Anonymous ID: a74f16 March 31, 2018, 6:15 a.m. No.849968   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>9979

For the uninitiated, ‘Governor Moonbeam’ became Mr. Brown’s intractable sobriquet, dating back to his days as governor between 1975 and 1983, when his state led the nation in pretty much everything — its economy, environmental awareness and, yes, class-A eccentrics.

 

The nickname was coined by Mike Royko, the famed Chicago columnist, who in 1976 said that Mr. Brown appeared to be attracting “the moonbeam vote,” which in Chicago political parlance meant young, idealistic and nontraditional.

 

The term had a nice California feel, and Mr. Royko eventually began applying it when he wrote about the Golden State’s young, idealistic and nontraditional chief executive. He found endless amusement — and sometimes outright agita — in California’s oddities, calling the state “the world’s largest outdoor mental asylum.”

 

“If it babbles and its eyeballs are glazed,” he noted in April 1979, “it probably comes from California.”

 

/www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/weekinreview/07mckinley.html