What Will Be Next for Willie Brown?

For 30 years, Willie Brown had one focus, one ambition, one obsession: Speakership of the California Assembly. He spent the first 16 years trying to attain it and the next 14 fighting to keep it.

Now in his 31st year as a member of the house “I absolutely love . . . the house that gave Willie Brown his opportunity,” the Assembly dean is being pushed out by term limits. He’ll have to leave after next year and he’s not sure where to go.

Long-range planning never has been Brown’s forte. Spontaneity is his skill. Nobody in the Capitol is quicker on his feet. He keeps people guessing at his next move, usually because he hasn’t determined it himself. Recently--only half-jokingly--he summed up his style to reporters: “Consistency is the conduct of small-minded people.”

(Brown was paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson from his essay on “Self Reliance”: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers.” Emerson obviously never got pounded by a political opponent for “flip-flopping.”)

Bearing in mind that Brown’s thinking is in perpetual flux, I asked him this week how he saw his future. The 61-year-old Democrat replied:

* He has “a desire to run” for mayor of San Francisco this fall, but “I really don’t know. My gut doesn’t tell me yet. . . . Whether I act ultimately on that desire will frankly be determined by whether my instincts tell me I can do the job and, No. 2, I can win.”

* He has taken a hard look at running for the state Senate and doesn’t like the view. “The Senate is not as attractive as I initially thought. . . . There are enough people waiting to get even with Willie Brown for whatever reasons (that) I wouldn’t have the influence.”

* If he doesn’t run for mayor, he’ll “probably put together some kind of nonprofit foundation, a public policy institute where I could continue to have some influence. . . . And that may be more attractive than anything else.”

* Whatever lies ahead, he should step down as Speaker when the Legislature recesses in mid-September. “Oh, sure. Absolutely. . . . I need to turn the Speakership over to the next generation.”

*

It’s conceivable Republicans could oust Brown sooner if Assemblyman Paul Horcher (I-Diamond Bar) is recalled, as expected, on May 16. Horcher renounced the GOP last December and cast the votes that allowed Brown to stay in power.

But having been humiliated once, Republicans seem to have lost their fire to fight Brown. And the betting is that when he does step down, it will be voluntarily.

Although the Speaker’s power has been substantially weakened in an evenly divided house, Brown still is the Legislature’s most influential member, often by default. The decision to stick with his political and cultural roots and adamantly oppose the anti-affirmative action movement, for example, has quashed all compromise efforts in both houses.

The wide suspicion is that Brown began speaking out on affirmative action--charging that most of its critics are “coming from a racist position”--because he theorized this would help him in the mayor’s race. Politically, San Francisco is 180 degrees from the rest of California. While the state was approving Proposition 187 by an 18-point margin, San Francisco was rejecting it by 42 points.

“Not even close,” Brown insisted. “It’s not an issue in San Francisco. Everybody is where I am. That’s the last thing that would be of any great value to me.”

What would be? “Proving that I understand city problems and have the skills to pull together the disparate groups. I’m going to have a very difficult time trying to prove that my state-acquired skills can be appropriately employed at the city level. I am really an outsider.”

In most places across America today it helps to be a political outsider. In San Francisco’s neighborhood-oriented politics, Brown said, it “hurts.”

*

But Brown, according to a recent San Francisco Chronicle poll, “now is the odds-on favorite” to unseat moderate Mayor Frank Jordan. The Speaker, who would be the city’s first black mayor, has a 9-point lead in a hypothetical December runoff.

“It would be a fun job because San Francisco is a world-class city,” he noted. “It has a presence.”

San Francisco may be ready for a mayor with pizazz. What Brown isn’t certain of is whether the city is ready for the “restructuring” needed to straighten a bad fiscal mess. “San Francisco’s appetite for services exceeds anybody’s. It needs to deal with the reality of downsizing.”

That part would not be popular or fun. But it might be more fun than the Senate where, Brown said, “I’d be going back to real basics. I’d be considered an upstart.”