State Lawmakers Angered by Poll : Politics: Legislators think voters are wrong to hold them in low esteem. But they seem resigned to the fact.

State legislators, returning to the Capitol after a two-month recess, reacted with both anger and acceptance Wednesday to a new state poll showing that most voters hold them in low esteem, believing they are unethical and unproductive.

“That’s an awful shallow, cynical attitude about elected officials,” Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) commented. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do to deal with that kind of lie--and it’s an absolute, unadulterated lie.”

Although legislators contended that they were getting a bum rap from the public--with many politicians suffering for the sins of a few--they also basically agreed that their image, indeed, is unseemly and needs serious polishing.

Several politicians observed that the findings by The Times Poll pinpointed opportunities for statewide and legislative candidates to run for office this year against “the mess in Sacramento.”

“People are fed up and looking for some alternatives,” said Paul Maslin, a veteran political pollster who now is a top adviser to state Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, a candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. “People think the system doesn’t work for them. It’s an insiders’ system, a vicious circle that just helps perpetuate itself--the legislators, the wealthy contributors, the bureaucrats.”

Maslin naturally believes Van de Kamp will benefit politically from “this feeling of cynicism and disillusionment,” which the pollster said has been showing up in his own surveys as well as The Times’.

Van de Kamp, who has called Sacramento a “swamp,” is pushing a political reform ballot initiative that would impose term limits on elected state officials and provide for partial public financing of their races in exchange for ceilings on campaign spending. The Times Poll indicated that voters might be receptive to these ideas.

The Times’ findings that particularly irked legislators during their first day back on the job after a long vacation included those showing that most voters think it is commonplace for lawmakers to take bribes, that the overwhelmingly majority believe lawmakers “are for sale” to campaign contributors and that the electorate assumes all of state government “is pretty much run by a few big interests.”

Gov. George Deukmejian, beginning his final year in office, also was found to have only lukewarm support among voters, who had a hard time naming anything that either he or the Legislature had accomplished recently. The irony was that the governor and the Legislature had--by almost any standard--a very productive year in 1989, hammering out several major agreements.

Neither Deukmejian nor any of his top aides would comment on the survey Wednesday. But many legislators talked freely of their frustration with trying to clean up an image that has been severely tarnished by continuing scandal, including a lingering FBI investigation into Capitol political corruption and a widely publicized trial of a state senator on charges of extorting bribes and laundering money.

Typical was Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), who recalled laboring half of last year against long odds to help enact legislation demanded by the public to ban semi-automatic assault rifles. “Your enemies remember and your friends forget,” he lamented. “The public, six months after the fact, can’t remember that the bill even passed. That’s life in the big city, but that’s not the fault of the Legislature.”

Roberti and several other politicians also theorized that state government is suffering from a public attitude of “a pox on all politicians,” with voters not differentiating substantively between widely publicized scandals in Congress, the Legislature, Los Angeles City Hall and in savings and loan regulation. “It was a scandal-ridden year,” noted pollster Maslin.

“The constant publicity and stories rubs off on all of us,” noted Senate Republican Leader Ken Maddy of Fresno, one of many lawmakers who insisted “there’s no way” that as many lawmakers have been taking bribes as the public believes.

Ron Smith, a veteran political consultant who is managing the campaign of Sen. Marion Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) for the GOP lieutenant governor nomination, asserted that all the scandals really are just beginning to sink in with the voters.

“Whatever you are seeing now is going to be 10 times worse by June,” Smith predicted. “The year’s going to bode poorly for any candidate who is seen as an insider. The wheeler-dealer candidate is going to have real problems.”

Bergeson’s campaign opponent, Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim), agreed “there’s no doubt whatsoever” that political ethics is ripe for political exploitation.

Otto Bos, who is directing U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson’s campaign for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, said Wilson plans to present himself to the electorate as a “squeaky clean outsider” to Sacramento. Wilson will remind voters that as mayor of San Diego he sponsored a tough campaign finance law, Bos said.

“That was in 1972--before Watergate, before it was fashionable to be for campaign reform,” Bos said.

The Legislature is sponsoring its own ballot proposal aimed at cleaning up its image by curbing the most flagrant ethical abuses of lawmakers. But the measure has become controversial because legislators linked the ethics reform to creation of a commission empowered to give them a pay raise.

Richie Ross, formerly Speaker Brown’s chief of staff and now Van de Kamp’s campaign manager, said the “sad, regrettable fact” is that the Legislature’s ethics proposal suffers from the negative image of its sponsor.

“The Legislature doesn’t realize how deep the problem goes with the public,” Ross said. “It does not see that the very fact it is authoring the (ballot) measure reduces its credibility, regardless of the merits.”

But Assemblyman Lloyd G. Connelly (D-Sacramento), considered one of the more reform-minded legislators, said, “the poll didn’t surprise me. It’s consistent with what I find when I go to the hardware store or go to get a haircut. . . .

“People in the United States, since after George Washington’s presidency ended, have been suspicious as hell of their elected officials. And they ought to be.”

Times staff writers Jerry Gillam and Carl Ingram contributed to this article.