34 years later, Jerry Brown runs for governor again

It was 1974 when Jerry Brown ran for governor as a dashing 36-year-old reformer, the embodiment of change in Watergate's aftermath.

"I was the new spirit," Brown recalled. "That was my slogan."

No one would mistake Brown for a new spirit today. At 70, he occupies a prime spot among the elders of California politics. His career has spanned four decades, with three failed tries for the White House along his way up, down and back up the elective ranks.

Now, after two years as state attorney general, this Democrat who first ran for office in the era of Janis Joplin and the Beatles is remaking himself yet again. This time, Brown's quest is to recapture the job he won 35 years ago: governor of California.

But Brown is already facing a quandary that could bedevil him in this, his 12th campaign: How does a man so closely identified with California's past show that he is best fit to lead the troubled state into the future?

That question will loom large in the June 2010 primary that will probably pit Brown against at least one younger big-city mayor, Gavin Newsom, 41, of San Francisco, and possibly another, Antonio Villaraigosa, 56, of Los Angeles.

It is an odd role reversal for Brown, who prided himself in the 1970s on forward-looking ideas about solar and wind energy, space exploration and Silicon Valley's high-tech future. He still casts himself as a visionary, but now a more practical one.

"I have a very strong record in every office I've held of new ideas and bold moves," Brown said in an interview. Ideas now tempered, he added, by wisdom born from experience -- which in his case includes an improbable 1990s comeback as Oakland mayor, the springboard to his election as attorney general.

But experience failed to propel Hillary Rodham Clinton to victory in last year's Democratic presidential race, and some strategists say it poses risks for Brown too.

"Voters associated her with the past, and she got beat by the candidate who stood for change," said Ben Tulchin, a Democratic pollster uncommitted in the gubernatorial contest.

For now, the Democratic field is in flux. Brown and Newsom are planning to run, but neither has formally announced.

Villaraigosa, wary of appearing to take his likely March reelection for granted, has remained coy about his aspirations beyond L.A.