State Squanders Unruh’s Legacy : Power to Serve High Purpose Dwindles in a Purse-String Era

Jesse Unruh didn’t really belong in George Deukmejian’s California--or Jerry Brown’s, either--a place of lower expectations, tight budgets, declining public services, deteriorating schools and worse roads. I don’t imagine that he was any more comfortable with us the way we are today than we often seemed to be with him.

Unruh was part of an earlier political generation in a very different America, the one that John F. Kennedy presided over in a period of boundless self-confidence, energy and expansion. It was a time when even an arch-conservative politician like Ronald Reagan could run for governor promising a “creative society.”

As Speaker of the Assembly, Unruh was Reagan’s principal adversary, the same role he played for Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown. But the differences between those three men and the furious battles they fought over California’s future are not as important in retrospect as the perception that they shared of government as an effective agent for change.

What survives of Unruh in those days, at least so far as the public memory is reflected in the commentaries that have followed his passing, are the pictures of a corpulent Big Daddy, jocular in the description of his power and gross in the exercise of it. But the historical Unruh was much more than a 300-pound artifact of political wars that hardly anyone remembers. Unlike Reagan or Brown, he gave an enduring form to his vision of effective public leadership which transformed the nature of government in California in ways that the rest of the country is still only beginning to catch up with.

Despite the contempt of academics who have treated all things having to do with states as inherently trivial, and despite the accepted wisdom of the postwar era that regarded the flow of public power to the Potomac as natural and inevitable, Unruh set about making the Legislature into an effective policy-making body in its own right. Rather than treating the administration of California’s affairs as a sinecure for hacks and a way station for political novitiates, he created a professional staff, insulated from shifts in the political wind, that attracted serious people interested in doing important work. And if the nation’s governors meeting two weeks ago in Michigan presented a convincing case that theirs is the level of government that today plays the most important role in shaping the quality of American life, they have Jess Unruh in part to thank for that distinction.

Today the system that Unruh built is in apparent disrepair. The power of the Assembly Speaker’s office as a counterbalance to the immense authority that California’s Constitution confers upon the governor has dissipated. The buffer that the Speaker once provided against the demands of lobbyists and special interests has broken down. The staff has become politicized. And the policy-making capacity of the Legislature, as Unruh often complained in his later years, has degenerated into a bill factory that is neither deliberative nor particularly far-sighted.

The problem isn’t that Unruh’s successors in the Speaker’s office have been less intelligent or committed to public service than he was. And it’s certainly not the case that Unruh was ahead of his time in the reforms he instituted. Rather, what Unruh built was perfectly suited to the period in which he served. And if later legislative leaders haven’t made it work as well as he did, that’s because the problem of governing California today isn’t anything like what Unruh once imagined.

You don’t need a policy-making body in Sacramento, after all, if there aren’t that many new policies to be made or highways and water systems to be built or public outcries against injustice to be set right. We don’t ask the people we elect today to high state office to express the kind of cohesive if not always coherent vision that Pat Brown or Ronald Reagan once offered. It’s sufficient, it seems, if they simply strike the proper attitude--of cynical irony in Jerry Brown’s case, or of petulance and penury for George Deukmejian.

And maybe that really is enough. Proposition 13, after all, didn’t just focus more power in Sacramento by devastating local agencies. It transformed the business of state government as well into something that has less to do with questions of long-term public policy and much more than ever before with the management of fiscal purse strings. And if, in the wake of the works of Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, public leadership in California today consists primarily of presiding over the division of a steadily decreasing pie of public finance, you probably don’t need to know much more about a governor than what his mind-set is like when it comes time to wield the knife.

Power doesn’t necessarily corrupt. But power unhitched to any worthwhile purpose quickly curdles and degenerates. In an important sense, Unruh devoted his career in public life to proving the first of those propositions. But it was his understanding of the second that drove him into public service in the first place.

He had an unparalleled ability for accumulating power in a vacuum, which he demonstrated first in the Assembly and later in his transformation of the moribund Treasurer’s Office into an agency of truly astonishing national influence. His exercise of authority was seldom as ruthless as his critics contended, but it was always unabashed. And why not? His power wasn’t something borrowed from the offices he held; it was a force that he fashioned himself out of his own intelligence, gristle and ambition.

Most important, Unruh’s influence was at all times harnessed to a notion of the potential of public service that today seems just as noble but also somehow antiquated. When Unruh passed his civil-rights bill and all the other social-welfare and consumer-protection programs that were part of his legislative agenda, he genuinely believed that people’s lives would be improved as a result. The opportunities for taking that kind of satisfaction in public office aren’t as readily apparent in a governmental system that devotes two years to debating where to put its prisons.