What Really Matters in Sacramento

Sitting through Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s economic summit this week, I was constantly reminded that good ideas are a dime a dozen. You can find them in any university faculty lounge or corporate boardroom.

What really matters in Sacramento are 54 votes in the Assembly, plus another 27 in the Senate and the governor’s signature. This is the complex formula--a two-thirds majority vote in each house and a willing governor--required to enact most major bills.

Political consensus--not policy innovation--has been the missing element of public policy formation in the state capital, as illustrated by years of gridlock on such continually debated issues as workers’ compensation, tax incentives, education reform, government streamlining, health care, auto insurance. . . .

Scores of learned scholars and hard-nosed business executives offered Speaker Brown, Gov. Pete Wilson and other powerful decision-makers countless recommendations on how to boost California’s troubled economy. Not to belittle their meritorious suggestions, but the elected officials didn’t hear much, if anything, they hadn’t heard before. The state Capitol is up to its dome in ignored reports, including recent major studies by Rebuild L.A. Chairman Peter V. Ueberroth and Chairman John Vasconcellos of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee.

What the Legislature and the governor need is the one thing the summit policy wonks could not provide: a plan for patching up feuds, standing up to competing special interests and choosing between the rival ideas. In short, courage, compromise and consensus.

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C. Michael Armstrong, chairman of Hughes Aircraft, spoke for most Californians who are frustrated with stalemate in Sacramento when he told Brown, Wilson and Vasconcellos they “should go into a room and don’t come out until you have a consensus.” The corporate executive prefaced his comment with the acknowledgment that he had lived in California only a year and didn’t “know all the power centers.”

“You are new to the state,” responded Brown in an oblique reference to Armstrong’s political naivete. Sitting next to the Speaker was Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti, who must be included in any consensus, as must the Legislature’s Republican leaders.

Wilson drew the session’s biggest laugh and made the same point about practical politics when he described an economist--and many were present--as “a man who knows 103 ways to make love to a woman, but doesn’t know any women.”

There was value in the Speaker’s summit, however, even if it was not in the ideas. The value was in the added pressure it now places on Brown, the Legislature and the governor to stop running in circles and move forward.

In sponsoring the summit, the Speaker positioned himself and the Legislature--especially the Assembly he leads--to be kicked in the rear for two days by the hundreds of invited guests. These influential Californians now will be watching to see whether their prodding has any lasting effect once the lawmakers return to Sacramento.

Brown also went to elaborate lengths to focus the media spotlight on his show, arranging to have it telecast live by cable channels into 6 million homes. And he undoubtedly raised vague expectations among the public about Sacramento’s ability to create jobs.

“When you invite people to a party, you’d better have more than TV,” said one lobbyist, echoing talk around the tables of pastries and at the bars. “Willie sold the poker chips, dealt the cards and raised the ante. He’d better have a real game.”

Conceded Senate leader Roberti, although a lukewarm participant in Brown’s game: “This may create a psychology that pushes us into doing what we know we have to do.”

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I kept asking myself, though, why wasn’t this so-called summit being held in the state capital?

The official answer is that it was placed in Los Angeles because this is the region hardest hit by the recession. The lawmakers, however, were not out surveying economic blight. They were comfortably ensconced at the Biltmore Hotel.

The answer, of course, has more to do with Los Angeles being the TV capital of the state and its easy access to all the local news shows.

But Brown and his advisers also obviously felt that to be credible the summit had to be held away from Sacramento. This is a sad commentary on the state’s political system and merely reinforces the public perception that nothing important happens in the Capitol anymore.

So maybe the solution to gridlock, the answer to restoring the Legislature’s luster and the best job stimulant for Southern California is to move the state Capitol out of Sacramento and relocate to Los Angeles.