Plugging a Leaky Ship

Sacramento needs some shock treatment. California has a petulant Republican governor who either is reluctant to recognize the problems that face the state or is unwilling to risk voter irritation by daring to do something about them. The state has a Democratic-controlled Legislature that has run amok on petty power trips and a fixation on perpetuating itself in office, thus ignoring its basic reason for being: the promotion of sound public policy.

The jolt that might wake up Sacramento is the passage on June 7 of a state ballot initiative to limit campaign spending for legislative races and to rein in the ability of legislative leaders to raise massive amounts of money to dole out to friendly candidates who will in turn vote to keep those leaders in power. The initiative measure supported by Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and others would not directly affect the governorship or other statewide offices, but its passage should send a strong signal to those officials that the people have lost patience with the mad scene being enacted in Sacramento.

One symptom of what is wrong was Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s (D-San Francisco) statement on Tuesday: “My goal in life is really to be Speaker as long as the house will have me.” In fact, Brown’s goal should be to present a strong agenda of progressive action and to use his considerable political skill to get it enacted into law. This, of course, would require the cooperation of the state Senate, where President pro tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) spends an inordinate amount of time bickering with the governor, or considering punishment for Senate members who cast an occasional vote against his will.

Then, if California is to get its leaky ship of state back on course, there must be pressure on Gov. George Deukmejian to acknowledge that all is not so golden in the Golden State and that he must work with the Legislature on some critical issues like public finance, transportation, air quality, planning, education, job training, housing and health care. Since it seems impossible for the governor and legislative leaders to be civil to each other for more than a few hours, some other force may have to bring them together. That catalyst might be a consortium of California’s leading business and civic leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, who recognize that the state cannot expect to remain No. 1 in anything by drifting sideways into the future.

California desperately needs strong, farsighted leadership. Legislators and other state officials seem obsessed with raising campaign money, pandering to the public with sops like last year’s tax refund, and playing special interests off against one another without resolving the issues at stake.

Campaign finance reform by itself will not cure all that infects Sacramento, but it is a start. Legislators do have to campaign, and Assembly and Senate leaders do have to curry favor among their members in order to remain in power. This is a political system. But in recent years playing the system has become everything while the development of strong public policy to benefit the whole state for future decades has become a distant and indistinct objective.