California’s Bitter Season : Schoolboy Taunts, Shoving Matches, Obscene Invective--The Summer’s Follies in Sacramento Were the Political Equivalent of Pro Wrestling. But Beyond the Shenanigans, Some Saw the Decline of the State’s Promise.

A VENERABLE MEMBER OF THE CALIFORNIA Legislature estimated recently that roughly 20 of his lawmaking colleagues want to be President of the United States. The venerable legislator, Lloyd G. Connelly of Sacramento, noted that the Assembly and the Senate contain a total of 120 elected members. Simple arithmetic thus suggests that one of every six state legislators has become a President-in-Waiting.

This observation, which may provoke you to laughter or sadness or both simultaneously, addresses a central feature of life in the Capitol, and may help explain--in small measure, at least--its recent, utter degradation. Namely, Sacramento contains two kinds of politicians: those who believe they will soon move up to higher, exalted office, and those who have given up believing. Life as a Capitol politician, by itself, rarely defines the ambitions of those who serve here.

To be allegorical for a moment, this leaves Sacramento in the position of the not-so-pretty girl who will soon be dumped by her beau when a better prospect arrives. Or, conversely, and maybe worse, the not-so-pretty girl who is kept and loathed because a better prospect never showed up.

Either way, Sacramento suffers from a kind of depreciation. One group, the upwardly moving, sees the Capitol as a way station; the other wonders what might have been. Neither crowd particularly treasures its position here. And from time to time, like schoolboys forced to play right field, they are capable of displaying an observable contempt for their roles, for each other and the institutions they serve.

The teeming Assembly floor constitutes the great arena of these displays. Take, for example, the afternoon of Aug. 13, the 44th day that California turned in the summer wind without a budget. On that otherwise forgotten afternoon, the Assembly gathered for yet another try at financial compromise.

The drama began when the Republicans announced their discovery that California, in the midst of its economic agonies, was paying premium wages to its construction workers. Whereas private industry paid road workers who act as flagmen about $12 an hour in wages and benefits, the state was paying $25 an hour. The Republicans made the wholly reasonable suggestion that the state, being broke, might revise its sweetheart wages to reflect industry standards.

Understand that the Republicans receive very few fat checks from trade unions at campaign time. The Democrats do, and they were having none of the GOP plan. Dick Floyd, the portly, dyspeptic Democrat from Carson, rose to defend the $25-an-hour flagman. He compared the reform plan with practices in Russia, predicted it would lead to widespread corruption and then, revealing the full scope of his forensic skills, said the whole thing was “horseshit.”

Hearing this, Republican David Knowles from Cameron Park sprang to his feet. Knowles, a homeboy of the religious right, suggested that the Assembly censure Floyd in light of his dirty talk. The irony of Knowles’ suggestion was not lost on many of the members: Last year Knowles delivered what many regard as the most offensive address ever made in the Legislature.

In the debate over the now-famous gay rights legislation of 1991, Knowles took to the floor and told his colleagues that, before they voted, each of them should be familiar with the sexual practices of homosexuals. As his fellow Assembly members, including many Republicans, shouted at him to shut up and sit down, Knowles began describing, in detail, the techniques of fisting, yellow rain, etc. Videotapes of this speech are regarded by some as collectors’ items.

The same Knowles now took offense at Floyd’s naughty word. He jumped up, his bald head glinting in the lights, and suggested censure of “the individual in the back of the room.”

From the back, Floyd again displayed his rhetorical talents.

“Go curl your hair, bub,” he shouted. “This is the ridiculous situation we get into with fools like this who get up and talk dirty for 25 minutes one time and then object to something else.”

Knowles muttered something inaudible.

“Well,” Floyd replied, “I noticed you getting an erection when you were talking about it.”

Floyd then sat down and puffed happily on a prohibited cigarette. The censure business, he knew, would go nowhere. At the podium, Speaker Pro Tem Jack O’Connell scribbled a note and passed it to Floyd via the sergeant-at-arms. Floyd read the note, grinned, and shot O’Connell the finger across the Assembly floor. Both men chuckled.

And thus did the Assembly grapple with the issue of premium wages paid by the state during its financial dolor. Throughout the exchange, most legislators barely looked up from their desks. Tom Hayden, reading a newspaper as the episode began, kept reading. Aug. 13 was just another long summer afternoon in the Assembly.

The Republican plan lost, by the way, and we are still paying $25 an hour to the flagmen.

UNDULY HARSH, THIS STORY? PERHAPS. ON MOST DAYS THE members do not give each other the finger. You can, in fact, find in the Legislature men and women of intelligence, and even, occasionally, genuine style. You can watch smart guys like Phillip Isenberg of Sacramento work up a sweat over education funding “recaptures.” You can see legislators truly torn by the competing forces pulling on them.

But today we are looking for the disease, right? We want to know why our leaders sat paralyzed for 63 days in Sacramento, becoming the very symbol of modern government’s decline into brain death. How they let California degrade into a hapless, embarrassed issuer of IOUs. And how, in the process, they allowed themselves to look like fools, ditherers and foghorns.

In part, the answer lies with the changed nature of our Capitol. Over the last decade, something has happened to Sacramento, and that something has sapped its ability to cope. The debasement of the Assembly into an arena of schoolboy taunts, pushing matches and overt contempt is only one sign of that enervation. We’ll come back to this part of the answer later.

First, let’s consider a more ominous side of the breakdown. Unlikely as it seems, our crippled leadership made a peculiar form of history this summer. It appears that the Sacramento crowd--involuntarily, wailing all the way--became the first big-time government in the nation to honestly reconcile itself to a new, poorer America. The legislators and Gov. Pete Wilson found themselves forced to balance the state’s books without recourse to the usual bag of tricks. They could not raise taxes, could not borrow their way out, could not--for the most part--cook the books.

In short, California had to face the consequences of a state grown measurably poorer. And it showed the rest of the country what happens as result. Which is to say, shock and paralysis. Or, as state Sen. Gary K. Hart likes to remark, a reaction similar to Kubler-Ross’ classic stages of meeting death: denial, anger, negotiation, acceptance. In any case, the message to the rest of the country is simple enough: Get ready. When your day comes, it will hurt worse than you thought.

“When historians look back on this era, they’re going to see a nation that finally came to terms with the fact that its period of unlimited growth came to an end in the mid-1970s,” said Isenberg. “It took us this long, until the early 1990s, to realize it. True acceptance is going to be very difficult. We are just beginning.”

Why California first? The question lingers because, for decades, California’s economy seemed to levitate above the dips and troughs of other regions. Our economy grew faster, sometimes twice as fast, and recessions took a smaller bite out of our hide.

But that very success turned out to be part of the problem. Flying higher, we had further to fall. Virtually the entire increase in the cost of state government over the last decade--expenditures grew from $24.4 billion in 1980 to $50.6 billion in 1990--was supported by revenues generated from economic growth, not higher taxes. We depended on those annual leaps upward to keep our expensive government solvent, and when the bad times came, we took it hard.

For the first time since World War II, California sank further than other regions, and stays sunk to this day. Our unemployment rate remains more than 2 percentage points higher than the national average. The Midwest may see a partial lifting of the cloud, ditto the South and even parts of the Northeast, but not California.

In truth, we are seeing California suffer from more than mere recession. The state’s solvency has been drained by the federal government’s wholesale retreat from aid and comfort to the states, while, at the same time, Proposition 13 has hamstrung its taxing process. But most chilling of all, some economists have begun using the dreaded words “structural change” to explain the severity of our problems.

They are suggesting that California has reached the end of the wildly successful era that began with the onset of World War II. That was the point when California industrialized on a large scale and began half a century of extraordinary growth.

But no region, not even California, can grow perpetually at twice the rate of the rest of the country. Eventually the factors that propel the growth--available land, easy transport, affordable housing, the good life--get consumed by the very process of success. The region switches gears, slows down. “Matures” might be the most generous description.

A year ago, Prudential Securities published a review of California’s economy that claimed the gear-switching point had been reached. The review became a bestseller in boardrooms around the state. Here’s one of its opening sentences: “A long era of growth and prosperity, in our view, has come to an end in California.”

And then it got worse. At one point, the review compared the current problems in California with those of Texas and New England prior to their precipitous falls. “If oil represented 25% of the Texas economy; and defense, technology and finance represent 25% of New England’s economy, we can easily identify several sick industries in California whose employment adds to 25% of the total. These would be defense, aerospace, construction . . . .”

No one knows if this gloomy view will turn into reality. Some economists predict that California’s golden era will soon spring back to life. But the unending cutbacks in the defense industry, the flight of Japanese investors, the continued drop in the price of houses, all suggest that the bottom has not yet been reached. Gov. Wilson himself has taken to referring to the downturn as “the worst since the Great Depression.”

George Salem, main author of the Prudential review, says he understands why the notion of structural change has been resisted by some economists. “California has been immune for so long, you can’t blame people for refusing to accept the idea that the rules have changed,” he said. “I mean, no one alive today can even remember when California wasn’t at the top of the heap.

“But sooner or later California will have to face the fact that it is not immune anymore. What has happened to other regions can happen to California. We are looking at the beginning of a long period of adjustment.”

BY EARLY SUMMER, THE ENORMITY OF THE BAD NEWS HAD worked its way into our sugary white Capitol. A 19th-Century confection, as gorgeous as the presidential palace of a tropical republic, the Capitol rises soothingly over a graceful park. Inside, in its deep chambers, the walls and curved stairways glow dimly with mahogany. Voices echo in the great rooms. Anyone coming here would, at first visit, conceive themselves as having arrived at an enclave of great mass and gravity.

And each morning, to the Capitol, our legislators roared to work in their Oldsmobile 98s and Lincoln Town Cars, all tokens of appreciation from the people of California. They slipped into their special garage, which the public is forbidden to see, passed the guards, passed the special DMV office that never has long lines, and then up the special elevators designated for the members only, and finally into their suite of offices. There, on their desks, they received the official reports saying the state was broke.

Really broke. More than $10 billion broke. The kind of broke that appeared to have no end. Even in the isolated splendor of the Capitol, virtually all the lawmakers understood the meaning of the numbers. A much smaller pie was going to be divided into much smaller pieces.

In past eras, the struggle implied by the smaller pie would have been smoothed by a network of old friendships and trust within the Legislature. But not this time. The old bipartisan friendships have virtually disappeared. Among the Republicans, half the members don’t even speak to each other, much less to the Democrats. These days, in fact, the paralyzing disputes spring from vendetta and the erosion of trust as often as ideological difference. Something basic has changed about the Legislature, and not for the good.

B. T. Collins, former chief of staff for Gov. Jerry Brown, now prowls the back of the Assembly as a freshman Republican from nearby Carmichael. “I never realized how petty everything gets here. No one keeps their word anymore. They rat on each other, try to smear each other’s reputations,” Collins said.

Last year’s passage of the term-limit initiative was the breaking point, he said. “I think the passage of (Proposition) 140 changed things. It hurt their feelings and now they just don’t care. No one gives a damn about the Legislature as an institution.”

And here’s Bev Hansen, a Republican assemblywoman from Santa Rosa, talking about the periodic meetings of the Republican caucus:

“I usually come out of the meetings very frustrated. No one extends much respect to anyone else. I mean, you see these bitter exchanges. People calling each other names. Personal animosities getting vented. And hardly anyone seems interested in resolving the issues at hand. Usually they don’t get resolved. Sometimes I have to remind myself that these people belong to the same party.

“I’m not talking about a lack of integrity. It’s something else that’s gone wrong. Many members seem to have lost the idea that solutions need to be found to issues. They would rather just fight.”

For those of you who have visited Washington and witnessed the empty seats of Congress while a “session” supposedly is taking place, be advised that Sacramento puts on a much better show. No quiet prevails in these chambers. On the Assembly floor in particular, dozens of members fill the room, milling about, jabbering with each other like merchants in a bazaar.

This apparently satisfying display of democracy cannot, however, be attributed entirely to the philosophical dedication of the members. They must show up for roll call to receive their non-taxable $100 per diem from the state.

Usually, as the day’s business begins, the initial impression of statesmanship rapidly evaporates. Accusation and bluster take their place as the strategies of choice. One day, Democrat John Burton of San Francisco claimed that the governor was hiding in his office during the budget crisis, cynically letting innocent people suffer for his own political advantage. He began calling Wilson “the little pipsqueak.”

Several Republicans shouted insults back at Burton, and a contest erupted to see who--Burton or the Republicans--could bellow the loudest over their microphone. Sitting in the gallery, you got the feeling you were watching the legislative version of professional wrestling, where all reactions get comically exaggerated. Eventually, Burton slyly apologized and thereafter referred to the governor as the “little guy.”

On another day, the choleric Ross Johnson of Fullerton decided he was offended by the vote of a fellow Republican on the most controversial of budget issues, school funding. He charged across the Assembly floor and pushed the offending lawmaker, Charles W. Quackenbush of San Jose. At first it seemed that Johnson had committed a strategic error, since the tall and athletic Quackenbush could squash him like a toad. But the two men merely tussled for a moment, or perhaps Quackenbush took mercy on the stumpy Johnson. In any case, a sergeant-at-arms pulled them apart, and the day ground on.

ALL THIS COULD BE DISMISSED, PERHAPS, IF THE SERIOUS WORK still got accomplished. But it does not. This summer’s embarrassing dysfunction with the budget constitutes only the most visible failure of recent years. Anyone would be hard put, in fact, to name one major problem--whether it be the crumbling school system, abuse of the workers’ compensation system or the dissolution of Los Angeles into warring, rioting camps--that has been resolved by the men and women of the Capitol in the last decade.

This decline gains all the more poignancy when you realize how recently Sacramento was regarded as the model for state governments. You might say that California --or more specifically, the late Jesse M. Unruh--invented that model in the ‘60s. Unruh, then the Assembly Speaker and the undisputed Big Daddy of Sacramento, decided that the growing complexity of government demanded that legislators evolve from sleepy, part-time amateurs to full-time professionals. So Unruh gave them good salaries, support staffs and power.

Now, in these fallen times, people like to talk about the Unruh days. They seem to find it consoling, as if it proves there is a way back to better times. They tell the story about Unruh’s own budget crisis in 1963, when he locked the doors of the Assembly and refused to let the members leave, or, at least, the Republican members, until they agreed to one compromise or another.

Of course, Unruh was drunk as a skunk at the time. Nothing unusual about that. In those days, Sacramento drifted on a tide of gin. In fact, many will argue that Sacramento ran more smoothly in the old days, partly, at least, because of the bonds formed on long, boozy nights. In these times of abstinence, this view hardly qualifies as politically correct, but a surprising number of people here believe it.

“If you are asking how the link was forged between the Republicans and Democrats in the old days, it was Jesse,” said Isenberg. “He kept this role even during the Deukmejian years, when he had long lost the speakership and gotten elected state treasurer. Jesse was smart. He would move back and forth, just move around, and talk to people.

“He’d go down to that bar where everyone collected after work, the name was Ellis’s I think, and he’d sing Country-Western songs with (Assemblyman) Ross Johnson. Now, you know Ross. He’s Republican through and through. But he and Jesse would sing all night long. They’d drink and sing, and everyone would relax. They could be friends then, see? Jesse had these connections with all kinds of people. It was remarkable, and when Jesse died, Sacramento lost a lot. Things have never been the same.”

Probably, they never will be the same. That after-hours universe of Jesse Unruh was exclusively male, drunken and moderately corrupt. Drinks and dinner usually came gratis from one lobbyist or another. The money flowed so smoothly that often a legislator never knew which lobbyist had picked up his tab.

The new Sacramento displays a wine-sipping sobriety, and many of the younger members radiate a health-club wholesomeness. Waves of reform have cut out the free dinners along with many other small and large corruptions. You would think that this new world would represent great progress. Yet, somehow, the spirit of the place seems far more poisoned than during the bad days of Jesse.

“People put their egos first now. Our big egos are the front edge of every issue,” said Sen. Art Torres, a Los Angeles Democrat. “There’s no sense of belonging to a team with shared goals. We want to see our bills passed because it makes us look good individually. It feeds our egos. Doesn’t matter whether the bill really solves the problem, see? We have an institution decayed by ego.”

Money also corrupts the new Sacramento in ways the old Sacramento never dreamed of. Once-modest campaigns have become multimillion-dollar affairs, converting politicians into pathetic money junkies, always looking for their next fix. Sometimes the fix is legal, sometimes not.

Most Sacramento regulars can point out the “Montoya” table at Pennisi’s Cafe, where Sen. Joseph Montoya wrapped his fingers around an envelope stuffed with cash as FBI cameras hummed away. Montoya is now doing six at the federal prison at Boron. Soon, he was joined in the condition of incarceration by another half a dozen or so Capitol notables.

If you watch, you’ll see that Sacramento fails to work because no one really wants it to work. At least, none of the major interest groups in the Capitol. One crowd or another may want to tinker with a regulation here or there, but not too much, because major change threatens the status quo. And, despite everything, the status quo remains very comfortable.

We are talking here not only about the traditional bad guys, the bar associations and big water interests, but outfits like the PTA. Everyone has their piece of the pie to protect.

So the state teachers’ associations, which make heartbreaking appeals for an upgrade of the education system, also jealously guard against school reforms that threaten the cozy deals between school districts and senior teachers.

THUS TINKERING HAS become the art of Sacramento. All this summer, as Wilson and the Legislature stood frozen over the budget, tinkering bills sailed through, one after another.

On Aug. 24, the Senate overwhelmingly approved a proposal to remove something called the Thompson Contender from the state’s list of banned firearms.

Two days later, the Assembly voted to require cities and counties to hold at least one public hearing 45 days before they enact a tax increase.

And so on. Sacramento can tinker you to death in the same way that ducks can nibble you to death. The larger stuff, measures that deal with central problems, requires a brand of leader that has largely disappeared here. Leaders who own their agenda, who are driven enough and, perhaps, evil enough to get what they want. An Unruh, who was driven and evil both; or a Pat Brown, who was driven but had too much fun to be evil.

Instead, the Capitol has Pete, and it has Willie.

In Pete Wilson, we see a governor who has been transmogrified in his first year and a half in office. The pleasant, bland man with the suburban face of a prosperous optometrist has vanished. In his place has appeared someone smaller, almost shrunken. On television, his discomfort seems acute, as if he has been shoved out, against his will, to confront the cameras.

From the beginning of his term, Wilson portrayed himself, more or less honestly, as a manager rather than a leader. The very term he coined for his administration--”preventive government”--implied that he expected to have the opportunity to foresee and forestall the deluge.

He never got it. California betrayed him, collapsing immediately after his arrival, and Wilson has seemed sadly miscast ever since. He hasn’t the foggiest idea how to rally 31 million people to the notion that they must rise to a period of crisis. In public, an odd mannerism gives him a certain tutorial air. Before speaking, his head begins to vibrate slowly, as if winding up for delivery, but when the voice finally emerges, it comes out reedy and thin, a disappointment.

Still, Wilson revealed a surprising, steely will throughout his long contest with the Democrats. The ready negotiator of the first year disappeared utterly. Phillip Isenberg refers to this approach as Wilson’s “Marine mode.”

“You go into the little office he’s got in the back, behind the conference room, and when you sit down next to his desk you are sitting underneath the Marine Corps flag. Not a little one. A big one. And this is Pete-Wilson-the-Marine. He’s saying he believes he’s right and compromise is unacceptable. You know, ‘Death Before Dishonor.’ ”

The standard explanation for Wilson’s behavior during the budget standoff suggests that he had little choice but to take up the Marine mode. The diplomatic posture of last year, which produced a large tax increase, proved disastrous for Wilson’s standing among voters. Most recently, his approval rating stood at 20%, the lowest recorded for a governor in 50 years. Therefore, the explanation goes, this second round of financial crisis had to conclude with Wilson the perceived victor. Anything less would doom him to the certainty of one term in office and the abandonment of all ambitions about moving up and out.

As we now know, Wilson won the war of wills with Willie Brown, and the Marine mode went a long way in forcing the Legislature to deal honestly--more or less--with California’s financial fall. Whatever his motives, whatever the outcome for his career, we should remember that he did that much.

And of Brown? If all politics is appearance, then the Assembly Speaker appeared to lose big. But does it matter, at this point? For more than 12 years, Brown has presided over the Capitol, his personality as dominant as Unruh’s in his day. Just watch Brown herd the Assembly through an otherwise prosaic afternoon in the Assembly, and you will see the measure of his talents.

Brown cajoles and lectures the members, makes them laugh, always edging the process forward like a third-grade teacher marching her charges through a geography lesson. “Mr. Mountjoy, you are confused. Please consult with your leadership. I assure you the result will be satisfyin’.”

“Satisfyin’,” not “satisfying.” Brown’s soft Texas accent still trims the unmellifluous g’s from participles. Off the podium, he maneuvers with skills that put him in a league above and beyond his contemporaries, and probably Unruh as well.

But Unruh had a clear agenda. One Sacramento lobbyist, once a public-interest lawyer, said Brown has never displayed much interest in policy. “When Willie became Speaker, Sacramento began to change. Before Willie, the important thing was knowledge. Issues often got settled on their merits, so knowledge equated with power. But with Willie, money spoke, and things changed. The merit of the issue simply became a mask behind which money was working. People stopped caring about the merits, and that’s when Sacramento began to drift.”

It is fitting, in a way, that the Brown era will conclude with a belated and probably fruitless attempt to stop that drift from growing into a rout of the state government.

The budget just passed in Sacramento will allow the state’s schools, once ranked near the top nationally, to slip further toward the bottom. Government-funded hospitals, already scandalous, will become more so. The newly arrived, the not-yet middle class, will find it more difficult to scratch and claw their way up.

The Brown era likely will end with this act of retrenchment. Because soon, Brown will be gone. And so will virtually all the rest. The voters’ wrath, expressed last year through Proposition 140, assures their departure. Over the next few years, one by one, they will retire or give up or run for President of the United States.

And we, the voters, will get a new crowd in Sacramento. A group of rookies with limited terms, the very type of amateurs rejected so long ago by Unruh as outmoded in the modern world. We will see, then, if this crowd fits into the modern age after all, if they can rediscover what others have so thoroughly lost.