Speaker on a Roll but Won’t Face Wilson

It has been a great winter for Willie Brown, the often-reviled Speaker of the California Assembly. And he is having the time of his life.

He pulled off a widely publicized economic summit. His mediating averted a Los Angeles teachers strike. He helped lobby Washington to spare some threatened California military bases. His legislative power has been strengthened. He just became a grandfather and on Saturday--the first day of spring--he will celebrate his 59th birthday.

Now, serious politicians and pundits even are talking about him maybe running for governor. This, the Speaker really has enjoyed--Willie Brown, the Republican dirty word, the lightning rod for public disdain of the Legislature, spoken of in the same field as Gov. Pete Wilson, Treasurer Kathleen Brown and Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi.

Willie Brown, a candidate for governor? “I’d write him a check,” says Wilson spokesman Dan Schnur, fantasizing about the powerful Democrat leaving the Legislature to run against his Republican boss.

Put away your checkbook, Dan. Brown says he isn’t going to run for anything next year except reelection to the Assembly. And then he hopes to serve his eighth and final term as Speaker before being forced into retirement with the first class of Proposition 140 victims.

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“I’ve got a better shot at the lottery” than being elected governor, Brown says. That would put the odds against him at about 18 million to 1.

Polls provide evidence for Brown’s conclusion. A statewide Field Poll last month found roughly as many people giving Brown poor marks as good marks on job performance. This was much better than Wilson’s showing, but not nearly as good as Kathleen Brown’s. Also, the Times Poll last October found nearly five times as many Californians disapproving of the Legislature’s job performance as approving of it.

Brown is not a kamikaze. He learned 19 years ago when he first ran for Speaker and lost, he says, that “you never try to go up a mountain you can’t climb. . . . I never start anything I don’t feel I can win.”

Is there any way he might be tempted to start up that gubernatorial hill? “No, no, no,” he insists.

“I don’t want to dampen the spirits of all these people who are dreamingly thinking about it. But I certainly don’t want to mislead them. . . . I’m amused and I’m enjoying it. But make no mistake--I’m not lifting a finger. . . . I don’t want to be perceived as any kind of crazy person who’s taken leave of his senses.”

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None of this seems to faze the woman who started all the talk of a Brown campaign for governor.

“I’m up to doing God’s work,” says Alice Huffman, a longtime Brown ally and political director of the California Teachers Assn. “I just think California doesn’t know what a jewel it has in Willie Brown. . . . If he were marketed properly, a lot of that negative stuff would go away.”

In January, Huffman began circulating “Willie for Governor” buttons at fund-raisers for the Black American Political Assn. of California, which she and Brown helped found in the late 1970s. Brown saw the buttons and joked about them.

Huffman says she never talked to Brown about what she did next, and still hasn’t. She filed official papers forming “The WLBJ Club”--for Willie Lewis Brown Jr.--with the aim of raising money to collect nearly a million signatures of people “drafting” the Speaker to run for governor. “I hope to give him a pretty decent Christmas present,” Huffman says.

The next thing Brown knew, he was at a news conference in Washington lightheartedly answering questions from serious reporters. Most of the disclaimers and quips were ignored, but his final comment was widely picked up: “If there was a draft that came along and sufficiently had the security of my being able to win . . . I’d have to consider it.”

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Back in Sacramento, things seem to have gotten out of hand. “This is much ado about nothing. It’s a joke,” asserts Mike Galizio, Brown’s chief of staff.

Comments Brown: “This is going to screw up my effectiveness. If people start taking this stuff seriously, some of them are going to be closing doors that otherwise would not be closed.” The Wilson people in particular, he says, although “I would assume they’d like nothing better than to run against Willie Brown for governor. At least that’s the way I’d see it if I were looking at it through their perspective.”

But from Brown’s perspective, he says, “I’m just going to stay Speaker as long as the (Assembly) members will have me.”