(CBS 5 / AP) OAKLAND Jerry Brown won his first election the year man walked on the moon. Tuesday, the man once mocked as "Gov. Moonbeam," took his long and colorful career to a whole new place by winning the race for California attorney general.
Brown, a two-term former governor, three-time presidential candidate and, for the last eight years, mayor of Oakland, easily defeated Republican state Sen. Chuck Poochigian from Fresno.
He saw his crowded resume as good training for attorney general.
"All of these things gave me a very broad range of experience, which enables me to give very sound advice to the governor and legislators," he said.
With one of the best-known names — not to mention nicknames — in California politics, Brown started the race with a fundraising edge over Poochigian, a state senator from Fresno.
That didn't change much despite Poochigian's scrappy attempt to convince voters that a recent upsurge in Oakland crime meant Brown wasn't ready to be top cop.
"My greatest challenge was to overcome his name ID," Poochigian said. "His greatest challenge was to overcome his record."
Brown painted Poochigian as being an extremist who voted against a ban on rifles that fire armor-piercing rounds.
Poochigian fired back, bringing up Brown's past opposition to the death penalty as well as portraying him as overwhelmed by a rising tide of murder in Oakland.
As a big-city mayor, Brown was able to encourage downtown development, even though he couldn't stamp out Oakland's perennial crime problems. Along the way, he seemed to shake off the "Moonbeam" tag slapped on him for his embrace of the unorthodox by the late columnist Mike Royko. (Royko long ago withdrew the slam).
Brown calls himself "the most durable politician in the Western hemisphere next to Fidel Castro." And he doesn't even smoke a cigar.
Brown's political odyssey began in 1969, when he was elected to the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees. He was elected secretary of state the following year.
He was elected governor at age 36 and chose to live in a modest apartment near the Capitol rather than the mansion that comes with the office.
As governor, he opened state government to more women and minorities. He was called a flake for changing his mind about tax cuts and aerial spraying of pesticides, but some of the things he was dinged for wouldn't raise an eyebrow today, such as a proposal to try windmills as alternative energy sources.
Brown quit politics for a while after losing a bid for U.S. Senate in the early 1980s, working with Mother Teresa in India among other things.
He moved to Oakland in the 1990s after losing his third bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and was a talk-radio host there before handily defeating a crowded field for mayor in 1998.
The move stunned critics, who saw it as a comedown and predicted Brown would soon tire of municipal management. But Brown persuaded voters to give him strong mayoral powers and stayed on the job.
At 68, he remains uninterested in retirement.
There was some family history at stake in Tuesday's election. Brown's father, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, was governor from 1959-67 and attorney general for the eight years before that.
In his campaign office, Brown has a mosaic given to his father by the staff at the attorney general's office when he left to become governor.
"I'm looking forward to hanging it up in the attorney general's office," he said.
