Now Proposition 38 may be doing exactly as Brown feared, acting as a spoiler and drawing away a small but significant band of voters. Both proposals could fail, leaving Brown and the Legislature to grapple with huge budget cuts they've threatened to make to schools and other government programs.
Munger isn't apologizing. "We're very uncomfortable with the idea that Proposition 30 is being presented to voters as something that helps schools," she says, "when it is really the opposite."
PHOTO BY RANDALL BENTON
Jerry Brown's $6 billion to $8.5 billion tax measure has been hurt by his team's amateurish and self-inflicted mistakes.
PHOTO BY NANETTE GONZALES
Molly Munger co-founded the Advancement Project to help the underserved. She worked behind the scenes – until now.
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Yes on 30 campaign spokesman Dan Newman calls Munger's charge "fundamentally dishonest" and "absurd," and describes Munger as an "ultra-wealthy dilettante." He adds, "You have to wonder about her motivation. ... It's honestly baffling."
But as Election Day nears, Munger's history of working with the underserved through the Advancement Project — which trained gang interventionists, expanded early-education programs and helped ensure the construction of new schools in poor neighborhoods — is making it harder for the Brown camp's broadsides to stick.
Molly Munger tells a story about being a precocious teen in the early 1960s, studying French, singing in Latin and wearing saddle shoes with her pastel uniform at the elite Westridge School for Girls in Pasadena. As the civil rights movement gathered strength during the Kennedy years, Munger yearned for something different and convinced her parents to let her transfer to the local public school.
"It just changed me forever," Munger recalls of attending John Muir High School. "I saw for the first time the wide variety of people that live in my community, instead of just seeing a narrow little slice."
She graduated from prestigious Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Mass., about the time that her future husband, Steve English, also a product of California public schools, graduated from UCLA. English comes from a military family — his father was a naval officer who moved his clan to Buena Park from Pennsylvania. Munger and English both got their law degrees at Harvard, but they didn't meet until they ended up as newbie attorneys at the same Los Angeles firm in 1977.
The couple's motivation for underwriting Proposition 38, she says, is simple: to give back to California's public schools. "This opportunity happened to land at the feet of two people who were just very, very motivated to pick it up and take good care of it," Munger says.
She regularly references her husband in her campaign speeches, and says that marrying him is "probably the most important fact of my life."
Thrown together as young attorneys at the firm then known as Agnew, Miller & Carlson, the two "were always having very lengthy conversations," English says, about movies and current affairs. They married in 1978, a year after they met. "It's been a very fulfilling marriage," he says. "Having a spouse you're very compatible with is a great blessing in life." They have two grown children and recently became grandparents.
In the early 1980s, Munger became a federal prosecutor, handling many bank robbery and tax-fraud cases. The thieves and scam artists she dealt with helped inspire her to include a hard-hitting protection in the fine print of Proposition 38: If politicians or anyone misuses the tax funds meant for schools, they can face jail time.
Wearing a knowing grin at a campaign meet and greet in Altadena, Munger tells a small group of parents: "Because I was a federal prosecutor, I have those protections [in the ballot measure]. It's too bad you have to do that, but you need some teeth in there."
English says that after their success as lawyers, and after billionaire Charles Munger Sr. gave Molly, her half-brother Charles Munger Jr. and her other siblings untold millions, the couple came to realize, "We should do what we [want] to help people in California. ... Our general aim is extending the ladders of opportunity to people who didn't have the same opportunities we had."
English has presided over the boards of organizations serving the poor and disadvantaged, including the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, the Inner City Law Center and Public Counsel Law Center. For Munger's part, she went to work for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she met tough-edged minority-rights activist and attorney Connie Rice soon after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Six years later, the three — Munger, English and Rice — founded the Advancement Project, with offices in Washington, D.C., and in a tall, nondescript building on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park.
Munger operated below the media radar while Rice acted as the well-known, oft-quoted face of the Advancement Project. "I have spent almost 20 years working with Connie Rice, who is one of the most brilliant and charismatic figures that our country has right now," Munger says, "and I have been completely content to be utterly obscured while Connie has been the star of the work we have done together.
"I don't know why that is comfortable for me. I can't tell you. ... It's been about the work. I've always been interested in the work."
"That was a huge jump right there, to go from a big corporate lawyer to a nonprofit," Rice says of Munger. Their unofficial mission statement has been, "We're lawyers who are following the same mandate as Thurgood Marshall, which is to make the Constitution work for everyone."
