NEWS ANALYSIS : Nominee’s Rejection a Blow to Bipartisan Spirit

The Assembly’s rejection Thursday of Gov. Pete Wilson’s nominee for state superintendent of schools dealt a blow to a budding sense of bipartisan cooperation in the state Capitol and undercut the popular theory that 27 new members of the Assembly elected last year would be an independent force in their own right.

The action, which came on a nearly party line vote, also seems certain to heighten the Republican governor’s impatience with his continuing nemesis, Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.

But in the long run, the Assembly’s refusal to allow Republican state Sen. Marian Bergeson to take the top schools post may not directly interfere with efforts to draft a budget for tough times and overhaul the state’s troubled workers’ compensation system.

“The shelf life of this as an embittering experience is nowhere near some of the other things we’ve gone through,” said Assemblyman Phillip Isenberg of Sacramento, one of three Democrats who sided with Wilson.

Yet there was no doubt Thursday that the Assembly’s snubbing of Wilson and Bergeson would cast at least a temporary pall over well-publicized efforts to create a less partisan atmosphere in Sacramento.

“It’s impossible for Democrats to talk about bipartisan cooperation with a straight face after killing the confirmation of a qualified nominee on purely partisan grounds,” said Dan Schnur, Wilson’s chief spokesman. “We believe there is a very strong spirit of bipartisan cooperation in the Assembly, but Willie Brown isn’t a part of that spirit.”

The rift confirms the worst fears of lawmakers and Administration officials: that all the talk of bipartisanship would melt away under the heat of the first tough vote.

If the split is a sign of things to come and not just an aberration, it could make it more difficult for lawmakers and Wilson to come to terms on workers’ compensation, where a major bipartisan agreement seems within reach, and on the budget, where committees in both houses have just begun to make modest progress toward consensus on spending plans that might be acceptable to Wilson.

Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys), whose relationship with Wilson is significantly stronger than is Brown’s, said he worries that the ill will could spill over into other issues. Roberti had predicted that Bergeson would be confirmed in the Senate if her nomination cleared the Assembly.

“This doesn’t help,” Roberti said. “It just kind of heightens the warfare.”

The vote also was the first major test of the notion that more than two dozen members elected last year--the first to run for office knowing they faced term limits--would be more likely to break from the party leaders and strike out on their own.

All 13 new Republicans in the Assembly sided with Wilson. The 14 first-term Democrats all sided with Brown. In addition to Isenberg, the other two Democrats who voted to confirm Bergeson were Tom Umberg of Garden Grove and Jim Costa of Hanford.

“We heard a lot of bold talk about independence a few months ago,” said Republican Assemblyman Ross Johnson of La Habra. “Here was an opportunity for the new members to demonstrate that. It was a test of wills. Clearly, the Speaker’s will prevailed.”

One theory circulating among Republicans was that Brown used the contest as a way to imprint loyalty on the new members so that the next time they confront a tough vote, perhaps on a matter of policy, they will have had this experience of partisan bonding under their belts.

This fits well with Wilson’s view of the legislative world, in which the state Senate is an honorable body and most members of the Assembly are open-minded, but Brown, in ongoing efforts to embarrass the governor, spoils the well.

Brown, while conceding that he never would support a Republican for statewide office, denied that he applied significant pressure on his members to reject Wilson’s nominee. And he said he saw no reason why Thursday’s vote should affect anything else the Legislature is doing.

“I hope the governor does his job and I do mine,” Brown told reporters after the vote. “That’s what I did today.”

Brown’s Republican counterpart, Assembly Minority Leader Jim Brulte of Rancho Cucamonga, said he was disappointed but expected to be able to patch things up with the Speaker.

“We have to start again on Monday and we will,” Brulte said. “This is a setback. But we can’t let it destroy our movement toward solving California’s problems in a bipartisan manner.”