Try it. See if you can come up with a model job résumé. Education: BA and MA in either government or sociology. Make it government. Drop-out from Harvard Divinity School (the Absolute Liberal should have had at least one nasty brush with God: and escaped). A well-off family (the Absolute Liberal should have enough money to know how evil it is). Peace Corps, of course. Some civil rights activity in, say, ‘63. ‘65 : involved with SDS antiwar marches and, yes, the CIA-student exposé. ‘67: Anti-Vietnam Summer. Oh, environmentalism, almost forgot that. How about: an organizer of Citizens for Colorado’s Future, which kept the dirty Winter Olympics over there? That’s it: that’s also Sam Brown. Even if you leave out Students for McCarthy and the Vietnam Moratorium—those sound just too perfect—no one would hire Sam Brown. For a liberal he’s overqualified.
But, as microbes do, by 1974 Sam Brown had decided to work within the system. It wasn’t really all that inconsistent. In 1971 he had been regional director of the very abortive Harris for President drive. Even during those front-line Moratorium days, he often strummed a canoe-by-moonlight song to Middle America. Brown has always had instincts for, if not the jugular, the varicose. In 1974 he was elected Colorado State Treasurer. While campaigning—and quicker than you can say “for my next impression”—the activist became Andrew Carnegie. “I sold my first pair of shoes at age 12,” he could say without bringing up his cookies. “I was summer manager of a [family-owned] shoe store at age 16.” Brown, I expect, didn’t get Christmas cards from Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman in 1974. “I never played down my background,” he told me, “I even talked about. it. And you can bet my opponents did.” But why would Brown court a Babbitt office like state treasurer? “The unkind way is to say I was looking for a platform. The better way to say it is—well, I was looking for some sort of access to say things. It permits me to talk about tax policy, which I’m very concerned with.”
Comments