The Leader Who Might Have Been : Cranston: He has had the luck and ability but preoccupation with deal-making left his promise as a liberal beacon unfulfilled.

Alan Cranston is a difficult man to hate. For all the allegations of improper dealings with bank regulators on behalf of savings-and-loan mogul Charles H. Keating Jr., Cranston’s image will never be one of the underhanded schemer. Rather it is one of a steady Democrat and a reliable liberal whose early promise of leadership gave way to an almost obsessive penchant for deal-making and of an incredibly lucky politician whose luck finally gave out.

The image is a complex one full of nuance and contradiction. He is both a Democrat and a democrat--the only U.S. senator in my knowledge whose staff members routinely address him by his first name. But he was also a politician who moved easily in the circles of the high rollers whose interests were not always identical with those of the ordinary American.

It was in the aftermath of the Democratic debacle of 1980 that I first had a chance to examine closely the career of the man who announced Thursday that he would not seek another term in the Senate. The election that brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency had also caused the defeat of some of the prominent liberal Democrats in the Senate. Swept out in the Reagan landslide were such liberal heroes as Birch Bayh, George McGovern, Frank Church and John Culver. Many of those who remained were either so fearful of presenting a high profile to Republican sharpshooters that they cowered in the aisles of the Senate or were looking beyond the Senate to the presidency.

Conspicuous among the liberal survivors was Alan Cranston, who pulled off the remarkable feat of defeating anti-tax conservative Paul Gann in a year in which the message of small, frugal government was selling briskly throughout the nation. That Cranston had bucked the trend and emerged victorious gave him almost a presumptive right to leadership among the remaining liberals in the Senate.

But it was more than Cranston’s remarkable political luck that gave him a claim on leadership. Here was a founding father of the California Democratic Council, the group that gave form and voice to the state’s once-beleaguered Democratic left wing. He was also part of the Senate leadership, having won the post of party whip in 1977 at the same time that Robert Byrd became the floor leader for the Democrats. He seemed to have the fortitude required of a leader, such as the ability to shrug off defeat. He had lost the job of state controller in 1966 only to come back in 1968 to win a seat in the Senate in a bitter campaign against school superintendent Max Rafferty, who attempted to tie Cranston to anti-war radical groups.

As I floated Cranston’s name to people on Capitol Hill as the natural person to begin rebuilding the liberal edifice in the Senate, the reactions ranged from tepid enthusiasm to stark incredulity. One lobbyist who had been a Cranston staffer explained to me, “You have to understand, Alan sees his job as putting pieces together. Now that would be a good thing if it were harnessed to a different kind of personality.” A staff member to a Democratic senator asserted that, “If the liberal Democrats wanted to have a voice and they said, ‘Let’s get a leadership guy,’ they wouldn’t turn to Cranston. He can’t play that role.”

I was baffled as to why a senator who looked so good on paper would be dismissed so airily as a claimant on leadership. Part of the explanation seemed to be in the way he conceived his role as whip. A staff member to a Midwest Democrat said that Byrd had elbowed Cranston out of any important leadership activities so that, “Cranston has been nothing more than a valet.”

But a Byrd staff member rejected the assertion that Byrd was unwilling to give Cranston the running room he needed. “Flat out wrong,” she said. “On many occasions, something is happening on the floor and Byrd will say that we’ve got to get Cranston to help, but Cranston could never get the whips going.”

If Cranston was not counting heads and rounding up votes, what was he doing? He was doing what he did best in the Senate--making deals. Not corrupt deals, just pedestrian deals for the awesome constellation of special interests in California: aerospace industries, winegrowers, agribusiness, and the one that was to blow up so spectacularly in his face, the savings-and-loan industry. He was the chairman of the big board of congressional deal-making and sometimes the very cleverness of his transactions caught up with him. That happened in 1979 when he tried to put together a package of water legislation that would benefit large farms while not antagonizing environmentalists. Both sides ended up angry at him.

But all senators do deals for their constituents, especially in a megastate such as California. Deal-making is not a fatal flaw, so why should Cranston be singled out? The answer is that Cranston had it in him to be more than just any senator. He was courageous in his support of the SALT II treaty even when it appeared a lost cause. He could transcend the grubbiness of political horse-trading, but he never did so on a sustained basis. He could have been a liberal presence but settled for the role of someone whose star would only occasionally glimmer brightly.

Ultimately, Cranston succumbed to that most corrosive of political diseases, the pursuit of incumbency for its own sake. So while there are a few monuments to Cranston scattered around, there could have been an Acropolis.