In 2010, Jerry Brown, at age 72, completed a remarkable political comeback by winning an overwhelming electoral victory to return to the office of Governor of California, a position he first won in 1974 and again in 1978. Upon embarking on this third term as governor, Brown inherited a broken and broke state, as the outgoing governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, left office with a budget deficit of some $27 billion. By 2012 Brown had overcome California’s pathologically hard to govern political system and had turned the state’s financial situation around by cutting spending and winning the backing from California voters for the tax increases he’d championed in the form of Proposition 30. The result was a budget with a surplus of at least $500 million. This chapter makes use of an operational typology of leadership focusing on representational and performative capital as well as the 5S’s --skills, stances, supporters, structures, and situations-- of political leadership to make sense of how Jerry Brown, against long odds, has made use of his powers of public persuasion and the powers of his office to achieve, at least temporarily, the mastery of the state’s unwieldy political system and control of its public finances.
