NEWS ANALYSIS : Many Echo State Political Expert’s Gloomy Outlook

In a perverse way, it was fitting that on political science professor Larry Berg’s last day of work at USC, the state of California seemed to be running aground.

The state Assembly, as usual, was deadlocked in acrimonious combat. Gov. Pete Wilson was off to New England and Iowa, campaigning for President of the United States after promising voters that he would not. California was again entering a new fiscal year without a state budget. Orange County was bankrupt. Los Angeles County was not far behind.

So, Prof. Berg, is this a good time to retire, after 26 years as the founding director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California? After nearly three decades of teaching how government could serve people better?

“You damn right it is!” Berg retorted.

Like many of his contemporaries--conservatives and liberals--Berg went into government and politics in the 1960s fired by the ideal of crafting public policy that would fix some of society’s ills.

But as he emptied out his desk at the end of June, Berg lamented a California system of state and local government--once honored as a model for the nation--that appears broken.

“It’s a very depressing thing,” Berg said. “You spend all your life concerned with the functioning of government, and we have one that doesn’t function. . . . I just can’t find anyone who is optimistic that we can solve these problems.” It is a belief echoed by many of Berg’s colleagues.

Mervin Field, the founder of the Field Poll and an observer of California government and politics for half a century, was more blunt: “The state is in real peril.” Indeed, experts both within and outside government believe the gridlock that has increasingly gripped Sacramento in recent years is likely to get worse before it gets better.

One of the rare rays of optimism in Sacramento these days emanates from the California Constitution Revision Commission, which is drafting a report for the Legislature recommending potential governmental reforms.

The proposals range from minor tinkering to the very bold. All are designed to make government more functional, to give the various levels of government clear responsibility for their roles, and to make elected officials more accountable to the people.

Perhaps the most far-reaching idea under consideration is to junk California’s two-house Legislature and create a single, 120-member unicameral body.

But almost any significant reform means amending the state Constitution. That requires a two-thirds vote in each house of the Legislature and then ratification by a majority of voters casting ballots in the next general election.

Commission Chairman William Hauck knows that will not be easy. Virtually any alteration in the structure of state and local government involves triggering shifts in political and economic power and the demise of someone’s sacred cow. If nothing else, Hauck said, “I want to get these issues on the table.”

But politics and government represent more than institutions drafted on paper. Much of the conflict and acrimony that pervades the state Capitol today, the experts say, mirrors changes--demographically, economically, politically, socially and culturally--in California in recent years.

Assemblyman Richard Katz of Sylmar, part of the Democratic leadership team in the lower house, said the struggle being acted out on the Assembly floor each day reflects “all the turmoil in the state: ethnic tension, economic tension, cultural differences.”

But while California’s population continues to change, the experts noted, the electorate has not. Though the state has become more ethnically diverse, those who vote are increasingly middle-aged and elderly white people. And they are more affluent and less inclined to spend money on government services.

They rejected, for example, a proposed state bond issue last year to finance reconstruction of freeways and other public facilities damaged or destroyed in the Northridge earthquake, as well as a host of other proposed bonds.

This voting trend has given fresh vigor to a growing conservative movement. It hit a high point in 1994 with the reelection of Republican Wilson and a GOP majority in the Assembly, and a virtual standoff in the state Senate.

Two actions led directly to the GOP gains last year and the increasing political polarization of the Legislature this year.

One was the California Supreme Court’s redistricting in 1991, at the behest of Wilson, that ended years of legislative districts drawn by Democrats to perpetuate their dominance of the Legislature.

The other was Proposition 140, the initiative approved in 1990, that imposed term limits on legislators. Term limits will be in full effect next year, when veteran lawmakers who have written the legislative agenda in Sacramento for years are forced into retirement or into running for other offices.

The combined effect has been to set up intensely competitive elections and fierce ideological battles. As a result, the Legislature has become increasingly polarized between liberal Democrats seeking to defend traditional programs and conservative Republicans bent on paring back government.

Added to this political caldron have been a host of other factors: the long recession and a reordering of the state’s economy, greater demands on a government suffering declining resources, the huge impact of initiatives, legislators in Sacramento convicted of corruption, the soaring cost of campaigns and the influence of special interests, a public outcry about violent crime and anger over illegal immigrants and affirmative action.

Atop all that have come a succession of natural disasters that sapped public energy and dollars.

Absent reform, the experts said, the outlook for the Legislature is probably more deadlock, with compromise illusive.

Ken Maddy of Fresno, the veteran moderate Republican leader in the Senate, said, “In this atmosphere today, we can’t do anything. There’s no desire to.”

Says Berg, “When you have an unwillingness to work together, to reach some consensus, you get nothing, which is what we have now.”

Berg and others said both consensus and leadership are vital elements of functioning government. Right now, California lacks both, they say.

“If you can’t have bipartisanship, you can’t govern,” Berg said.

An example is the current and past budget quagmires. Because the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of each house to pass a budget, a small minority of members can block the budget. Reformers want budgets to pass by a simple majority, as in most states.

As for leadership, Katz said the state needs someone “who could forge consensus and force people to put personal considerations aside to do things for the better good.” As examples, he cited Democratic Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown and Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan, who served from 1959 to 1975.

Wilson may have had that sort of clout this year, coming out of his dramatic reelection after being considered an almost certain loser to Democrat Kathleen Brown a year before.

But Wilson, his eye now on the Republican presidential nomination, has refused to intervene in the fratricidal Assembly Republican battle over party leadership and has been traveling out of state a third of the time this year.

Republicans won a majority of 41 seats in the Assembly last November for the first time since 1970, but failed to capitalize on their victory to cement control of the lower house. Critics attributed the fiasco to inexperience and ineptness of leadership.

Maddy, a longtime Wilson ally, said it is easy to second-guess the governor, but added, “I think the responsibility to a large degree falls on him because he is the leader of the party. If we’re in disarray and things aren’t going well, if you want to blame one person--I mean we can all take some blame--he’s the top of the party so he probably takes most of the blame.”

The bitter infighting over leadership positions has been particularly frustrating to the first big term-limit class in the Assembly, most of them Republicans.

“I came up here to move bills, to focus on public policy and the real problems of this state,” said Republican Assemblyman Brett Granlund of Yucaipa, a former businessman. “Instead it’s all about recalls and internal power struggles.”

“I’m disgusted and I don’t have the answer,” Granlund lamented.

Not everyone, however, sees doom and gloom in the current turmoil. “I think it’s an exciting time to be here,” said a veteran Sacramento lobbyist who asked for anonymity. “We’re going to have change, lots of it. We’re so used to the old paradigm that most people don’t have any clue about what’s going to come out the other side--a systemic mutation or the Andromeda strain, some cataclysmic change.”

Whatever emerges, the period of transition provides California with an opportunity to change in fresh and innovative ways, the lobbyist said.

At its core, California government is trying to operate a state of nearly 33 million people, with the world’s eighth-largest economy, under a Constitution that is fundamentally the same as when it was adopted in 1879, when California was little more than an outlying agricultural province.

The state Constitution underwent modest revision in the 1960s. But the dominant factor in state government the past three decades has been a series of ballot initiative measures mounted by citizen groups and special interests frustrated by legislative inaction.

Beginning in 1978 with Proposition 13, which institutionalized a tax revolt that had been brewing for a decade, initiatives have locked into law a series of mandates that have severely limited government’s ability to respond to the demands of constituents or to keep up with change. It is a trend that shows no sign of abating, and 1996 is already shaping up as a banner year for initiatives.

As the end of summer approaches, attention will begin to focus on recommendations coming from the Constitution Revision Commission, and their prospects in the Legislature.

Two University of California experts said it will be a delicate balancing act for opposing political factions.

Bruce E. Cain and Nathanial Persily of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Politics told the commission that the political choice is this: “If I prefer government to be as inactive as possible, then I should prefer a form of government to which legislation is as difficult as possible to produce.” In other words, the status quo.

Or, they said, “If I prefer a proactive government, then I want to make the legislative process as easy as possible.” That takes reform.

Up to now, minority Republicans have tried to clog the system to thwart Democratic programs. Now that Republicans believe they are on the threshold of true power in Sacramento, they might want a reformed system to keep Democrats from doing the same to them.

Cain and Persily said the more productive way of balancing the options is to ask whether the public is served by a system that resists change.

“In the end, democratic government is rule by majority,” they said. “If the majority is stifled, the policy agenda will flow to the initiative process instead.” The ultimate irony would be for the Legislature to reject reform and then have voters impose it via initiative.

That, they said, could render the Legislature irrelevant.