Rosenfield Supports Collis in Insurance Commissioner Race

Creating a novel partnership of political outsider and insider, Harvey Rosenfield, celebrated consumer activist and author of insurance Proposition 103, threw in Tuesday with Conway Collis, elected member of the State Board of Equalization and renowned fund-raiser. The first goal is to push Collis for election as state insurance commissioner in 1990, and then pursue a longer-range Populist agenda of reform for the state.

Never before in California, at least in this age of modern media politics, has a grass-roots crusader of this caliber teamed up so closely and so ambitiously with an Establishment elected official.

In formally declaring his candidacy to be the state’s first elected insurance commissioner, Democrat Collis promised to do what voters intended last year when they passed Proposition 103--roll back insurance premiums 20% and “move away” from rates based on where a motorist lives.

“I will lower insurance rates,” Collis said without qualification or hesitation.

That is what the proposition promised when it was approved last November in the most expensive campaign in California history--a promise that so far has been unkept as court challenges and regulatory proceedings have ground away.

Rosenfield, sitting at Collis’ side at press conferences in three cities, pronounced that the somewhat obscure 41-year-old politician “is the person who can get the job done.”

Lawyers, legislators and even some of Proposition 103’s key supporters are less sanguine about rollbacks--and, likewise, the political fortunes of candidates whose promises may prove difficult to meet.

Proposition 103, while establishing the insurance commissioner’s job as an elected post rather than an appointive one, specifically allows for court challenges of any rate rollbacks ordered by the commissioner. Further, the California Supreme Court decreed that insurance companies have a fundamental right to a fair profit when regulated by the government.

Virtually all insurance companies are seeking exemption from the 20% rollback, claiming that they would be denied reasonable profits. Collis said, however, that when insurance company ledgers are stripped of “excessive” salaries and political expenditures, such as the $63.8 million they spent in the 1988 California ballot initiative battle, and when company reserves and capital gains are counted, the 20% rollback is justifiable.

‘Renegade Department’

Collis charged that insurance companies are being assisted in their goals by Gov. George Deukmejian’s state Insurance Department under appointed Commissioner Roxani M. Gillespie.

“Right now, you’ve got an outlaw industry and you’ve got a renegade department. Well, enough is enough,” Collis said.

Collis is a former aide and political understudy to Democratic U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston. A lawyer, Collis became an accomplished fund-raiser for Cranston and other Senate Democrats, a skill he brought home and refined relentlessly as he moved from the role of political assistant to elected official in 1982.

That year he won election in a sprawling coastline district to the five-member State Board of Equalization. Board members have responsibility for administration of business sales and use taxes and for citizen appeals on income taxes.

Until he began forming an alliance with Rosenfield 10 months ago, Collis was most widely known for his challenge to the tax-exempt status of private clubs that discriminate against women or minorities, and for his unsuccessful 1988 ballot proposal to assist the homeless.

Even in a world where unrestrained ambition is commonplace, Collis stands out for his zeal to move ahead in politics.

In a breakfast interview, Collis said his switch from being a middle-of-the-road politician favored by business and other Establishment leaders to a liberal championing consumers against business is a natural path that brings him to a place where he is most comfortable. His critics call it just an opportunistic shift in alliances.

Rosenfield, 37, the other half of the new partnership, is a Ralph Nader protege and founder of the upstart consumer group Voter Revolt. Because of the group’s tax exempt status, Rosenfield could not offer Collis the endorsement of Voter Revolt, but its core of activists are expected to assist in the campaign for insurance commissioner.

Rosenfield is the latest in a small and powerful procession of folk heroes who emerged from California’s initiative process--men who tapped the energy of public discontent and transformed it into landmark legal changes. His predecessors include the late anti-tax crusaders Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann.

While men such as Jarvis and Gann freely offered their political endorsements, and Gann even ran for office once, they never joined openly in a long-term working alliance with a single politician.

Collis and Rosenfield, while facing a long and difficult campaign for the office of insurance commissioner, already are moving ahead on another front--in support of a 1990 ballot initiative to more than double business property taxes. The proposition is the work of Santa Monica political consultant Bill Zimmerman, who ran the Proposition 103 campaign and who will manage Collis’ run for insurance commissioner.

Down the road, the new allies are dreaming of still other Populist proposals.

“The idea is that you are more effective if you have someone working outside the system and someone inside,” Collis said.

Their partnership carries high-stakes risks for both sides, however: Collis stands to lose the connections and support in the business community that he has spent years building and that have taken him this far in politics. Rosenfield is risking his credibility with voters by joining up with a common politician.

If unique, their teaming-up does offer one measure of the condition of state government affairs today. “Our partnership is strange only in the context of the crazy system we have now, where politicians are the captives of special interests,” Rosenfield said in an interview. “You know, it is possible for government to serve the public interest.”

Critics Step Forth

The partnership had barely been announced before critics stepped forth. KABC-TV commentator Bill Press, another Democrat exploring the insurance commissioner’s race, said Rosenfield is unfairly trying to play political kingmaker.

“For a group that purports to be grass roots, this is a pure, smelly back-room deal,” he said.

Meanwhile, Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who leads possible Democratic candidates in one measure by the independent California Poll, sounded increasingly like he will not run. “I intend to seek reelection. I never say never, but it’s not my intention to run for insurance commissioner.

“I’m going to sort out if there are good, qualified candidates who are running,” Hayden said.

Also considering the race is Common Cause executive director Walter Zelman. He declined to comment, saying that it would be inappropriate while he still is in charge of a consumer activist group.

Several Republicans also are interested in the race, including Gillespie.