The Short, Tragic Reign of Doris Allen

Doris Allen was a historic and tragic Assembly Speaker who suffered many wounds, the severest of them self-inflicted.

She was the first woman Speaker of the California Assembly, but her reign was the shortest of this century. She held the office but not the power because she lacked the ability to lead.

And before memories get muddled into myth, one fact should be underlined: Doris Allen was not done in by the Good Old Boys. She was done in by herself.

When Allen finally stepped down last Thursday--figuratively jumping off a cliff as colleagues cheered--the departing Speaker acidly said she was leaving “Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ ” But Dante’s “Inferno” is where you can expect to go if you’re a Republican and make a deal with the GOP’s devil incarnate, Willie Brown.

That was Allen’s first and fatal mistake. Every other mistake, every torture, stemmed from that blunder.

American democracy operates principally on a two-party political system. Allen, lest we forget, committed the cardinal sin: Party infidelity. She took up with the Republicans’ Satan, Democrat Brown. Her Faustian bargain was that she would help the Democratic minority cling to power--half the committee chairmanships, ample money for staffs--in return for the speakership. Every Democrat voted for her; she was the only Republican who did.

No majority party can allow the minority to run roughshod over it and still remain in the majority for long. Neither can it allow such egregious treason to go unpunished.

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Brown, of course, completely understood this basic rule of political survival. His other motive, besides clinging to power, was Republican instability: keep the enemy fighting among itself, distracted from its legislative goals and the 1996 elections. That was easy. Angry Republicans immediately launched a recall campaign against Allen in Orange County. In the Capitol, GOP peer pressure discouraged colleagues from befriending her.

But she was not in a friendly mood anyway. Her primary motive in running for Speaker was revenge. And that was her second mistake. She seemed obsessed with getting back at Republican colleagues for past mistreatment.

“She kept bad-mouthing, bad-mouthing, bad-mouthing,” recalls Tony Quinn, an Allen political adviser until he quit in frustration near the end.

Allen spewed venom. And some of her main targets were other GOP women, whom she bounced off coveted committee posts.

But although Allen could punish, she could not reward. Republicans would not accept favors on her terms--total loyalty. The lone exception was rookie Assemblyman Brian Setencich of Fresno, a former pro basketball player. He turned his back on the GOP caucus and became Allen’s presiding officer. Now, she and Democrats have installed him as Speaker.

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Setencich says he’ll listen to advice from fellow Republicans. We’ll see. Allen certainly did not.

In mid-August, four GOP colleagues--males--met for five hours with Allen in an effort to help her survive. They advised her to give the GOP caucus the same power she had given Democrats: The right to make the party’s committee assignments. But she insisted on keeping that authority.

Moments after Allen was elected Speaker on June 5, a Republican assemblyman made a truly sexist comment: “The first thing she should do is her hair.” Ironically, she was at a hairdresser when the beginning of the end came on Sept. 7. Allen had called a press conference to disclose her Orange County bailout proposal. But reporters were kept waiting for 40 minutes while--it later was learned--she was having her hair done.

That got the press conference off to a sour start and her performance, Quinn later said, was “a total meltdown” She didn’t know the details of her own bill. As aides stood by, she complained of “sloppy staff work.” News stories were disastrous.

Then came the famous quote four days later: “Do I let a group of power-mongering men with short penises tell me what to do?” Says Quinn: “When a politician becomes the object of national ridicule, it’s all over.”

Advisers tried to talk Allen into stepping down and voting with Republicans to elect their own nominee as Speaker. But Democrats moved quickly and “recaptured her,” Quinn says. They prodded her into leaving and anointing Setencich.

There was little grace in the exit. In a bitter floor speech, Allen told her chief adversary--GOP leader Curt Pringle of Garden Grove--that he was “very untruthful . . . untrustworthy [and] nasty.”

Allen’s recall now is a virtual certainty, Quinn says, “but they’re recalling a political corpse.”

It was a sad political suicide.