Gann--Despite AIDS, the Fight Goes On

It is May of an election year and once again Paul Gann, who helped lead California’s tax revolt 10 years ago, is in the middle of a hot fight over a ballot initiative. Some wonder why he doesn’t give up the political battle and walk away to conserve his energy and spirit for an even bigger struggle--the one he is waging against the deadly disease AIDS.

But to Gann, the fire that burns within him when he thinks about overburdened taxpayers and big government is too much a part of his being to be extinguished by the debilitating disease that was traced back to contaminated blood he received during open heart surgery in 1982.

Gann walks slowly and painfully, but he also walks with a purpose.

“It is almost a necessity for me to do it. If I were to quit and go home and sit down, I don’t think I would last very long,” Gann said recently at the airport in Burbank, where he was awaiting a commuter flight to take him back to Sacramento after a debate taped for Channel 4’s “News Conference” show.

As if to underscore his words, Gann’s eyes sparkled and he grew excited thinking about points he had scored hours earlier against his debate opponent, state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig.

Gann is co-author of Proposition 72, one of two June ballot measures that would ease the state spending limit that he authored nine years ago in an earlier initiative campaign. Proposition 72 would give the state more spending room and provide extra tax dollars for transportation programs. Honig is supporting a rival measure, Proposition 71, which would also raise the spending limit, but in a way that Gann believes would benefit his longtime adversaries, public employee unions, and lead to tax increases.

Honig argued that the state would have plenty of money under Proposition 71 without needing a tax increase, but Gann believed he scored some points during the debate.

“I will never fight Bill Honig as Bill Honig, but I will fight against his Proposition 71 and in favor of my Proposition 72 until I go blind,” he said.

For years, Gann has thrived on these kinds of political fights. In the process he has put his name with some of the most important laws in modern California history.

His biggest win came with Proposition 13 in 1978, the property-tax reduction measure that he co-authored with the late Howard Jarvis. Gann was sole author a year later of Proposition 4, which put the spending limit--many call it “the Gann Limit”--in the California Constitution.

After an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1980 against Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston, Gann came back in 1982, leading the drive to pass Proposition 8, the so-called “Victims’ Bill of Rights” that expanded the rights of crime victims.

He won another, though short-lived, victory at the polls two years later when voters approved his Proposition 24, which would have limited the powers of the Speaker of the Assembly and cut the Legislature’s budget. The measure later was ruled unconstitutional in the courts. In 1986, Gann authored Proposition 61, an unsuccessful measure that would have sharply limited the salaries and pensions of public officials.

Because of his failing health, Gann restricts his public appearances. He takes life one day at a time, keeping campaign appointments when he feels up to it, but canceling others when he doesn’t feel well. He tries to work every day, even if it is only half a day.

Gann said that he is not trying any special treatments, although he has been offered “at least 1,000 of them” and may just be ready to try one if it is considered safe enough. In the meantime, he said, “I try to eat right, and I take some vitamins, particularly B-12 and Vitamin C. They check my blood at the hospital every two weeks.”

Touched by Others

One of the saddest things, he said, are others whose lives have been touched by AIDS and who seek him out. He said a woman recently told him that her husband had also contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion. “She said she wanted to know what to tell her 9-year-old daughter when she asked, ‘Mommy, why did daddy have to die?’ ” Gann said.

Wherever he goes, Gann is asked how he is feeling. Lately, he has been saying he is feeling better.

Last week, just before his debate with Honig, Gann said: “I’m doing fine. I’m much better than I was some months ago. I’m gaining weight; I’m gaining my strength back.” Though only a thin, frail version of his former self, Gann said he has gained 6 pounds in recent weeks.

Gann says he thinks he will defeat AIDS, although he readily acknowledges that he would be the first one to do it.

Born in Arkansas, the son of a minister, Gann lived in Texas for a time before moving to the Sacramento area in the 1930s, where over the years he worked in real estate and automobile sales. He has been married more than 55 years to his wife, Nell.

He talks about his fight against AIDS the way he does about political battles.

“You are never whipped by being knocked down,” Gann said, “because I have been knocked down and not whipped. Being whipped is not getting up and fighting back. They can knock me down and I’ll get up as long as God gives me the strength to do it.”

Another of the things that keeps Gann going, in addition to wanting to see Proposition 72 pass, is an AIDS initiative he is sponsoring for the November ballot.

Nearly Ready to File

Gann said he has nearly finished collecting signatures for the measure and is just about ready to file them with the secretary of state’s office. In addition to requiring doctors and other health care providers to turn over the names of people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome or those who test positive for the virus to public health officers, the measure would also require officials to notify the spouses and sexual partners of those with AIDS.

Gann said he tries not to let AIDS get him down.

“I just ask God to help me accept it because there is nothing I can do to remedy it,” he said.

“I look at it this way: I am going to die someday anyway. I started dying 75 years ago. I resent the AIDS bit, because I have never been involved in anything (like gay sex or intravenous drug use) that would have given me AIDS. But I just decided with my family that we would live with it and not let it weaken us by spending our energy crying about it.”