Willie Brown’s Ignoble Legacy : Politics: The departing Speaker was a major contributor to the rise of voter disgust and the decline of his party.

With the cheers still echoing for Willie Brown’s latest feat of political legerdemain, I would like to register one small dissent from the chorus of journalistic huzzahs.

Brown’s thwarting of hard-right Republican hopes by installing his own hand-picked Republican in the Assembly Speaker’s chair made for undeniably great theater and may even prevent the onset of various ills. Nevertheless, now that his record-setting speakership has come to its end, and as he embarks on what will be a tougher-than-expected campaign for the San Francisco mayoralty, it’s important to point out that his personal reign not only coincided with the decline of the Democratic Party and the rise of public disgust with the political system in this state, but contributed greatly to it.

Brown’s approach to governance is firmly rooted in the Lyndon Johnson model of the 1950s and ‘60s: Big Government is to drive Big Development, and vice versa. Like L.B.J., Brown believes that leadership consists of working through the interest of the players--organized, well-heeled and well-informed interest groups and individuals. Outsiders to “the process,” as he calls it, need not meddle.

Times changed and new challenges emerged, but Brown’s insular method and ideology remained the same. While impressive in its maintenance, his 15-year reign as Speaker poisoned the well of public faith in political institutions and ignored the new California.

Brown came to epitomize for anxious white middle-income voters an arrogant political caste. That caste became the target of their rage against entrenched elites. Brown is not unpopular because his is African American, as he persistently argues. He is unpopular because a great many people who are not racists think he is arrogant and corrupt.

The “Ayatollah of California politics,” as he referred to himself, turned the State Capitol into a casino for the auctioning of access and brokering of interest. Special interest fund-raising became paramount and policy committees were cherished for their monetary potential as, in Capitol parlance, “juice” committees.

Brown’s scorn for the appearance of impropriety, implicit in his extremely lucrative law practice, extended even to its actuality. Brown vehemently defended Mark Nathanson, his key pro-development appointee on the Coastal Commission who turned his office into a racketeering enterprise, beyond the bitter end.

As Brown’s method enshrined a system of moneyed access, his ideological bent and desire for continued control led him to ignore emerging constituencies and growing demand for a radically reconfigured government.

A mobilization of emerging ethnic constituencies would have benefited Democrats statewide in races for the presidency, the governorship and the U.S. Senate, but that would have threatened Brown’s hold on Assembly districts loyal to him. He also disdained emerging entrepreneurial and technological clusters in the new economy. The trial lawyers were consistently his biggest contributors, which contributed mightily to the failure to reform workers’ compensation. This drove many otherwise apolitical entrepreneurs firmly into Republican ranks.

Brown made Big Government itself, in the form of its organized employees, an essential part of the Democratic coalition. This enshrining of the interests of public employee and teachers’ unions as sacrosanct under the Capitol dome blocked serious reform on the Democratic side. The intimidatingly tight linkage of the Willie Brown speakership and these combined to hold gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Brown back from dramatic proposals to reform education and reinvent government--areas in which Pete Wilson was terribly vulnerable.

As Brown writes the next chapter of his storied career, one wonders what might have been if only he had turned his great talent to the reinvention of California politics, rather than leading the system to its nadir.