Brown Savoring a Summer of Victories : Politics: Assembly Speaker was a big winner in the June primary. And if Feinstein wins the governor’s race, he could become one of the most powerful legislative leaders in state history.

Willie Brown is riding high again, less than two years after being dragged to the brink of political humiliation by opposition Republicans and dissident Democrats who came within a whisker of toppling Brown from his cherished Speakership of the California Assembly.

Brown is savoring the fruits of multiple victories in the June primary election that propelled his close friend and political ally, former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein, to the Democratic nomination for governor.

And should Feinstein defeat Republican Sen. Pete Wilson in November, Brown could become California’s most influential legislative leader within the memory of even the most veteran Sacramento political observer.

It was Brown who endorsed Feinstein and gave her credibility last fall when her campaign appeared to be faltering. Brown’s endorsement was followed shortly afterward by that of Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles).

A Feinstein victory, combined with the expected Democratic control of the Assembly and Senate, would give the same party command of the executive and legislative branches of government, with all three leaders pledging to working in close concert. That kind of executive and legislative cooperation hasn’t happened in Sacramento in at least three decades.

Those who know 56-year-old Willie L. Brown Jr. of San Francisco might expect him to be gloating effusively.

But Brown--best known to many Californians for his flash and dash, his love of high fashion and fine cars--is being uncharacteristically cool and subdued.

During an interview in his ornate Victorian Capitol office, Brown’s crowing was kept to a mere peep: “I do acknowledge that if Feinstein wins and Roberti prevails in his house and we prevail in this house, that is an increased level of influence on public policy.

“So my energy level is renewed.”

One veteran legislative aide was far less circumspect in describing Brown’s role if Feinstein is elected governor: “He’ll be in the catbird’s seat. He’ll be the vice governor.”

The aide noted that Feinstein control of the governor’s corner office would reinforce Roberti’s influence over the 40-member Senate, but that Roberti and Feinstein have never been as close politically or personally as Feinstein and Brown.

Feinstein’s victory was only one coup for Willie Brown in the June 5 primary. Voters rejected two Republican-backed ballot initiatives that sought to restrict, or eliminate altogether, the Legislature’s authority to redraw legislative district lines next year. Brown led the successful campaign to keep reapportionment control in the Legislature’s hands.

And Brown and Roberti won a major victory in the passage of their legislative ethics program.

The Legislature’s image has been battered in recent years with allegations of impropriety. The allegations have been largely in connection with members’ need to raise massive sums of money to win reelection, often resulting in the shameless shakedown of Sacramento lobbyists. A federal investigation and embarrassing FBI sting operation in the last two years have led to several indictments and the conviction of one lawmaker on political corruption charges. The probe is continuing.

But Brown said that the integrity problem may be largely behind the Legislature, with the passage two years ago of campaign contribution limits and now the Brown-Roberti ethics package.

“We are finally coming out of the wilderness of so-called corruption and the perception of corruption,” Brown said.

Brown also shares credit for voter approval of Propositions 111 and 108 in June, the $18.5-billion transportation finance program to be supported by a doubling of the state gasoline tax over the next 10 years. The real workhorse behind Proposition 111 was one of Brown’s most trusted lieutenants in the Assembly, Transportation Committee Chairman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar).

Katz was influential in drafting the complex measure and personally wrote a key portion of the plan that requires local governments to develop tough transportation management plans before they can qualify for $3 billion in local highway and transit funds. The Katz measure represents the state’s first attempt to use state transportation funds as a lever for managing growth.

The June victories--combined with a number of policy breakthroughs in the Legislature on issues such as workers’ compensation--have helped Brown rebound from the bleak days in 1988 when Republicans and the Democrats’ “Gang of Five” had Brown clinging to the Speakership day by day.

Somewhat repentant after he nearly lost his Assembly gavel, Brown agreed to share some of the Speaker’s powers with other legislative leaders. He also pledged to focus more attention on policy matters and less on Assembly intrigues--such as punishing opponents by sending them to the Siberia of unwanted committee assignments and remote cubbyhole offices.

Perhaps, confidants say, Brown is mellowing in part because, as he approaches his 10th year as Assembly Speaker, he also is approaching his 60s. He suffers an eye ailment, believed to be hereditary, that affects his eyesight severely at times.

In any case, Brown seems intent on shedding his reputation as an arrogant leader who wheels and deals with special interests to the detriment of the public good. In talking about the prospect of working with a Feinstein administration, Brown concentrated on the potential for public policy achievements rather than the glory of enhanced personal power.

He predicted that California would have an activist government for the first time since the days of Gov. Edmund G. Brown Sr. that would move the state “back to the forefront in terms of leadership” in the nation.

The challenge will be made even more difficult by dramatic population changes, he said. There will be more elderly people and very young Californians--groups with special and costly needs. At the same time, ethnic and racial minorities, taken together, will constitute a majority of California’s population for the first time.

“The challenge to respond to that and to keep California an interesting, quality place in which to live is just going to be incredible and clearly commands the kind of cooperation that Dianne will get from the legislative leadership,” Brown said.

“What it means in terms of public policy, I think, is that you’re going to have an activist government, so to speak. I think Dianne will aggressively push health insurance for unemployed persons in the state. I think Dianne will aggressively push low-cost, no-frills auto insurance. I think Dianne will aggressively pursue school construction. . . .

“I think Dianne will actively pursue some form of regional government, or reorganizing local government into regional functional units where appropriate.

“I think Dianne will re-examine the past (revenue) policy of this state and submit those revisions appropriately to the voters for their approval. . . . And she will do so with a clear prospect of having two houses of the Legislature cooperating in, first, helping her frame those policy issues, and then making sure they are enacted into law.”

Most of the programs Brown mentioned, such as health and auto insurance, happen to be his pet projects.

Brown said he hopes that Feinstein would support a rollback of 1986 state tax reforms that aided California businesses and the most wealthy taxpayers--errors, he called them--as a means of evening state revenue flow from year to year and preventing the sort of budget deficit the state faced this year.

If the enhanced state revenues are not enough to support ongoing state needs and new fiscal demands, such as assistance for crack babies and AIDS victims, “Then we’ve got to relook at the tax policy,” Brown said.

Brown insisted that talk of a tax increase would not hurt Feinstein in the campaign because the voters have demonstrated in the last two elections that they will support increased state spending if there is a demonstrated need and a corresponding improvement in public services.

He said there is no chance that Feinstein would be a puppet of legislative leaders, or vice versa. “Oh no, not at all,” he said. “She’s really unusually independent. I have a personal friendship with her, but we have public disagreement. We have had public fights, but they were always over positive issues. They’re not nasty fights,” such as ones involving some Democratic legislators and Gov. George Deukmejian “where they stop talking to each other.”

In fact, Brown said that differences in his style and philosophy and those of Roberti would assure that a Feinstein-Brown-Roberti triumvirate in Sacramento would be no seamless monolith.

“Roberti is by everybody’s measure, standard and performance is more liberal than Willie Brown happens to be,” Brown said. “Willie Brown appears to be the most pragmatic. And Dianne appears to be more conservative. So all of a sudden, you have the pragmatist, the liberal by reputation and the moderate or conservative by reputation, but all in the same political party and all pretty much with the same views on most social issues.

“That’s got to be the first time--if and when it happens--that it’s happened in California. And it will happen at the right time that it’s needed.”