“One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko” (Mike Royko)
Factoid I did not know, Mike Royko, one of the famed Billy Goat denizens, coined the long-lasting epithet for Jerry Brown.
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.”
[Click to continue reading How Jerry Brown Became ‘Governor Moonbeam’ – NYTimes.com]
Of course, Mike Royko eventually came to be a Moonbeam supporter, and hated that the nickname stuck:
All of which made Mr. Royko’s epiphany even more striking. It came in 1980, at the Democratic National Convention, where Mr. Royko said that the best speech had come from — you guessed it — Governor Moonbeam.
“I have to admit I gave him that unhappy label,” Mr. Royko wrote. “Because the more I see of Brown, the more I am convinced that he has been the only Democrat in this year’s politics who understands what this country will be up against.”