They’re Not Snickering Anymore

Three years ago when Assemblyman John Vasconcellos introduced a little bill to create a state government commission to study self-esteem, the Capitol hallways all but echoed with snickers.

What was Vasconcellos up to now, the skeptics asked. A self-esteem commission? Sounds touchy-feely. Who needs it?

Vasconcellos, a liberal Democrat from Santa Clara known for marching to his own drummer, pushed the bill through the Assembly but watched it die in the Senate. A year later, he coaxed the measure through both houses of the Legislature, but Gov. George Deukmejian vetoed it. Then last year, Deukmejian reversed himself and signed a third version.

Vasconcellos shrugged off the snickers, and now he is savoring victory as the Capitol is deluged with hundreds of applications to serve on what has been formally named the “California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem, Personal and Social Responsibility.”

It’s even in for some national attention as satirical cartoonist Gary Trudeau is preparing a “Doonesbury” series dealing with California’s fledgling effort to promote increased self-esteem as a way to resolve some of society’s toughest problems. The task force, which soon will be activated, is believed to be the first state government-sponsored enterprise of its type.

“It’s blooming,” Vasconcellos said in an interview. “There is an infectious, contagious something that is happening that people are expressing themselves on.”

One of the proposal’s early skeptics who ended up supporting it was conservative Sen. John Seymour of Anaheim, chairman of the Senate Republican caucus, who explained his switch this way: “My initial reaction, like most, was to pooh-pooh the Vasconcellos idea. If an individual doesn’t have the gumption inside to put it together, how will government ever do it?”

But Seymour, who specializes in issues dealing with drug and alcohol abuse among youngsters, said he has found that low self-esteem is a “common thread” binding together teen-age pregnancy, drug dependency and other serious problems of the young.

He said the mere fact that the task force will recommend ways to heighten self-esteem and offer its recommendations to the public “will accomplish some real good.”

An early conservative supporter, Assembly GOP Caucus Chairman Gerald N. Felando of San Pedro, said: “I took a lot of flak on this bill. There are still a lot of people snickering. They kept saying it’s another one of Vasco’s wacko ideas. It has been a long, hard pull, but this is a good bill and it will work.”

Felando credited enactment of the legislation to the persistence of Vasconcellos and his self-esteem advocates.

At the heart of Vasconcellos’ idea is the assertion expressed in the new statute that “most individual behavior is largely motivated by self-perception and self-image. Increased self-esteem tends to enable persons to become more confident, creative, productive and successful, which, in turn, translates into a society which is healthier, safer, more productive and less costly.”

Conversely, the statute finds that low self-esteem “may well have a wide-ranging, negative influence on individual human conduct, the costs of which both in human and societal terms are manifested in a number of ways, many of which convert into significant expenditure of state moneys. If so, these human costs and the costs to government could be reduced by raising the self-esteem level of our citizenry.”

High on the task force’s list of problems tied to apparent low self-esteem are crime and violence, drug and child abuse, teen-age pregnancy, prostitution, chronic welfare dependency, failure of children to learn and dropping out of school, hunger and poverty.

The commission will be composed of 25 members, appointed by Deukmejian, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) and the Senate Rules Committee. It will be charged with collecting all the research available on self-esteem, recommending ways to increase it and then putting it into practice “as a way of preventing social problems.” There will be no salary for members, but they will be compensated for travel and expenses.

The annual budget is $245,000.

Speaker Brown, who can name six appointees, described as “really awesome” the estimated 150 applications he alone has received. He called it the largest number of applications he has ever received for any appointment.

Likewise in the Senate, about 200 applications have been received for the six appointments to be made by the Rules Committee. “We’ve never had as many applications for an appointment as we’ve had for this one,” said Nancy Michel, who screens applicants for the committee.

A spokesman for Deukmejian, who already has made nine appointments to the panel, described the applications for appointment as “sizable.”

Legislative staff members who examined the applications said they seemed to reflect the diverse spectrum of California citizens: fundamentalist Christians, psychologists, police, teachers, clergymen, Republicans, Democrats, homosexuals, heterosexuals, racial and ethnic minorities, men, women, business executives, real estate people and a Latina who has been foster mother to 70 children.

“There’s a hunger, appreciation and an excitement out there that I have not seen for a long, long time,” Vasconcellos said.

Vasconcellos, chairman of the money-handling Assembly Ways and Means Committee, said he met twice with Deukmejian last year in his quest for the governor’s support. The liberal Democrat said he pitched it to the governor as a “smart, conservative use of a small amount of taxpayers’ money” to head off problems before they became a heavier burden on the public.

Kevin Brett, deputy press secretary to Deukmejian, said Vasconcellos made the bill more acceptable to the governor by agreeing to reduce the cost to $245,000 a year from the originally proposed $750,000. He said the lawmaker also agreed to narrow the task force’s mission and to let the group expire in 1990 after it furnishes a report to the Legislature and governor.

For Vasconcellos, creation of the task force represents one of the major accomplishments of a 20-year legislative career that began in 1967 when he arrived in the Assembly as an energetic, attorney looking as if he stepped straight out of the pages of an Ivy League yearbook.

A few years later, Vasconcellos, his hair relatively long and his denims faded, went into what critics and admirers alike refer to as his “flower child” phase, in which legislative priorities finished second to his anti-Vietnam War activities.

He was often accused of tilting at windmills. Occasionally, he still is, although his style is more mellow and his dress more conventional.

But Speaker Brown, a Democrat, recently told The Times that he rates Vasconcellos as a “serious potential” long-shot candidate for governor. “You can’t discount the self-esteem movement,” Brown said.