The Labors of John Garamendi : The California Insurance Commissioner and Gubernatorial Candidate Is Hard-Working and Ambitious. Maybe Too Ambitious.

In the windowless lunch room of the Hi-Ridge Lumber Co. on the outskirts of Yreka, a small group of dust-covered sawmill workers sits around scarred picnic tables. They don’t care much for politicians--especially the ones in Sacramento, who seem to cater mostly to the strange and distant problems of urban California--so they’re disconcerted to find themselves spending their dinner hour with one.

The visitor, who essentially invited himself, is state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, 49, Democrat and iconoclastic candidate for governor. Garamendi coils his lanky denim-clad frame on a corner of one table and introduces himself, then asks for questions. There are no TV cameras, no campaign word spinners, no banners or fund-raising envelopes. And no bull. Not, at least, from the dour workers as they pick through brown bags and dinner buckets.

“What can the governor’s office do for us?” one worker demands. Hi-Ridge is a survivor, so far, in a timber industry that is succumbing to owls, imports and other forces--mostly government bureaucrats, the way the workers see it. If they are skeptical of politicians in general, these hunters and outdoorsmen are particular scornful of those who talk, as Garamendi does, about gun controls and protecting the environment.

As he launches into a discourse on forestry, environmental balance, sustained yield, computer-monitored laser-beam saws and the export of California logs to Japan, the men hunch over their sandwiches. If not for Garamendi’s imposing physical presence, he might’ve lost them entirely. He carries his trim 215 pounds erect on his 6-foot-2 frame. His dark hair shows no gray, his blue eyes are intense, and his hands, massive even for such a large man, slice the air to punctuate his points.

He moves on to the reform of workers’ compensation insurance to reduce rates at high-risk places like sawmills. He says that health-care reform--he has his own plan, of course--would free up the capital that Hi-Ridge would need to modernize its plant. Then, closing the circle, he says, “You can maintain your productivity here, compete, and you guys keep your jobs. Or, alternately, you can go debate (higher) wages.” He grins at Hi-Ridge vice president Gerald Bendix, sitting off in a corner.

“Providing we can get jobs,” a doubting mill hand says.

“That too,” Garamendi says, flashing a smile. A grudging burst of laughter breaks the tension. “Can’t solve everything in one evening,” he adds.

Maybe not, but Garamendi tries. He fields questions and offers proposals on crime (the “three-strikes” law, licensing of handguns, boot camps for young offenders), job retraining, restructuring the work force, overhauling the school system, putting California onto the information superhighway and invigorating the economy by converting aerospace plants to new transportation industries.

Then the lunch boxes snap shut, crumpled bags are slam-dunked into the trash barrel, and Garamendi, in hard hat, gloves and apron, joins the workers on the saw lines. With the campaign slogan “Working for California,” he’s pledging to work in every one of California’s 58 counties by the June 7 primary, and he’ll add his sawmill day to his growing list of odd jobs: clerk at a hardware store in Weaverville, crowbar wielder on an L.A. city street-repair crew, grocery bagger at a Safeway store in Fairfield.

When he leaves the mill after 11 p.m., he is as sawdust-grimy as the others and as bouncy as a kid with a new bike. His proposals didn’t seem to impress the workers too much, mill official Bendix says later, but that he should come and work at the mill and share their lunchtime, he adds, “that made an impression.”

The workday photo op is a poor man’s tactic, the sort of gimmick an underdog uses to get free publicity. Even Darry Sragow, Garamendi’s campaign manager, says the candidate could meet more voters by standing in front of Garamendi state headquarters on Sunset Boulevard for an hour. And he could raise more money by spending that hour on the telephone with prospective campaign donors. With rival State Treasurer Kathleen Brown sitting on some $4 million (to Garamendi’s $58,000, as of the March reports) and a hefty lead in the opinion polls, working the phones means survival. (State Sen. Tom Hayden, a Democrat from Santa Monica, also a candidate, acknowledges he has no chance of winning.)

Sragow does not like Garamendi’s workdays. But the candidate is keeping his own counsel, as he always has. And the idea of real, physical labor is at the core of his upbringing, his character and--even if it undermines it--his campaign. The product of a Basque-Irish-Italian mining and ranching family (Garamendi means “fiery mountain” in Basque), he insists that working alongside people is the only way a governor can really understand California.

Like other new-idea politicians (Gary Hart, Bill Clinton) before him, Garamendi believes problems must be attacked forcefully on the ground level. Communities must come together, pitch in and make things better. Put everyone in the room and hammer out a solution--without getting dissipated and lost in gridlocked committees.

Such circumvention of conventional politics also allows the 20-year state-government veteran to run as an outsider. That may not be as contradictory as it seems; Garamendi has worked outside the system even while he has been in it, a quality that does not endear him to all his colleagues.

Ignoring the old notion of stroking allies and paying your dues, he often seems to be elbowing his way to the front of the line. “He was always working for the best interest of John Garamendi, with political gain in mind,” observes state Sen. Robert G. Beverly, a Republican from Long Beach and a Garamendi Senate colleague for 16 years.

By all accounts, Garamendi is a supremely self-confident man who always has charted an independent course. “I don’t care about the political risk,” he says. “I win it or lose it, I want to attack the problem.” His way.

IT WAS A LITTLE EXPERIMENT ON THE PART OF CALAVERAS HIGH SCHOOL teacher John Lodato one day back in the early 1960s, when one of his honor students was a burly ranch kid named John Garamendi.

Lodato went into the classroom, took roll, and then, he recalls, “I just went to the back of the room and sat down. After about five minutes or so of low-order chaos, John takes over and gets the class organized, and they do a certain amount of activity related to the curriculum. . . . I had a hunch that John was the type of kid who would not be willing to just sit there and see the class do nothing.” Garamendi, says Lodato, now running a tennis club in San Andreas, always stood out as a leader.

John Raymond Garamendi grew up the second of seven children on a ranch two miles from the Gold Rush town of Mokelumne Hill in the Sierra foothills. For John, often in tandem with brother Tom, nearly a year and a half older, boyhood in California’s Mother Lode was bucolic. He remembers Little League, Boy Scouts, milkshakes at the town soda fountain, almost-straight-A report cards, being class president at Calaveras High.

In the summers, there was backpacking in the nearby Sierra with his father, Raymond, a local civic leader. They skied in the winter and branded calves in spring. And when he and Tom got crosswise with their dad, there was some serious digging of postholes in the rocky ground of the Mother Lode.

“You lived your values, the value of hard work,” says Garamendi. “Stay with it until it’s done. ‘When that hole is 32 inches deep, then you can quit, Son. I don’t care how hard the rock is. You’ve got to set the post properly.’ ”

Talk to relatives and friends from Moke Hill, as they call it locally, and you get stories tinged with Norman Rockwell. They recall the time John pulled a man from a burning building while on his way home from school. And they tell of pranks. Such as the time Tom and John built a fort to end all forts, burrowing out tunnels within the bales of hay stacked in the barn for feeding the stock through the winter and spring months. “It was not just a big hole,” recalls Tom Garamendi, who is maintenance supervisor at the prison in nearby Ione. “It was a major chasm. We’d taken everything out, and we’d made supports of timbers and large pipes and everything.”

In the fall, Ray Garamendi inventoried the hay to make sure he’d have enough bales to feed the cattle when needed, and there seemed to be plenty. So it came as a rude surprise when he removed some bales the following year to find “there was nothing but air down there,” Tom says. “I am sure that we were grounded,” he adds, “not because of what we did, but because we didn’t bother telling him.”

Like his father, who died almost three years ago, John is a strapping fellow with a jaw so squarely chiseled he brings to mind Dudley Do-Right, the stiff-backed Mountie of the Bullwinkle cartoons. As a star athlete, the one-on-one nature of wrestling particularly appealed to him. “It was what you could do yourself,” he recalls. “You find out how good you were right away. If you made a mistake, it was all yours”--a template for the way he’d play politics years later.

When Garamendi was 18 and a tackle on the UC Berkeley football team, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy had been the hero of Garamendi and his girlfriend, Patricia Wilkinson, a 19-year-old music and education major from Watsonville, and his death changed their discussions about their future.

In their senior year, they were married and enjoyed a surprise honeymoon in Hawaii when Garamendi was picked to play in the Hula Bowl college all-star game. They debated whether John should go on to business school as planned or, possibly, play professional football; there were feelers from both the Oakland Raiders and the Dallas Cowboys. But then Patti brought up the idea of joining Kennedy’s Peace Corps.

Mary Jane Garamendi, 73, recalls a spring day in 1966 when John and Patti came home for a visit before getting their degrees. “They said, ‘We’re going to Ethiopia.’ ”

“I said, ‘Where is Ethopia? Oh gosh, that’s so far away.’ ”

John Garamendi was 21 years old and had never been beyond Mexico when a creaky World War II C-47 transport left him and Patti in a pasture in southwestern Ethiopia--”about as far from anywhere as you could get,” he says.

They lived in a mud hut, without running water or electricity, in the village of Mettu, and for the next two years taught the village children English, math and other subjects, with John using his ranching skills to organize local improvement projects.

“We saw everything,” Garamendi says. “We saw people next to us die because they were sick.” They responded systematically. “We’d find some task that could be done rather simply and quickly, and we’d fix that, so there’d be a success.” That lesson, of using small successes to build experience and to motivate the community to solve more complex problems, is one he applies broadly. In Ethiopia, he worked with the villagers first to develop a water well, then a bridge across a stream to its school and, later, plumbing, electricity and improvements in the local economy.

And he carries a similar approach to problem solving into his campaign for governor. After the Jan. 17 Northridge earthquake, Garamendi quickly--and with considerable political risk, some experts thought--called for temporary increases in the state sales and gasoline taxes to repair the damage. California could not afford to sit back and wait, as Gov. Pete Wilson was inclined, to see just how much of the bill would be paid by the federal government, he said. The money was not as important as the idea of Californians joining together to work toward a common goal, to overcome the Golden State’s decline.

“I’ve been very clear about this business of this tax,” he said before the Legislature opted, instead, to put a bond issue on the June ballot. “It’s a very important test of the spirit, of the capabilities of the community. It’s like building that bridge to the school (in Ethiopia). The community got together. . . .” They did it. And that empowered them to do something else. And so it is here.

“Ethiopia. It changed everything,” Garamendi adds. “It just intensified everything and has remained the pivotal point in our lives.”

GARAMENDI’S POLITICAL OPPONENTS MIGHT CHUCKLE TO LEARN THAT HE lost his first big election when he ran against his best friend for president of the Calaveras High student body. Compared with the stakes of being governor of the nation’s largest state in 1994, it was more of a social honor, says the winner, Erle Winkler of San Andreas, a realtor and owner of a health food store in San Andreas.

There were no hard feelings, Winkler says. “It was a friendly campaign.” In a later election for senior class president, Garamendi emerged as the winner.

It was not the last time that Garamendi kept on running after a loss. In 1982, after just eight years in the Legislature, he was swamped in a premature bid for the Democratic nomination for governor, losing to then-L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley. He lost a shot at state controller four years later. And after he had worked his way into the state Senate’s controlling Democratic hierarchy to become majority leader, he was dumped by his colleagues. They argued that Garamendi spent too much time nurturing his own political ambitions and not enough attending to fund-raising for fellow party members.

An even more serious miscalculation was his abortive effort to replace a fellow Democrat as the top Senate officer, president pro tem, in January of 1986. Garamendi tipped reporters the night before his planned coup, and word got back to Senate chief David A. Roberti, who rallied his own forces. When Garamendi moved the following day to elect himself to the top job, he got nobody’s vote but his own.

Garamendi had risen quickly in the Senate because he was smart, hard-working and productive, veteran Sacramento observers agree. But they also claim that he repeatedly was tripped up by his ambition to jump to higher office too quickly, particularly when he tried to leap over Roberti, who had been something of a mentor to him in the Senate.

“His ambition keeps getting in the way of his pragmatic judgment,” Roberti said after the vote. State Sen. Diane E. Watson, a Democrat from Los Angeles and a Garamendi supporter, says that Garamendi, while a whiz at policy, tends to rush into situations. “He worked, I guess, in a very rapid way and probably was ahead of a lot of people,” she says. “But you know, it doesn’t do you any good unless you’re sure people are following you on these things. I think he’s learning that.”

Garamendi, who has dealt in some fashion with virtually every major state issue over the past two decades, is not shy about taking credit for his policy successes, another quality that irks his colleagues. At a senior center in Crescent City, he volunteers that he wrote the bond act that provided the money to remodel the building. Talking about putting welfare recipients to work, he says, “The reason I’m familiar with that program is that I wrote the law.”

The health-care debate in Washington? “Based on a program I developed here in California,” he says. “Hillary substantially improved it. Bill will do his best not to screw it up, I’m sure.”

Hillary and Bill? Oh yes. John and Patti Garamendi are friends of the First Couple. Garamendi was Clinton’s California campaign chairman in 1992. His health-care plan did, in fact, serve as the basis for development of the Clinton program. Patti Garamendi has been appointed to the No. 3 job in the U.S. Peace Corps in the Clinton Administration.

Garamendi’s foes complain that he’s too good to be true, yet many acknowledge that he does have a broader vision than most. In 1986, just as personal computers were becoming popular, he issued a report emphasizing the importance to California of new technology and information systems. Before it became a common political buzzword, he wrote a report on competitiveness. He argued, as he still does, that California cannot afford to abandon its manufacturing base and become a total service economy.

This immersion in public policy and politics after his return from Ethiopia was something of a natural progression for Garamendi, although it almost didn’t happen. In 1970, after earning his MBA from Harvard, he started working in the international finance department of the Bank of America in San Francisco, but concerns about taking his young family abroad again--by then, the Garamendis had two children--derailed his international business plans. Instead, the family moved to Calaveras County, where John went into real estate development and became involved in local affairs--building a park in Mokelumne Hill and working to protect farmland from development. The Garamendis also helped to organize a Democratic caucus in their new Assembly district, established under reapportionment.

As it was a new seat, there was no one with the built-in advantage of incumbency. With the help of another active young Democrat in the area, Pat Johnston, the Garamendis put together a winning campaign.

“John was a comer, immediately a striking candidate,” recalls Johnston, who followed Garamendi into the Assembly and the Senate. “He brought a dynamism and a sort of optimism--idealism really--that most people don’t convey even when they’re trying to.”

Asked to assess Garamendi’s assets and flaws, he pauses and thinks carefully. “His ambition has never been hidden or disguised,” Johnston says in his state Senate office in Sacramento. “There’s no false humility. And he believes that he’s the best one to do whatever the next political position is that might be available--governor and probably President of the United States. I’ve never heard him talk about it, but that’s how he views himself.”

“I am not one to let the world go by,” says Garamendi. “I take an active role in what I do and sometimes that rubs people the wrong way.”

Garamendi served one two-year term in the Assembly and moved on to the state Senate in 1976, again when there was no incumbent running.

After his Senate career, Garamendi finally won a statewide office in 1990, becoming California’s first insurance commissioner. In the high-profile race for enforcer of the insurance rebates promised in Proposition 103, he pledged to ensure that the promised $2 billion in rebates was returned to voters. Since then, a conglomerate of three insurance companies agreed to pay a $500,000 fine for redlining in San Francisco and Los Angeles, thanks to pressure from Garamendi. And by this year, rebates to 6 million California policyholders totaled $832 million, according to figures provided by Proposition 103 author Harvey Rosenfield. Many of the major companies are still fighting rebates in the courts, along with virtually every other Garamendi initiative to regulate the industry more strictly.

But auto liability rates have been stabilized, averaging $518 a year in 1992, compared with $519 in 1989, Rosenfield says, while rates increased by 20% in the rest of the country during that time. Rosenfield did not support Garamendi’s election in 1990, viewing him as too much of a pro-business moderate and fearing that he would not be tough enough on the insurance industry. But “it didn’t turn out that way at all,” he says. “I think he’s really tried hard to make 103 work and keep rates low.”

Garamendi’s insurance-industry foes generally label him as a publicity-hungry demagogue who rushes prematurely into an action primarily for its headline value. He, in turn, calls them “pigs at the trough” who care more about their profits than their policyholders.

No one disputes the fact, however, that the insurance commissioner’s job was an ideal platform for launching Garamendi’s next run for the brass ring.

ON SEPT. 3, 1990, JOHN GARAMENDI DID SOMETHING ALMOST UNHEARD OF in politics. He resigned his state Senate office two months before he would know if he would win the office he was seeking: state insurance commissioner. This time, Garamendi’s actions seemed to have nothing to do with his own political ambition. But they did have something--perhaps everything--to do with the political ambitions of his wife, Patti.

Garamendi argued that by resigning when he did, the governor could schedule the special election to fill his Senate seat--which had two years to run--to coincide with the general election. That would save the $500,000 cost of a separate special election, he said--and his salary as state senator. But few bought Garamendi’s argument because they knew one of the candidates for Garamendi’s seat would be his wife. Another was Garamendi’s old political sidekick Pat Johnston, who would now be in something of a box. Johnston wanted the Senate job, but it was too late for him to remove his name from the ballot for reelection to his Assembly seat. So he faced voter confusion over which seat he was running for, as he was now forced to seek both. This gave Patti Garamendi a distinct advantage, but Johnston won anyway, with 35% of the vote to Patti’s 26%.

If political critics view John Garamendi as a little glib, a little too effusive, many see Patti Garamendi as even more so. Also tall (about 5-foot-10), blond, blue-eyed and energetic, she has always been an activist, she says. “From the time I was 10 years old, my dad said I was just a born do-gooder. I don’t know if he meant it positively or not, but I couldn’t help myself.”

And in politics, she is irrepressible. Johnston’s victory not only failed to discourage her, it created a fresh opportunity. Johnson’s Senate victory opened up his Assembly seat, setting the stage for a new round of special elections to fill that post. Patti ran for the Assembly and lost in May, 1991, to conservative Republican Dean Andal. Still another opportunity arose in 1992--a new congressional district created by reapportionment. Patti ran for that U.S. House seat, too. She lost again, narrowly, to the Republican mayor of Tracy.

Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters wrote what many California political observers were thinking: “Despite their attractive public personalities, the Garamendis’ political endeavors have always been plagued by their self-contained insularity . . . and a reputation . . . for self-serving machinations.”

The question now is whether Patti’s three tries for office not only cost Garamendi goodwill among political insiders but also campaign donations from those the couple has repeatedly solicited. Patti Garamendi says she has no regrets about losing three times in two years. The losses, after all, yielded a gain in the form of her Peace Corps job. “I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t had the courage to step out there as an individual and offer my skills for service,” she says.

If John Garamendi is elected, Patti says, California would get more than an executive partnership on the order of Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton--it would be electing an entire First Family. Eldest daughter Genet, 25, is a political assistant to a California congressman. John Jr., 23, travels as Garamendi’s aide-de-camp and friend. Daughters Christina, 21, and Autumn, 18, UC Davis students, are leaders in an international environmental organization and helped establish programs within a Bosnia refugee camp last year. Merle, who is 13 and prefers to use her middle name, Elizabeth, and Ashley, 7, live in Washington most of the time with their mother, who says that despite their bicoastal living arrangement, she and John “remain totally connected.”

Johnston, choosing his words carefully, says he believes John and Patti Garamendi constitute “a core consultation unit that is very exclusive. . . . It’s never been particularly important to John what other people thought of him.”

As a new legislator, Garamendi commuted regularly to the Assembly in Sacramento, returning to Calaveras County over a twisting two-lane road to be with his family in the evenings rather than schmooze with other legislators who maintained second homes in the capital. Eventually, the Garamendis moved closer in, to a 1920s farm house near Walnut Grove.

“My dad was always there,” says Genet, never missing a recital, a school play, a graduation or the other important events of childhood. “He would make breakfast for us every morning.” Though even her friends are skeptical, she insists that there is no dark side beneath a happy facade.

A standing joke in California political circles is the annual Garamendi Christmas card, showing the family and, sometimes, a surprise guest, in an idyllic scene from the ranch or on the beach. The 1992 card included Bill Clinton.

There is nothing new about a politician using a family photo on a Christmas card. But the Garamendis come in for ribbing perhaps because there are so many of them, all so handsome, with, sometimes, a schmaltzy message. In the 1992 card, John wrote, “We seize each day and squeeze from it its fullest, thanking God for what has been given. Like the special evening in the photo when our new president joined us for dinner at Walnut Grove.”

The Garamendis know that some make fun of their cards. In fact, Sragow picked up on it in issues of his “Garamendi Gram,” a periodic newsletter to reporters and political insiders. The Dec. 10 Garamendi Gram proclaimed: “They’re on their way! The 1993 Garamendi family Holiday Greetings will soon be available in mailboxes all over California.” And the 1993 version also would include a surprise guest, Sragow said. “See if you can guess who joins the Garamendis this year (pick one): Boris Yeltsin, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Ringo Starr, Elvis Presley, Martin Kurtovich, Pat Brown, Dave Letterman.”

The winner would get to spend one day fund raising for Garamendi. All losers would have to take the winner’s call.

The answer was Kurtovich, Genet’s husband. The only winners were Garamendi staff members, who already were dialing for contributions.

BACK IN MID-1993, THE PREDICTIONS for California’s gubernatorial election went like this: Republican Gov. Pete Wilson was in the tank, Treasurer Kathleen Brown would be anointed with the Democratic nomination in June, and she’d probably roll over Wilson in November. And John Garamendi? Well, if he weren’t so blinded by political ambition, he would settle for a second term or get his friend Bill Clinton to give him a job.

Today, the dynamic of the campaign is far from last summer’s forecast. Wilson has returned from the political dead zone, Garamendi is plodding along to his own campaign script, and people are wondering why Brown’s campaign seems to be stalled.

Wilson, 60, started poll vaulting with a productive 1993 legislative session, by exploiting voter anger over illegal immigration and by hammering away on the issue of violent crime. And his constant visibility during last fall’s brush fires and following the Jan. 17 earthquake gave him more media exposure than at any time since he was elected.

Opinion polls still harbor danger signs for Wilson. But by April, his popularity with voters had rebounded to near-respectable levels. He trailed in mythical matchups with Brown by 10 points and Garamendi by 5 in the latest Los Angeles Times Poll.

The glitter around the candidacy of the 48-year-old Brown began to fade in late 1993. Critics and some supporters began to question how much substance there was behind Brown’s family political tradition, her telegenic stardom and her fund-raising acumen. She countered with a series of policy speeches, but they were criticized as failing to convey any overriding vision.

By this spring, her campaign remained on cautious cruise control, so flat and listless that some political commentators began writing that Brown seemed unable to articulate why she wanted to be governor, or what she would do if elected. She was rarely on the stump and dodged Garamendi’s constant demands to debate. Then in March, Brown hired consultant Clint Reilly to replace her campaign management team.

Garamendi has not exactly taken California by storm, but he is making inroads. He blocked Brown from winning endorsement by the giant California Teachers Assn. and won the support of Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, California’s most prominent Latina politician. But through early April, most of this was insider stuff. The California electorate, increasingly distrustful of politicians and distracted by economic hard times, violent crime and an earthquake, was not yet focusing on the election. Garamendi’s job--as Garamendi, Sragow, and many political experts see it--is to find some way to directly confront Brown and allow voters to see what they believe is his superior grasp of the issues.

That most likely will take a series of televised debates, and people interested enough to watch--but no meetings had been scheduled by early April. Additionally, Garamendi would need to do some crash fund raising to buy TV time. As a last resort, he could dip into the Garamendi coffers. The family, worth several million from real estate deals and other ventures, has given or loaned more than $1 million to their own campaigns in the past.

On issues, Garamendi and Brown are similar in many respects: Each calls for reform of education, making schools safe, being tough on crime, and providing tax incentives to revitalize California industry. They’re further apart on immigration, with Brown calling for using troops to monitor the Mexican border and Garamendi, speaking in more conciliatory tones, emphasizing his immigrant roots and rejecting calls for denying citizenship to U.S.-born babies of non-citizen parents. Garamendi has so far not fully exploited one major difference: his enthusiastic backing of the death penalty, which Brown opposes while insisting that she will enforce the law.

Unlike Brown, he exudes passion about a vision for California, saying that the state has the rare opportunity to meld diverse cultures and their talents into a new renaissance comparable to Europe’s of the last millennium. And he contrasts his experience with her relative lack of it. (“Most every tax incentive stimulation package and program discussed by my opponents,” he says in one speech, “came from work my staff and I did years ago in the state Senate.”)

But the broader theme Garamendi promotes is one of determined leadership that refuses to give up until there is agreement. He cites the three years he spent in the 1970s bringing Nevada into a new interstate compact with California to control runaway development in the Lake Tahoe Basin. Nevada was particularly reluctant because the compact effectively would prevent the construction of more high-rise casinos on the Nevada shore. But until a new compact was signed, there could be no other development on either side of the lake. “We created a situation where it was in their interest to do something,” Garamendi says.

He also takes credit for bringing parties together in support of Proposition 111 in 1990, the gasoline tax increase that revived a stagnant highway and transportation system in California. Again, it took months of meetings, “and I simply wouldn’t let them go until it was done.”

In typical fashion, he tends to gloss over the work of others. But Garamendi supporter David Mixner, a pioneering political leader of the gay community, sees a benefit in the fact that Garamendi is not a team player. Such a stance, he says, can lead to political effectiveness because independence is sometimes “another definition of putting other people’s feet to the fire to get things done. . . . He passionately cares. He will short-circuit others to get things done.”

And he is an acknowledged policy wonk. Says Diane Watson, who succeeded Garamendi as chairman of the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee: “John always had a plan. He was the one who always had the charts and graphs and how we could improve the policy.”

Unlike Brown, Garamendi’s image is not particularly polarized by partisanship. The Times California survey in late March found that among Democrats, 51% like him and 15% do not. The numbers are similar among independents at 55% to 13%. And even among Republicans, he finds more positive ratings--43%--than negative--13%. But, the poll found, many of the Democrats who like him seem to like Brown more.

Sen. Beverly has known Garamendi throughout most of his legislative career and is one colleague who genuinely likes him. But whether he would be a good governor? “That’s hard to say. Watching him in action over the last, what is it, 20 years, he might have his eye on the presidency as he walks in the door, the day he walks into the corner (governor’s) office.”

The ambition thing again. The issue comes up repeatedly with Garamendi, says Democratic Assemblyman Richard Katz of Sylmar, because “John is fairly up front about his ambition, more than other people, and they tend to hold that against him.”

“He’s an anomaly,” Beverly adds after a long pause. “On paper, he’s such a superb candidate, like you called Central Casting and asked for one. You couple that with his charming wife and a beautiful family. Yet with all that, he’s not popular; an attitude, an arrogance comes across, something. That’s puzzling.”

Rather than try to explain himself, Garamendi returns to his strength, says Johnston, “which is working with his hands. John is, if there’s a physical aspect to a task, much more comfortable.” In the physics of Garamendi’s universe, motion seems to be a constant, regenerating force. After dinner, he’ll sit a few minutes, then jump up and continue to talk while washing dishes. What does he do to relax? “Work,” he says. “Go out and prune trees.”

Today, Garamendi campaigns the way he prunes trees or digs postholes--with so much urgency that it seems he’s trying to physically move the entire state of California with those big hands. But can he transmit that intensity to enough Democrats and capture their votes by June 7? Garamendi’s tactic is working better than political experts thought possible six months ago, but time is growing short.

So, Garamendi’s off to more back-road towns that many Californians never heard of to toil at ordinary jobs for a few hours beside ordinary people. Working man to the core, he thrives on it.