"The Most Powerful First Lady in the Country"

Anne Gust Brown and husband (Sacramento Bee photo)

California Sunday Magazine runs a profile of Anne Gust Brown:

Gust Brown has been at the center of nearly every major political feat for which her husband can claim credit: closing the budget deficit; persuading voters to pass ballot measures to raise taxes, sell bonds to update the state’s aging water infrastructure, and create a rainy-day fund to protect against future budget crises; shrinking the staff of the governor’s office; recruiting some of Brown’s top advisers, including executive secretary Nancy McFadden; nudging a stalled high-speed-rail project back into motion; and, last year, getting her husband re-elected.

In the early 1990's (California
Sunday Magazine photo)

Born and raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Anne went to Stanford (BA 1980) and the University of Michigan Law School (JD 1983). A successful corporate lawyer, she met Jerry Brown in the early 1990's. She became general counsel at the Gap, eventual rising to "chief administrative officer, a senior position reporting directly to the CEO." Anne and Jerry got married in 1995, after which "she left the Gap and a salary of $600,000 to run her husband’s [State Attorney General] campaign for no pay."

What's fascinating--at least to this Californian--about Anne Gust Brown are her Midwestern values and her willingness to give up her career to support her husband's. Snippets:

I certainly would want people to think I was helpful — that I helped Jerry be a good governor — but I don’t actually sit and think, I want to be known for this. Maybe I’m deficient that way.” This could be “a Midwest sort of thing,” she said. “You know, we’re not real navel gazers.”

She seems unaware — or maybe just unconcerned — that her goal of helpfulness can appear old-fashioned. The modern image of a powerful first lady is of someone who pursues policy objectives that complement, but are often separate from, her husband’s projects. Gust Brown suggested that she approaches her position differently because of her deep involvement in the governor’s office rather than despite it. “Jerry and I are partners all the time in almost any issue that’s going on in California where I think I can be of help,” she told me. “I don’t feel the need to say” — she took on an officious-sounding tone — ‘These are the Anne Gust Brown goals.’”

“I just think for social issues,” she said, “the government should be out of all that stuff. I’m very pro-choice, I’m very pro–gay marriage, and on those social issues, I just think the Republicans are so off-point on that and off-track. Fiscally, I just think that we should live within our means, and I’m a conservative that way. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be investing in certain things, but I don’t think we can just keep spending off a cliff.”

But the First Lady of California is not demure and retiring. She's also Jerry Brown's campaign manager and (unpaid) chief counsel. From the 2010 gubernatorial campaign:

Brown left a voice message for a police union in Los Angeles; afterward, thinking the call had concluded, someone from Brown’s circle called [Republican Meg] Whitman a “whore,” a comment the union caught on tape and released. A number of people thought the voice sounded like that of the candidate’s wife, which the Brown campaign deflected. A couple of years later, Gust Brown acknowledged that it “probably” had been her after all. (Several people who know her told me they recognized her voice.)

Anne Gust Brown rejects all suggestions that she enter politics on her own after her husband retires. But it's not unheard of for First Ladies to seek--and win--political office, and in this heavily liberal state she may just be the Democrat that Republicans can get behind.