A Change That Opens State’s Political Doors : Careerism is ended; new members mean the Legislature will again reflect our changing society.

The passage of Proposition 140 teaches important lessons in democracy. The question now is whether there are students in our state Capitol capable of learning from them.

The legislative Establishment, outspending Proposition 140 many times over, developed a campaign strategy to take advantage of the longest ballot in decades. Aiming to confuse voters, they pitched their ads against two dissimilar initiatives: they lumped Proposition 131, which provided for public funding of campaigns, with 140, which does not.

But vote against both, urged Angela Lansbury and Walter Matthau. Our taxes will be spent to elect Klansmen! Watch out, public funding will help the special interests subvert the popular will--it’s all a special-interest “trap”!

The opponents of Proposition 140 spent millions, raised from special interests, on Hollywood-style promotion of such themes, supplemented with huge telephone banks and tens of millions of slate mailers and sophisticated computer letters.

Yet, on Election Day, despite the confusion and negativism sown by this political extravaganza, the voters knew their minds. They voted “no” on Proposition 131 and on more than 20 other initiatives.

But they voted “yes” on Proposition 140. And by their action, they incorporated into the state’s Constitution provisions for term limits, cuts in legislative staff and operating costs and replacement of the legislative retirement plan with Social Security.

For believers in democracy, there are many positive lessons in that result. First, as Lincoln insisted long ago, all the people cannot be fooled all the time. The glitzy ad bonanza simply underestimated the California electorate, failed to recognize the deepening popular disgust with Sacramento.

Incumbent special-interest ties, partisan extremism, gerrymandered districts, vote-selling scandals, the pampered lifestyles of legislators, stockpiling of campaign funds, perpetual reelection of incumbents, a Legislature out of step with public opinion--Sacramento’s ills are all-too-common knowledge. And voters recognized in Proposition 140’s provisions a democratic cure for them.

The first result of term limits will be to bring many new people into the political system. Incumbent legislators have been blocking the door into the Capitol for years. Their money power, their control over redistricting, their huge staffs, their high-tech media campaigns--all have combined to keep challengers out. That’s why the caucuses and major committees in both chambers are run by men whose formative political experiences occurred in the 1960s. That’s why there are no more Latinos and Asians in the Legislature today than there were a decade ago. That’s why women have generally had to wait for open seats to find their way in.

Proposition 140 limits the terms of current assembly incumbents beginning in 1996 and of senators in 1998. But we won’t have to wait that long to see change--watch for some of those incumbents to begin moving out in 1992 and 1994. The attractions of service in Sacramento have been, for some, all too intimately connected to a pension plan that Proposition 140 ends. Now careerism has fewer incentives.

And it is careerism, the aim of our so-called “professional legislators” to keep themselves permanently in office, that is the root problem. Careerism is the preoccupation that has led legislators to seek ever-bigger campaign contributions from special interests (causing today’s vote selling scandals and the growing power of special interests in Sacramento). It accounts for swelling legislative staffs, so many of whom are campaign consultants in disguise. And it explains legislators’ timorous refusal to deal with the controversial issues that now flood our ballot.

Proposition 140 forces the state Capitol to reopen its doors to citizen legislators whose aim is public service. Today most recruits to the Legislature are former legislative staffers whose whole career experience is of professional politics, whose only hometown is Sacramento. Under term limits, local government will once again be a training ground for our state legislators. People with experience in small business and the professions, with personal knowledge of California’s communities, will find their way again into the Capitol.

As elections bring in new people, the Legislature will begin again to reflect our changing society, its new trends in opinion. Electoral competition will force change in the politics of both the Democratic and Republican caucuses, too long locked in the ideological time warp of the 1960s and 1970s. It will bring both legislative parties, finally, into the 1990s.

Proposition 140 will also win us some relief from redistricting abuse. When incumbents can no longer protect themselves in safe districts from one decade to the next, gerrymandering loses much of its point.