For the better part of three decades, The Jerry Springer Show took the talkshow format into increasingly outlandish areas. Springer, who has died aged 79 of pancreatic cancer, presided over what amounted to a three-ring circus, as guests revealed a steady stream of betrayal in relationships they seemed to model on tawdry pulp novels and porn films.
This led to a cycle of what the writer David Sedaris described as “championship wrestling in street clothes … Curse, fight, disentangle. Curse, fight, disentangle … repeated with tedious precision”. Meanwhile, the studio audience would be pumping fists in the air, chanting “Jer-ee! Jer-ee!” while, just outside the fray, stood Springer, at once bemused by the antics and aghast at the way his guests treated each other.
Not just the ringmaster, Springer also tried to play the empathetic therapist, like Oprah Winfrey, but in a bar brawl. “The truth is, in most cases, we get treated the way we permit ourselves to be treated,” he told us, and each show ended with Jerry advising us to “take care of yourselves, and each other”.
The formula worked. The Springer show ran from 1991 until 2018, nearly 5,000 episodes, and, at its peak in the late 1990s, passed Oprah as the most-watched daytime talkshow. It wasn’t the first of its kind: Geraldo Rivera had evolved from news to trash, while Jenny Jones specialised in revealing guests’ sexual secrets. But Springer’s appeal to chaos influenced countless imitators, and, more crucially, the rise of so-called reality television, in which contestants chosen for their exhibitionism tried to outdo each other in humiliations and conflicts created and scripted by the producers.
The influence seeped over into politics, with the rise of Donald Trump, but Springer got there first. In 2003, as Springer contemplated a serious run for the US Senate from Ohio, the conservative magazine National Review worried he might attract “non-traditional voters who believe most politics is bull … slack-jawed yokels, hicks, weirdos, pervs and whatnots”. In other words, the way many viewed Springer’s audience.
Springer actually came to American television via serious politics. Born in Highgate tube station, London, during an air raid, he spent his early years in East Finchley. At the age of five he moved to Forest Hills in Queens, New York, where his father, Richard Springer, owned a shoe shop and his mother, Margot (nee Kallman), was a bank clerk. Both parents were Jews who had fled Landsberg in Prussia (now part of Poland). Years later on the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? he learned the details of the deaths in concentration camps of both his grandmothers; he lost most of his relatives to the Holocaust.
Springer was active in drama at Forest Hills high school, then took a BA in political science at Tulane University in New Orleans and a law degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 1968. That summer, he worked on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign; after Kennedy’s assassination, he began working at a law firm in Cincinnati, at which he had interned while a student.
In 1970 he lost a race for Congress, but was elected to the city council as a Democrat in 1971. Three years later he resigned for “personal family considerations”, which turned out to be his visiting a sex worker across the Ohio River in Kentucky, and paying her with a personal cheque.
In 1975 he was re-elected to the council for the first of three terms, serving as mayor in 1977-78. During his comeback, he argued that his use of a personal cheque to pay for sex at least proved “his credit was good”. He also opened his own law firm, Grinker, Sudman and Springer. After finishing third in the Democratic primary for governor of Ohio in 1982, Springer turned to broadcasting, joining the NBC affiliate WLTW as a political reporter, then becoming joint host of the main evening news show, which catapulted the station from last to first in the local ratings.
Jerry Springer greets supporters in Cincinnati during a failed campaign in 1982 to become the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio. Photograph: Ed Reinke/AP
In 1991, Multimedia Television, which owned WLTW, began syndicating The Jerry Springer Show, in a political format much like Phil Donahue’s. It soon began to change, especially after Richard Dominick arrived as producer. He had worked on National Enquirer-style tabloid supermarket papers, and for Jones. His real genius lay in taking the talk format away from celebrities and experts, and focusing on ordinary people and their own scandals.
At its peak, Springer was getting upwards of 8 million viewers in daytime, and TV Guide named it the “No 1 worst show in the history of TV”. Dominick also produced two spin-offs: a VH1 backstage documentary series about making the show, and a show starring Springer’s top disentangler, the security chief Steve Wilkos.
Jerry was spun off on his own as well, playing a thinly disguised version of himself in the film Ringmaster (1998) and the US president in The Defender (2004), directed by Dolph Lundgren. He replaced Regis Philbin as host of America’s Got Talent for three years, and from 2010 to 2015 hosted Baggage, a dating game on the Game Show Network.
He guested on television shows, everything from The X-Files to Roseanne; hosted Miss World and Miss Universe beauty pageants and appeared on World Wrestling Entertainment shows. In 2006 he went on Dancing With the Stars to learn how to waltz at his daughter Katie’s wedding.
He was also a success in his country of birth, where imitators such as Jeremy Kyle were not free to generate the same intensity with their content. Springer had more straightforward talkshows on ITV in 2000 and Channel 5 in 2001.
In 2003, Jerry Springer: The Opera, written by Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee, debuted, and ran for almost two years. It won four Olivier awards, including best new musical, before going on tour. In 2005, a BBC broadcast of the musical drew 55,000 complaints, and protests at BBC studios.
The same year ITV ran The Springer Show against Trisha Goddard, who had left it for Channel 5; despite being toned down he triumphed over Goddard in the ratings. He acted in a West End production of Chicago in 2012, guested on Have I Got News for You, and covered Trump’s 2016 election as president for Good Morning Britain.
The Jerry Springer Show ended in 2018, though it is still syndicated by the CW Network. In 2019, Springer began Judge Jerry. It ran for three years. As Springer said: “Television does not and must not create values; it’s merely a picture of all that’s out there – the good, the bad and the ugly.”
While TV might not create values, Springer showed it certainly could amplify them, especially the bad and the ugly.
He married Micki Velton in 1973; they divorced in 1993. Springer is survived by Katie.
[ad_2]
#Jerry #Springer #obituary
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Jerry Springer, the captivating TV host famed for his eponymous and provocative talkshow The Jerry Springer Show, has died aged 79. Springer’s show entertained but also scandalised audiences with its notorious on-air fights, swearing and infidelity revelations. After almost three decades hosting The Jerry Springer Show, he hosted America’s Got Talent and Judge Jerry, a spinoff of the popular Judge Judy show. Jene Galvin, a friend of Springer’s and spokesperson for the family, said he was ‘irreplaceable’. ‘Jerry’s ability to connect with people was at the heart of his success in everything he tried whether that was politics, broadcasting or just joking with people on the street,’ Galvin said.
Born in London in 1944, Springer’s multifaceted career included a period as an advisor to Robert F Kennedy and a brief tenure as the mayor of Cincinnati
[ad_2]
#career #host #Jerry #Springer #video #obituary
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
I’ll never forget the time I went to a taping of The Jerry Springer Show with two of my closest high school pals. This was back in the 1990s, when Chicago was the center of the talkshow universe and Springer and Oprah were the hottest tickets in town. My parents, bless, wouldn’t have batted an eye if I said I was going to see the queen of daytime. But the king of sleaze? Up to now they wonder how I ever got their permission.
Somewhere in my childhood bedroom, the ticket is sitting in a drawer with the actual episode title – not that the show headings stopped TV Guide from calling it “the worst show in the history of television”. Despite producers’ yeoman efforts to class up the spectacle for censors, it was the same show every day: somebody cheated, somebody didn’t know and we’re all about to find out. This one was no different – and still some of the most fun I’ve ever had.
Springer taped at NBC Tower, which meant you had to walk past a proper television operation to queue up for Jerry’s carnival. When we finally made it on to an industrial-themed set, with its giant fan slowly turning at stage left, it was so much smaller than I had expected. We were seated right behind Steve, the ex-cop turned security chief who’d emerge as a kind of sidekick and fan favorite. Turns out, calling the show’s toll-free hotline not only netted gratis admission, but the best seats in the house.
The spectacle itself didn’t disappoint. The confessions were sotto voce, the reactions were big and the reveals were gasp-inducing. I’m pretty sure at least one chair was thrown, prompting Steve to spring from his seat to break up the ruckus. Through it all, we charged our fists and chanted “Jair-REE! Jair-REE!” while the man at the center of it all couldn’t have appeared less excitable.
That was the irony of Springer, who died on Thursday at age 79, always so serious when the situation was anything but. Perhaps that’s because when his syndicated talkshow first launched in 1991, he was styled to be almost a diet flavor of daytime king Phil Donahue, down to the wire-rimmed specs. But where Phil was an incubated media personality, the London-born Springer actually had a serious career in politics.
He began at 25 as an advisor on Robert F Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign and was taking the bar exam in Cincinnati when he learned that his political hero had been gunned down in Los Angeles. Recalling the tragedy years after his talkshow fame, Springer would call RFK ”the most authentic person I’d ever met in politics” – and it was hard to miss the Kennedy influence in young Jerry’s mid-Atlantic delivery and Senator Ted-like hair helmet.
Jerry Springer, always so serious when the situation was anything but. Photograph: Ralf-Finn Hestoft/494552/51B ED/Corbis/Getty Images
In 1971, Springer ran for a congressional seat in Ohio and lost – but still made it to the Capitol to testify before a Senate judiciary committee in favor of lowering the voting age, which prompted a ratifying of the 26th amendment. That same year, he’d win a seat on Cincinnati’s city council only to resign the position three years later after being caught for soliciting in an FBI sting. But the responsibility that he took in that moment, facing up to the camera and admitting his transgressions, was such an outlier in the Watergate era that Springer’s constituents couldn’t help but take heart – and re-elect him in a landslide the next year.
Other than a fiat turn as Cincinnati mayor, Springer was nonetheless deemed too tainted and unfit for higher office. More recently, when Springer had flirted with running for Ohio governor or one of the state’s US Senate seats, Democrats and Republicans could never embrace a guy too many blame for dragging American culture into the sewer. (An unserious candidate, they’d call him.) But Springer was less of an instigator than he was a product of the times. Morton Downey Jr and Geraldo Rivera were trafficking in trash TV long before The Jerry Springer Show went national. Even Oprah wasn’t above devoting a show to “daughters who get pregnant by their fathers … and have the babies”.
What’s more, Springer started out doing a show about politics – a kind of extension of his sharp-tongued local TV news op-eds. But when producer Richard Dominick took over in 1994, he junked that format for episodes on adultery, race wars and other controversies. Before long, the show was not only surging past Oprah in the ratings but spurring Sally Jessy Raphael, Montel Williams and other rivals to shake up their formats, too. Verily, the era of tabloid TV was born.
But what Springer appreciated better than them all was the theater in the absurdity – what, with its Aristotelian motifs, Greek chorus and the threat of violence always hanging in the air. The Springer show was bound to resonate with high schoolers, given Shakespeare’s prominence on the curriculum at the time. What’s more, it’s hardly surprising anymore when Corey Holcomb and other comedians who cut their teeth in Chicago share stories about how they were invited on the show back in the day to help them manufacture trouble.
But Springer didn’t just expose my generation to classic conflict through lowbrow hijinks. For many, he was the first introduction to gay people, to trans culture – to communities still on the fringe and pushing for mainstream rights and respect. He proved dramatic telly could be manufactured by show producers. Steve got his own show! Springer’s hand in the rise of reality TV is unmistakable. Without him, Mona Scott-Young isn’t churning out seasons of Love & Hip Hop, and my dad isn’t asking me, “How can you watch this stuff?”
And then he’ll stop and remember, “you’re the same guy who saw Jerry Springer live”. Of course Springer was on screen plenty after his show’s 27-year run closed, from Question Time to the Masked Singer. But the chatshow is his legacy and not a half bad one for TV’s ultimate straight man. I’d give anything to go back.
[ad_2]
#Jerry #Springer #man #changed #television #worse
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
During his 27-year run as a TV host, Jerry Springer became synonymous with a few tropes: the paternity test, the bleeped-out swearing, the security guards always ready to break up a fight. Nearly every one of his 4,000 episodes could be considered explosive, but there are a few moments that surpass even the wackiest standards of tabloid TV.
After his death on Thursday at the age of 79, there is no better time to look back at the craziest Jerry Springer moments of all time.
You Slept With My Stripper Sister!
Let’s start with a 2011 clip that has everything: one family member revealing a “secret” to another, a cheating boyfriend, and, yes, a stripper sister. The unassuming woman tells Springer upfront that she knows whatever her sister has to reveal to her “can’t be good”, because we all know how this goes. But, to be fair, her sister has a history of sleeping with the woman’s exes. When she comes onstage and lets her sister know that she bedded her boyfriend after a night at the club and apologizes, there is the requisite slapping and hair-pulling. Things only get worse when the boyfriend tries to say he’s sorry, but ends up slapped as well.
Confronting a Racist Family
‘I feel sorry for you’: Jerry Springer confronts antisemitic priest – video
Springer often hosted racists and Ku Klux Klan members on his show – and as the son of Jewish-German refugees who fled the Nazis, the subject was quite personal to him. In 1995, he told an antisemitic priest, “I don’t hate you, I feel sorry for you.” When the priest went into a Holocaust-denial rant, Springer told him to “shut your face”, which almost led to blows.
‘I Slept With 251 Men in 10 Hours!’
In 1995, Springer spoke to Annabel Chong, a 22-year-old porn actor who took part in the “world’s biggest gangbang”. Despite the predictable slut-shaming that took place (“Are you ever going to be able to love a man?” Springer asked), Chong spoke of the experience as an empowering reversal of gender norms. “Why not?” she said of her decision. After some years in the industry, Chong went on to work in software development – and left her record behind. It was broken by Jasmin St Clair, who also went on Jerry Springer to discuss the feat.
‘I Married A Horse’
In 2004, Springer introduced the world to Mark, a Missouri farmer and zoophile who introduced a truly disgusted audience to his wife, a horse named Pixel. “I had to earn her love and respect,” Mark said in a voiceover, while showing off photos he had taken of Pixel wearing women’s underwear (with a hole cut in the bum for her tail). “As far as sex goes, we make love. We don’t fool around on each other.” Springer would later tell Meredith Viera that he did not know what Mark was going to reveal on the show, which explains why he felt physically ill on-air.
‘Married to Your Dad But Want You Back’
In a love story of Shakespearean proportions, a Montana woman fell in love with a California man, who apparently walked 1,200 miles to be with her (he didn’t have a car). When they broke up, she ended up with his father, who she had a child with – her ex-husband’s younger sister. But regret nagged at the woman so much that she tried to reunite with the son on Springer’s show. He declined.
“Zack … the 70lb Baby”
A rare happy ending for a Springer guest: in 1996, baby Zack Strenkert made headlines for his size and weight. (He was later diagnosed with Simpson Golabi Behmel Syndrome, which causes overgrowth.)His parents lived an unconventional life, putting their infant in adult diapers, but it didn’t matter. “Wouldn’t change him for the world,” his father said during his first appearance on the show. Strenkert returned to the show as an adult, saying he was happy and working as a competitive gamer.
[ad_2]
#Jerry #Springer #Show #outrageous #moments
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
The talkshow host Jerry Springer, a former mayor of Cincinnati whose work was vastly influential in daytime TV worldwide, has died. He was 79.
Springer’s family said he died “peacefully” on Thursday at home in Chicago.
In a statement, the family said: “Jerry’s ability to connect with people was at the heart of his success in everything he tried whether that was politics, broadcasting or just joking with people on the street who wanted a photo or a word.
“He’s irreplaceable and his loss hurts immensely, but memories of his intellect, heart and humor will live on.”
Springer was best known for his 27-year, near-4,000-episode run as host of his eponymous talkshow, which featured guests who purportedly engaged in controversial, excessive and often overtly sexual behavior.
Episode titles that could have been ripped from tabloid headlines included I Slept with 251 Men in 10 Hours!, I’m a Breeder for the Klan and I Married a Horse.
Guests often broke into chair-wielding brawls or fretted while Springer read paternity test results on air.
The show often generated negative headlines. A 15-year-old boy in Florida charged with sexual battery of his half-sister, aged eight, told detectives he learned what incest was from Springer. A woman in a segment entitled Secret Mistresses Confronted was found dead within hours of broadcast.
Despite it all, in 1998, seven years into its run, the show briefly enjoyed stronger ratings than Oprah Winfrey’s more mainstream daytime offering.
It catapulted Springer to fame, including the 1998 Hollywood comedy Ringmaster, loosely based on his life, and a cameo in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me in 1999, the same year he signed a contract worth $30m. The show also inspired a musical, Jerry Springer: the Opera, which logged more than 600 performances in London from 2003 to 2005.
Springer at a rally in Cincinnati in June 1982, during his unsuccessful run for governor of Ohio. Photograph: Ed Reinke/AP
On Thursday, the journalist and Twitter influencer Yashar Ali said the weekday daytime slot Springer’s show held at the height of its popularity helped it make an indelible impression on American millennials.
“Jerry Springer wasn’t just a host,” Ali wrote on Twitter. “He was also the babysitter for many millennials who were home sick from school.”
KSI, a YouTube celebrity, said: “RIP Jerry Springer. You made my off days at school so much more entertaining.”
The show was taken off the air in 2018, years after its audience began to dwindle. Springer later hosted a courtroom show that was canceled after three seasons. From 2007 to 2008, he hosted America’s Got Talent.
Some credited his success with inspiring other critically panned ratings magnets including Real Housewives and 90-Day Fiance.
In November last year, Springer said he was “so sorry” for the cultural impact his show had at the turn of the century.
“I just apologize,” he told David Yontef, host of the Behind the Velvet Rope podcast. “What have I done? I’ve ruined the culture. I just hope hell isn’t that hot because I burn real easy. I’m very light-complected.”
Yet he would also bristle when his work was dismissed as “trash”.
“It’s basically elitist,” Springer said. “You have all these celebrities [coming on other shows to] … talk about who they slept with, what drugs they’ve been on, what misbehavior they had, and we can’t buy enough tickets to their shows. We can’t buy enough of their albums. We go to see their movies. We buy their books.
“We think they’re god-like.”
Jerry Springer defends his talk show against its ‘elitist’ critics – video
Gerald Norman Springer was born in London during the second world war after his family fled Nazi Germany. He was four when his family moved to New York.
In 1965, he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Tulane University in New Orleans. He received a law degree from Northwestern University in Illinois three years later, and advised the presidential campaign of Robert F Kennedy before being elected to the Cincinnati city council in 1971.
He resigned his seat in 1974, after admitting soliciting a sex worker. Styling himself as a liberal, Springer successfully ran for re-election to the council after apologizing and addressing the scandal head-on in his advertising, and the panel picked him to serve a year as Cincinnati’s mayor, beginning in 1977.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, while apparently resorting to a double entendre referencing both his sex worker solicitation and his demoralizing resignation, Springer said of his elevation to mayor: “When I think of being flat on my back three years ago, having this happen is almost unbelievable. This is the best feeling I’ve ever had in my political life.”
In 1982, Springer ran unsuccessfully for governor of Ohio. In one campaign ad he said: “Nine years ago I spent time with a woman I shouldn’t have. And I paid her with a check. I wish I hadn’t done that. And the truth is, I wish no one would ever know. But in the rough world of politics, opponents are not about to let personal embarrassments lay to rest.
“… The next governor is going to have to take some heavy risks and face some hard truths. I’m prepared to do that. This commercial should be proof. I’m not afraid, even of the truth, and even if it hurts.”
On Thursday, the political commentator David Axelrod wrote on Twitter that Springer was “funny, self-effacing, incisive” during his political career.
Henry Gomez of NBC News added that as recently as the early 2000s, Springer was the Democratic party’s best hope of securing statewide office in conservative Ohio.
Springer left politics to become a news anchor and commentator at the Cincinnati television station WLWT, setting the stage for his talkshow career.
WLWT reported on Thursday that plans for funeral services and a memorial gathering were still being formed. His family asked the public to consider honoring him by donating to “a worthy advocacy organization” or simply being kind to someone.
“As he always said [at the end of his shows], ‘Take care of yourself – and each other’,” WLWT added.
Springer’s family said he died from pancreatic cancer.
[ad_2]
#Jerry #Springer #influential #talkshow #host #dies #aged
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Jerry Springer hosted “The Jerry Springer Show” from 1991 to 2018. | Terry Gilliam/AP Photo
By Kierra Frazier
Updated:
Former Cincinnati Mayor Jerry Springer has died at 79 after a brief illness, according to the Associated Press.
Springer was best known for his show, “The Jerry Springer Show,” which aired from 1991 to 2018. Guests on the outlandish show were faced with a spouse or family member’s controversial issues, such as adultery. The confrontations led to chair-throwing and bleep-filled arguments.
The show’s tilt into tabloid sensationalism drew a wide range of reactions from audiences. At one point, “The Jerry Springer Show” eclipsed “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in viewership. Conversely, the show was also named No. 1 on TV Guide’s list of the “Worst Shows In The History Of Television.”
[ad_2]
#Cincinnati #Mayor #Jerry #Springer #Dies
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Edmund G. Brown Jr., who turns 85 on Friday, is one of this country’s most enduring public figures, enjoying a resilience and relevance into old age matched by few this side of the current occupant of the Oval Office. Unlike President Biden, who’s remained a Washington fixture from his 1972 election through the present, Brown has led a more itinerant political life.
The namesake of a governor who defeated Nixon only to lose to Ronald Reagan, the younger Brown has been governor for 16 years over three decades, state Democratic chairman, Oakland’s mayor, California’s attorney general and its secretary of state, a Jesuit seminarian, a student of Buddhism and an aspiring president three times, officially.
Now, he spends most of his time on 2,514 acres of his family’s land in rural Colusa County, well north of Sacramento, with his wife, Anne, and their dogs, Colusa and Cali.
Brown is not exactly living the serene life of a gentleman farmer, though. And he sure isn’t ready to discuss his legacy, rejecting in characteristic Jerry Brown fashion the very construct itself.
“What’s George Deukmejian’s legacy?” he demands, alluding to his little-remembered Republican successor in the 1980s before lamenting how even some giants are nearly forgotten. “You ask people about Earl Warren, people don’t know who Earl Warren was.”
Brown isn’t focused on the past because, as ever, he’s fixated on the here and now. To speak to him for over an hour is to see affirmation in the title of a superb recent biography: Man of Tomorrow.
So I’m a little reluctant to suggest that the topic Brown comes back to again and again in our conversation is his final mission, or some other catchy, sum-it-up phrase he’d detest as glib.
However, what worries Brown the most about tomorrow, in America and across the planet, is we won’t have very many of them if we stumble into a nuclear-tipped conflict with China.
“I’m very worried,” Brown told me. “And I don’t think the people in Washington are worried enough.”
Why not?
“That’s the big question: why are they not worried when nuclear powers are becoming so hostile to each other and there’s so little attempt at dialogue or reaching some modus vivendi, some way of co-existing.”
It’s easy to dismiss Brown as an alarmist.
After all, he’s been fretting about nuclear catastrophe for decades. I can recall him self-assigning a stop at the New York Times Washington bureau as governor a few years ago, where he came in to a quickly assembled group of reporters interested in politics, climate, immigration and all things Donald J. Trump (and, perhaps, Linda Ronstadt) and spent most of his time warning the group about the ticking doomsday clock before Armageddon.
However, our most recent conversation in San Francisco took place on the same day the Senate finally repealed the congressional authorization of force that sanctioned the U.S.’s war in Iraq. It was also just a few days after the 20th anniversary of an invasion that had strong bipartisan support at the time and now carries even stronger bipartisan regret today.
And at a moment when the two political parties are supposedly polarized, not even agreeing on the same facts, there sure does seem to be a great deal of bipartisan consensus about taking a hard line on China.
Look no further than the current visit of Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen. She met with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries when she was in New York, sat down with a bipartisan group of senators in the city and Wednesday, in a setting plainly aimed at sending a confrontational message to the Chinese, was feted by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and a large, bipartisan group of lawmakers at a bunting-laden mini summit at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. (Unlike the Nixon Library down the road in Yorba Linda, there’s no section in Simi Valley dedicated to peace-making with Peking.)
That Republicans are taking a hawkish posture toward China is not surprising to Brown, but he’s plainly uneasy that so many in his own party are doing the same.
“There’s not much dissent, the chorus on China is overwhelming,” he says.
Iraq, Brown notes, “was a very minor power” while China “with 23 percent of the world’s population contrasts with our 4.1 percent.”
He continues: “So the notion that we can scare China and push them around or contain them and suppress their growth and development is utter folly. But it does seem to be widespread.”
Brown’s solution: diplomacy, and more of it between the country’s two leaders, and a continuation of the longstanding U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” when it comes to Taiwan.
“This requires intensive exchange of views and ideas by the nation’s leaders,” Brown says. “In China, one guy counts. If you’re not talking to him, you’re not getting to the essence of what’s going on. So Biden is going to have to talk to Xi and they can’t talk for just an hour.”
The former governor doesn’t necessarily think Biden should visit China, but he favorably invoked how former President Barack Obama met with Xi Jinping at Sunnylands, the Annenberg estate near Palm Springs, in 2013. (Brown himself also met with Xi on that trip and subsequently in Beijing, making him one of the few governors to have such high-level contact)
Brown called Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s decision to cancel his trip to China following the balloon affair “a mistake if you want to have communication,” and minimized the incursion over American airspace.
“We have balloons, we have satellites, everybody is observing the other guy,” he said.
The closest Brown will come to criticizing Beijing’s autocracy, human rights abuses or any of its other transgressions is to acknowledge that “there are things in China we find horrendous.” But in the next breath, he says “not everything we have done has been perfect, so we ought to have a little humility.”
Nuclear conflagration aside, Brown deems it’s naïve to think China can be isolated. “Even a serious decoupling could mean a real deterioration in the American and the world economy,” he says, adding: “We get another serious banking failure, mortgage meltdown, we can’t stabilize the world economy without China. Whether we like it or not this is the world we live in.”
It’s worth quoting from Brown at length on China, if for no other reason than he’s right about this: few in the corridors of power today are willing to make the case for restraint.
Yet as blunt as he is about issues, he requires some reading between the lines, or at least repeated questioning, when it comes to people.
Take one of his predecessors as California’s state party chair, Nancy Pelosi. Didn’t her trip to Taiwan last year exacerbate U.S. tensions with China?
“I’m not going to bite on that one,” he says
Why not?
“Nancy Pelosi is a good friend of mine, I’m not offering advice,” he explains.
You sound like a politician all the sudden, I say, what happened to freewheeling Jerry Brown?
“You sound like a reporter, looking for your lede,” he shoots back. “I’m not going to give you those ledes.”
Brown, however, is more forthcoming when it comes to Biden who, Brown notes without prompting, was elected to the Senate two years after he was elected to his first office, secretary of state.
Brown has conveyed his views on China to the president through intermediaries, “people who are close to Biden,” and relays that he’s told it’s Beijing that’s now not being responsive to Washington’s entreaties, a bit of intelligence borne out in my colleagues’ reporting this week.
It’s hard to be the grand old man of the Democratic Party, a sage of hard-won wisdom, however, when the current president has been in the fray as long as you have.
Which brings us to what you’re likely wondering: yes, Brown thinks he could serve as president today.
“I can handle the job but I don’t think the politics can handle my age,” he says. “We’re not like the old Soviet Union, where they had all those men in the Politburo, people want some fresher faces.”
And that in turn raises the question of whether he thinks Biden should run for re-election.
“Well, you know, it depends on what the alternatives are,” Brown says, pausing. “I’d say this it’s not a slam dunk any way you look at it.”
If he were younger, yes, he concedes he’d mount a primary of his own. “It would probably be hard to hold me back,” he says in a moment of self-awareness, recalling his “very stupid” challenge of then-President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
It takes more pressing, though, to elicit his actual view of Biden, but it’s worth the effort and fitting that he’s seated on a couch as he offers his assessment of who this president is.
“It’s similar to my father’s politics,” Brown offers. “There’s a sense of right and wrong, there’s a sense of fairness, there’s a certain old-fashioned quality about it.”
He calls it “Eastern seaboard Catholic Democratic politics” and its virtues include a “respect for the verities that have made us what we are and hold us together.”
And the downside? “That you can’t respond to changed circumstances.”
Speaking of sibling (or paternal!) rivalries.
If Brown is eventually forthcoming on Biden, he’s at his most uncomfortable when I shift the topic to the Californian who may succeed the president — and who was state attorney general when Brown was governor a decade ago.
Of the other Democrats who could run in 2024, I point out, Vice President Kamala Harris would be an obvious contender.
“Of the people on offer, there’s no doubt Biden is the strongest,” Brown says, suddenly coming around to Biden’s re-election.
Is Harris ready to be president, I ask?
“I don’t think vice presidents are ever ready,” he says, recalling that Eisenhower didn’t think his vice president was ready. (There’s Nixon again.)
Yes, but does this vice president have the capacity for the job?
“People thought John Kennedy was kind of a lightweight but he rose to the occasion,” he says, again turning to history for a vivid non-answer before chiding me for asking him to make “all these judgements.”
He insists he has “a good relationship” with Harris and that he’s “texted her a few times” as vice president but he doesn’t put much effort into the case before sounding like one of those old-school politicians he was talking about a few minutes earlier: “She’s been friendly to me and I’ve been friendly to her.”
He will, though, offer the vice president a bit of advice, and it comes tinged with envy from somebody who in our conversation has casually referenced Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Huntington, George Ball and his own piece in the New York Review of Books.
“Surround yourself with the best thinking on foreign policy, particularly, and domestic issues,” Brown says he’d tell Harris, noting that “she has access to everybody.”
He adds, longingly: ”She has the catbird seat as far as being where history is being made.”
It’s clear why Brown believes he never got closer to that catbird seat.
When I bring up how tomorrow can often be glimpsed first in California, a cliché I thought worth pursuing to get the futurist in him revving, he interrupts me.
“It’s an important place except when it comes to electing presidents, well you know the history,” he says, arguing that Reagan is the exception because “he was the leader of a conservative movement, he was national in scope.”
California, Brown notes, is more liberal than the states required to carry the Electoral College.
Could that hamper Gov. Gavin Newsom’s future ambitions, I ask?
Again, he turns to history to answer the question by way of dodging it.
“Well, I think it handicapped me running against Bill Clinton, him coming from Arkansas,” he says of his 1992 race.
Come on, I press him, would Newsom make a good president?
“I think he’s been a pretty good governor, so who the heck knows,” he responds before turning back the clock again. “I don’t even know if I would be a good president.”
On the California race of the moment, the campaign to succeed Senator Dianne Feinstein, Brown is clear about what he thinks America’s largest state deserves in the Capitol.
“Somebody of stature and very large conception,” he says, invoking Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and William Fulbright of Arkansas.
He initially says he won’t comment about which of the candidates has reached out to him, but it doesn’t take much guesswork for him to reveal that he’s yet to hear from Rep. Katie Porter but has talked to Reps Adam Schiff and Barbara Lee, who have a much longer history in California politics than their younger colleague from Orange County.
Brown isn’t much interested in the early shadow boxing for a 2024 race, though, or really any politics-heavy conversation.
Which isn’t to say he’s uninterested in domestic issues. Although he talks about generational differences in lingo with his father — “he called it necking and we call it making out” — Brown sounds quite different from today’s liberals.
He largely eschews identity issues and, perhaps even more notable, appears unbothered by the threats to American democracy that alarm so many on the left and middle in the Age of Trump.
When I ask about the former president and whether he’s an extension of the backlash politics Brown witnessed up close in California or a more profound threat to the country, Brown quickly dispenses with Trump and comes back to China, Russia and the nuclear threat.
The domestic challenges he’s most fixated on are the ones he sees up close in California: climate change, homelessness, affordable housing and adequate education.
“Unless America can find some kind of convergence among its diverse groups it’s going to be paralyzed,” he warns.
There’s a more dangerous reason, Brown continues, to be concerned about the tug of identity politics on the right and left.
“As national identity weakens, smaller identities increase,” he says. “People want to identify with something.”
Now he’s onto Samuel Huntington and an essay Huntington wrote for Foreign Affairs in 1997 “bemoaning multi-culturalism” and arguing that “America needs a great national purpose which takes an enemy, and China isn’t strong enough but they will be someday.”
In case I had missed the point, Brown warns: “The fragmentation of America will be resolved by war.”
And just like that, he’s brought the conversation back to where he wants it.
Not surprisingly, when I close by asking what his one plea to Biden would be, Brown says: “They can’t demonize Xi Jinping to the point where dialogue is impossible.”
Returning to his nostalgia for Nixon’s diplomacy in Moscow and Peking, he says today we’ll “inherit a world with three nuclear powers on hair-trigger alert.”
However, nobody, Brown laments, “asks for my advice.”
But as we get up to leave, he wants to make sure his counsel will get through.
“Now what’s the lede?” he asks.
[ad_2]
#Jerry #Brown #Angry #America #Barreling #Cold #War #China
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
