CORRECTION:Jerry Brown’s legacy mis-stated

CORRECTION

Jerry Brown’s legacy mis-stated

In a flight of rhetoric (TR#38 Apr 99 p13) directed against Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown for his efforts to get the tax and toll payers of California to fund a ‘signature span’ over the shallow waters off Oakland, in a fine literary peroration (rant) against monumentalism, we ended up with the observation that Brown’s only lasting accomplishment as governor of the state, during which term he gained the nickname Guv Moonbeam, had been to generate the political backlash that swept Ronald Reagan into the state governorship and then to the White House. Robert Poole has pointed out a large problem there, namely that Reagan preceded Jerry Brown in the governor’s mansion, rather than followed him. Thanks for the correction and apologies to anyone who was misled by our tenuous grasp of recent U.S. political history. We’re reading up on it (see right).