Roberti Sacrifices Causes in Seeking Compromise : Budget: Democratic Senate leader says he isn’t selling out but salvaging what he can before it is too late.

As the clock runs down on the legislative career of Senate Leader David A. Roberti, the veteran Democrat finds himself unhappily voting against everybody he has fought for in the last 25 years.

Count them: welfare mothers, the elderly, the developmentally disabled, schoolchildren, college students, housing and health care for the poor. The list goes on.

Now he is not only voting against them but urging his colleagues to do so as well to fashion a long-overdue state budget that Republican Gov. Pete Wilson will sign.

Has Roberti, a master consensus-maker and leader of the Senate for the last 11 years, sold out the constituencies he has defended so long?

No, he insisted Tuesday. It is simply a matter of salvaging what can be salvaged from the long budget fight before it is too late.

“Refusal to compromise is not going to save programs,” he said during a brief break from his legislative duties. “The only way to save the programs is to be realistic and try to save what you can. Otherwise the money will run out.”

Then he was off to a round of private negotiations with Senate Republican Leader Ken Maddy of Fresno in still another attempt by the two leaders of opposing parties to draft a compromise state schools funding bill.

Maddy’s proposal, which Roberti reportedly is close to accepting, is almost identical to what Wilson offered two weeks ago. It would give elementary and secondary schools the same amount per student in the coming year that they got last year. But it would do so by forcing the schools to borrow from money the state Constitution guarantees them in the future.

Roberti arrived in the Legislature in 1967 as an old-fashioned liberal ready to do battle with Gov. Ronald Reagan. Now, with the end of his career only two years away because of voter-imposed term limits, he finds he has run out of traditional political solutions to the budget gridlock.

Roberti has immersed himself in trying to find a budget solution that will meet Wilson’s demands that it contain no new taxes and not postpone payment of debts.

As a consequence, constituencies are pitted against one another, forcing lawmakers to make tough choices as they cut services that Californians may have come to take for granted. These include schools, health care and local police protection.

Roberti and Maddy have fashioned compromises--some with Wilson’s implicit support--that liberals would have spurned only a few months ago.

“It’s the most amazing spectacle I’ve ever seen,” said Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who is on the outs with Wilson, Roberti and Maddy. “Remember, you (press) guys used to write about the Senate, so dedicated to principle, so liberal under the great guiding hand of David Roberti?”

“I haven’t really moved to the right,” Roberti countered. “I’m just being realistic.”

“For the last 40 days (of the budget impasse), I have not been too much with the governor,” he added, asserting that he has supported virtually every budget-related alternative put before him, mostly without success.

“At some point you have to recognize that this thing cannot drag out forever. You have to recognize the reality, how the cards are dealt,” he said.

His efforts to find a compromise with Wilson and Maddy on the explosive issue of education spending has enraged education leaders, especially the California Teachers Assn., traditionally a generous campaign contributor to Democrats.

“He’s sold us out,” said state schools Supt. Bill Honig. “He’s thrown in his lot with Maddy and is carrying the governor’s water.”

In the Assembly, associates of Speaker Brown have privately circulated the notion that Roberti is eager to accommodate the governor so he might receive an appointment to the bench, perhaps the Supreme Court, when his legislative career ends.

Roberti dismissed the judicial appointment talk as ridiculous.

“I don’t want to quarrel with the Speaker, but it grates on my nerves,” Roberti said.

Roberti, who in June narrowly won a two-year term in a special election in a San Fernando Valley district, asserted that his more conservative voting stance reflects the new realities.

These include, he said, a California hit hard by recession at a time of stiff national defense cutbacks in addition to an influx of low-income immigrants who must be provided with educational, health and other services.

“Another reality is we have one terribly stubborn governor,” Roberti said. He said Wilson probably can hold out as long as he wants for a budget because minority Republicans can prevent Democrats from getting the necessary two-thirds vote required for passage.

“It is going to be his job to answer to the public as to why he was so intransigent,” he said. “. . . We have to deal with the fact that this is where he is. Essentially, what is going to pass is going to be his budget.”

Times staff writer Daniel M. Weintraub contributed to this article.