He's baaaack!

Adam Nagourney and Jennifer Medina have an article in The New York Times about the second coming of Jerry Brown:

Jerry Brown has seen this before: a budget in crisis, a Legislature divided, a state confronting the possibility that its glory days are behind it.
But as Mr. Brown— who, in 1974, was elected as the state’s youngest governor and on Tuesday was elected as its oldest— met with state lawmakers on Thursday to confront a potential $19 billion shortfall, he was looking at a vastly different world. Within the year, Mr. Brown may have to oversee another round of state layoffs and a battle over pension cuts with the unions that supported him.
In some ways, the governor-elect’s associates said, Mr. Brown— whose quirky and often edgy personality made him an object of national attention even before he ran for president three times— also has changed over the decades.
This time, Mr. Brown, 72, will not be serving under the shadow of his father, Pat, a former governor and a legendary force in California politics, who died in 1996. Many of Mr. Brown’s friends said they considered his excesses the first time he served as governor as an attempt to distinguish his career from his father’s.
His closest aide of thirty year ago— a bald Frenchman who wore a beret, and whose presence fed the zany image Mr. Brown fought to escape— has been replaced by Mr. Brown’s wife, Anne Gust, the former chief administrative officer of the Gap.
As much as an iconoclast as Mr. Brown is, he is a product of the political world, in contrast to the current governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who came from Hollywood and never seemed at ease with the glad-handing that is often necessary in state government.
“I have already spoken to him five times since his election,” John A. Perez, the Assembly speaker, said of Mr. Brown.
“After the current governor, they are going to find an old, steady, experienced hand good to work with,” said Charles T. Manatt, who served as both state and national Democratic leader while Mr. Brown was first governor. “He’s matured. He’s double the age that he was when he was first governor. He has a nice wife. He has settled down. He has changed.”
Mr. Brown, in an interview, said the situation he is facing now is much more dire than last time. “Not even close,” he said. “No comparison. The budget gap is enormous. Polarization is deep. The contradiction between what is wanted and what is funded is enormous.”
Mr. Schwarzenegger is handing Mr. Brown a big budget deficit, just as Mr. Brown handed his successor, George Deukmejian, a $1.5 billion budget shortfall when he left office in January 1983. “We’re facing a terrific deficit of maybe $20 billion,” said Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic leader of the State Senate and one of Mr. Brown’s new budget negotiating partners. “People have really lost confidence in the Legislature.”
Dealing with a budget deficit is more tangled in today’s California than it was thirty years ago. A series of voter initiatives, starting with Proposition 13, which limits property taxes and was passed in 1978, leaves the new governor far less flexibility in cutting programs or raising taxes and fees.
And the propositions keep coming. One that passed on Tuesday permits the Legislature to approve spending by a majority vote rather than two-thirds; a change that should help end the deadlocks that delayed the state budget by 100 days this summer. That said, a second proposition requires any increase in fees to be passed by a two-thirds majority in the Legislature; a similar mandate is already in place for taxes.
Voters also have imposed term limits on public officials, a move that has fundamentally changed the dynamics and motivations of the lawmakers with whom Mr. Brown is going to have to deal.
Mr. Brown’s biggest complication may be one he created for himself, in one of the few concrete pledges he made in defeating his Republican opponent, Meg Whitman: that he would not raise taxes without the approval of the voters. “To foreclose options by a blanket statement is not my preferred way of governing,” Speaker Perez said. “You just never know what you are going to need to do.”
But, after running a characteristically enigmatic campaign, Mr. Brown will take office wrapped in the kind of mystery that he has seemed to enjoy in a career that has kept friend and foe off balance.
On his campaign website, he said that he intended “to renegotiate current pension formulas. We should require employees to work longer and to a later age for full retirement benefits.” Yet it is a matter of conjecture here of how far he will go. Will he, for example, take advantage of being a Democrat who has natural union support and push for pension cuts?
“He may be a career politician, but nothing about him has ever been conventional,” said Christopher Lehane, a political consultant who has watched Mr. Brown for years. “If he is able to get through a lot of obstacles— and that is a big if— he could be the right person at this time, the sort of Nixon-goes-to-China way.”
Indeed, union leaders, who supported Mr. Brown and battled Mr. Schwarzenegger as he sought to cut pay and benefits, said they were hopeful that the new governor would look out for their interests. “I would hate to have to predict what he’s going to do; you just don’t know with Jerry,” said Rose Ann DeMoro, the leader of the state’s nursing union. “I think he is going to be looking at the pensions, but there’s nothing that indicates he’s going to gut them,” she said.
But Art Pulaski, the chief of the California Labor Federation, offered a gloomier assessment: “I don’t think he cares about re-election, so he’s not going to focus on keeping his constituencies happy, and that includes us.”