Opportunity Knocking at Capitol Door

Gridlock seems guaranteed for Sacramento next year, based on any orthodox view of the election results. One political party controls the Legislature, the other holds the governor’s office. What’s more, the three politicians in charge all are lame ducks.

Divided government and declining power--a recipe for deadlock.

But take another look at this tangled state of affairs and you’ll see opportunity. The political planets may be in rare alignment for solving some of California’s problems.

True, Pete Wilson is on his last wobbly legs as governor. Two more years and he’s out. Odds are he couldn’t get reelected even if there weren’t term limits. He foolishly wasted last year running for president, then continued to be preoccupied with national politics. His job rating has improved, according to The Times Poll, but almost half the voters still have a negative view of him.

It’s also true that the new Legislature, which will convene briefly next Monday to “organize” itself, is laden with legislative ignorance and insecurity stemming from term limits. In the Assembly, 40% of the members weren’t even here for the last session. The Senate has a 25% turnover. Institutional memory has faded. Stability is fleeting.

The designated Assembly speaker has been a legislator for only 3 1/2 years. Yet he has only two years remaining before he’s “termed out.” The Senate leader is a veteran at the peak of his power, but he’s also walking a two-year plank because of term limits.

Therefore, this is the perfect scenario for legislative action.

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First, Democratic leaders must forget about Wilson being a menace. He’ll never again run for governor. He has sworn off entering the 1998 Senate race. And if, in the quiet of the night, he still fantasizes about running for president in three years, that’s his problem. He’s no longer a threat to the Democratic Party.

The governor is still very relevant, however, because he can sign and veto bills.

So, legislators, give him some slack. Let him smooth out his image and reshape the legacy. Some aides say he longs for the mainstream after drifting off to the right. He’d like to focus on education--just about every politician’s No. 1 issue--and return to his “preventive” agenda for at-risk children.

Of course, the road back to the middle contains a bump called welfare reform. There’ll be less federal money for the safety net. The governor and Legislature must choose between such needy people as disabled kids, unemployed moms and feeble grandparents. It may be tempting for Wilson to veer right and Democrats to turn left.

Ditto prisons. Democrats can demagogue about emptying the treasury into human hellholes rather than children’s classrooms, and the governor can continue to ignore the need for cost-cutting reforms. But both sides know the prisons are dangerously overcrowded and could blow. They don’t want to be caught under the fallout. As with welfare and education, there’s ample room for compromise and enough potential kudos for everyone.

Career motivation also could spur cooperation. Speaker-to-be Cruz Bustamante (D-Fresno) and Senate leader Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) are lame ducks, but not political corpses. They’ve still got ambition. Bustamante, 43, could be a bust, or parlay the speakership into political stardom. Lockyer, 55, is thinking about running for attorney general.

Indeed, the entire Legislature under term limits has little time for games playing if it wants to score points with the public. That’s what term-limit sponsors had in mind.

New legislators “don’t have all the ‘experience’ of becoming jaded,” Bustamante told me. “They really are enthusiastic. They really want to do something.”

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The ideological atmosphere also may be right. Like Wilson, the Assembly is eyeing the middle. Gone are the ‘60s liberals and ‘70s “cavemen.” The GOP now knows it looked silly last winter pushing guns and school paddles.

Bustamante is a moderate who speaks for a growing centrist electorate, not just in the San Joaquin Valley but up and down the state. As he recently said: “Voters don’t want extreme politics. They want a little bit less rhetoric, a little bit less flash, a little bit more listening and a little bit more action.”

All this is the good government scenario. There’s also a blatantly political scenario focused not on opportunity, but opportunism:

Democrats plot to sully Wilson even further, emphasizing their differences and exhorting voters that after 16 years of GOP governors, it’s time for a party change. The Democrats have a special incentive: The next governor will sign or veto a bill redistricting the Legislature for a decade.

For now, however, it’s a new legislative session. All the politicians have an opportunity to be statesmen.