A Seasoned Style, Green Record as Gov.

He is remembered for tilting America to the political right during his eight years in Washington, but much of Ronald Reagan’s legacy as California governor nearly four decades ago would be called liberal today.

Legalized abortion. Smog controls for cars. Higher taxes. Bigger government. Environmental conservation.

At the same time, Reagan also introduced the Republican Party to a unique brand of cheery, pragmatic politics.

The conservative tax revolt that took hold in California after he left office and the populism now practiced by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, too, had their roots in Reagan’s two terms as governor.

Even California Democrats who fought him from 1967 to 1975 see in retrospect another Reagan today.

“I think he was a very good, good governor,” former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who clashed with Reagan as Democratic chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said Sunday. “He at the time was not yet a conservative, he was still under the influence of his long time as a Democrat. He did a number of things that post-1976 would have been heresy.”

Some of Reagan’s achievements are widely attributed to his time in the White House -- such as his mastery of television as a political weapon and his ability to lure disaffected Democrats into the Republican Party -- but they started in Sacramento in 1967.

Time and again, Reagan threatened to “take it to the people” when a Democratic Legislature balked at his programs.

The formula works to this day in California -- just look at Schwarzenegger, the telegenic pragmatist and unreconstructed optimist who considers Reagan his political mapmaker.

Reagan’s two terms as governor were sandwiched between a father and a son, one a Democratic icon, the other a Democratic iconoclast.

Reagan defeated Gov. Pat Brown in 1966, something Richard Nixon had failed to do four years earlier, and left the Capitol in 1975. Gov. Jerry Brown succeeded him, in the aftermath of Watergate and amid a national economic recession.

Californians who listened to the January 1967 inaugural speech of their neophyte governor would have been unlikely to predict the importance of environmental protection in his administration. Reagan glossed over the topic as he pledged to “squeeze and cut and trim until we reduce the cost of government.”

Yet while he left Sacramento without fully fulfilling that goal, Reagan’s environmental accomplishments as governor are perhaps his most significant.

His administration added 145,000 acres to the state’s park system. He helped protect Lake Tahoe from wanton development, blocked proposed dams on the Dos Rios and Eel rivers, and stopped a federal highway through the Sierra that would have despoiled the wilderness and interrupted the John Muir Trail. He signed legislation in 1972 to protect California’s north coast rivers.

While he championed some of those causes in a style that would later become familiar to all Americans -- riding to examine the sites on horseback, cowboy hat in place -- other successes were accomplished through the colorless creation of bureaucracies.

Reagan established the Water Resources Control Board and the California Air Resources Board. He emboldened the air board with strict car emissions rules that forced the nation’s automobile manufacturers to begin producing cleaner cars.

This is not to say that Reagan was a rabid environmentalist. He fought against the Coastal Protection Act that California voters approved in 1972. He opposed air pollution controls that Washington tried to impose on the state and resisted land-planning efforts, which he saw as an intrusion on private property.

Nonetheless, biographer Lou Cannon, who wrote “Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power,” said Sunday: “To me, the environmental achievements are enduring. Who the hell remembers or cares what the taxes or the budget was in 1967, but long after, people are going to be able to use the John Muir Trail without having to hit a highway.”

The environment is not the only area where Reagan’s actions as governor became obscured by his more conservative approach as president. The same was true of what is now a litmus test issue for much of the GOP: abortion rights.

It was Gov. Reagan who loosened California’s century-old abortion statute to allow the procedure in cases of rape or incest, when the mother’s health was at stake or when there was a substantial risk that the baby would be born deformed. Many other states followed that lead.

Even as he accepted and refined Democratic proposals, Reagan could keep Republicans from defecting in part because of his credentials as a fierce anti-communist who alleged that “agitators” had taken over the Screen Actors Guild. He later testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and toured the U.S. giving speeches for General Electric and preaching against communism.

“He was in a position where he could pretty much do what he wanted to as long as he stuck to the basics,” said Stuart Spencer, Reagan’s former gubernatorial campaign manager. “The basic for Republicans in those days was anti-communism, and he had great credentials.”

A part of Reagan’s legacy was his skill in winning over blue-collar Democrats through attacks on the party’s more liberal elements -- something GOP politicians often aspire to today. Reagan identified the approach even before he was elected, when he incorporated into his gubernatorial campaign criticism of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley.

“I remember during the campaign of ‘66, he started talking about campus unrest in Berkeley,” Spencer said. “We were in Fresno, and I said, ‘Ron, that isn’t even a bleep in our research, campus unrest.’ He said: ‘It will be when I get through.’ He was right.”

That approach -- more than his on-and-off battles with the university over budgets or his role in establishing a tuition -- helped win him support among Californians. They came to share his view that, as the Sacramento Bee put it in 1974: “Reagan, in short, made Berkeley a symbol of all that was wrong with what he viewed as an overfed and otherwise overindulged society.”

When it came to smaller government, Reagan failed to cut state spending by the 10% he had promised when he came to Sacramento. Instead, he presided over a $1-billion tax increase that year, at the time the largest of any governor in the country’s history.

When he left Sacramento, the state was spending more than $10 billion annually -- more than double what it spent when Reagan took office, although much of that was due to inflation and local property tax relief measures he enacted.

Indeed, by today’s standards, Reagan’s California record might not be considered conservative. Education spending increased substantially under his watch.

His restrictions on welfare benefits, which he touted as his proudest achievement, glossed over the fact that he agreed to an unprecedented automatic cost-of-living increase for welfare mothers sponsored by one of California’s most established liberals: then-Assemblyman John L. Burton (D-San Francisco).

“I don’t think the California imprint is anything like the imprint he made on the nation,” Burton said Sunday.

One of Reagan’s most significant failures in office was his bid to permanently impose spending limits on state lawmakers. The vehicle he embraced in 1973 was Proposition 1, a constitutional amendment so convoluted that he told a television interviewer that the average voter “shouldn’t try” to comprehend it, adding, “I don’t, either.”

Cannon said that if the measure had been successful, Reagan might have forestalled the much more severe Proposition 13, which voters approved in 1978. “At the time, Democrats were saying how draconian it is, but look how tame it is in comparison to Proposition 13,” he said.

But even if those efforts fell short, they turned out to be pioneering ventures that had a lasting effect on the direction of California politics.

“He kind of changed the debate so that it was proper, it was respectful, to challenge the basis of postwar California,” said Bill Boyarsky, a former Times reporter and editor who has written two Reagan biographies. “He didn’t eliminate much welfare but it became legitimate to challenge the basis of welfare. By that rhetoric, he really cleared the way for what happened later on, both here and in the rest of the country.”

Reagan “opened the door to the citizen politician,” said Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, who succeeded Reagan as governor. “He showed you didn’t have to be a professional politician to run for governor.”

Like Reagan, Brown said, “Arnold has a presence, a sense of humor and timing. That is very important. It conveys credibility and authenticity.”