A Simple but Savvy Notion From Speaker

New Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante (D-Fresno) is a pretty simple guy, we’re told. Simple talk. Simple clothes. Simple looks. Nothing flashy. The tortoise rather than the hare. A plodder. Not the smartest kid in the class.

Yeah, right!

Simple? Yes. Slow? Hardly.

So far, this plodding tortoise has captured the speakership with lightning speed, outsmarting and outhustling all rivals. He did it playing by the rules, proving his mettle with money. Over a three-year period, Bustamante tapped special interests for $1.2 million in campaign contributions and gave most of it to friendly Democrats in exchange for political IOUs.

He also was helped by the fact that people tend to like this simple guy.

Then, immediately after being sworn in as speaker Monday, Bustamante moved swiftly to recapture all the old patronage powers wielded by Willie Brown over committee assignments and staff funding. Republicans, in their brief reign, had ceremoniously dispersed these powers in a grand show of shattering Brown’s “imperial speakership.” But Bustamante has reclaimed them to--in the lingo of legislators--”exercise leadership.”

Now, the kid with the average smarts has come up with an idea so simple that it smacks of genius. And if he does little else during the next two years except follow through, the new speaker at least will have done something significant for a bunch of very important people: a few thousand no-name, impressionable schoolchildren.

Plus, it seems like one brilliant political move.

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Bustamante unveiled the idea in his low-key swearing-in speech before an Assembly chamber crammed with legislators, families, invitees and reporters. The notion was so simple it barely was noticed.

California’s first Latino speaker--a crop picker as a boy and a college dropout for lack of money--said he’ll visit grade school classrooms up and down the state to encourage kids to hang in there and do their best. If he could make it, so can they, the 43-year-old political leader will tell them.

And he’ll give the kids a button that says, “You Can Too.”

Corny, perhaps. But the teachers and students probably won’t think so. They’ll probably just be impressed that a powerful politician cares enough to drop by a classroom where, very possibly, the roof leaks, the heater’s broken and the desks are a disgrace.

Indeed, before driving to the Capitol on Monday, Bustamante visited a racially mixed fifth-grade class in Sacramento. He wanted the children, he said, “to know that it doesn’t matter where you’re from, or how many vowels are in your name . . . what you look like. Or whether you have money. Or go to the fanciest college. Or what kind of a job your mom or dad has. What matters is that you believe in yourself. That you work hard.”

Bustamante announced to the pols, “As I go from San Diego and Los Angeles to the Central Valley and up north, I plan to go to fifth-grade classes and give them a button and tell them what it means.”

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Turns out, Bustamante has been doing this--without the button--in his San Joaquin Valley district since first being elected in 1993. His brother teaches the fifth grade.

“Fifth-grade kids are smarter than a lot of people think,” the speaker says. “My brother believes this is the point in life where kids are deciding a whole lot of things--whether to go into gangs, whether to study, whether to bow to peer pressure.

“I make fun of myself. I say, ‘Look, I’m losing my hair, I’m overweight. If I can do it. . . .’ They kind of like an adult putting himself down. . . .

“I relate to sports. I ask, ‘What’s the one thing you would never do before going into the big game?’ And I say, ‘That’s not practice. You practice before a test, same as before a game. The goal is to get into the playoffs--college--which will give you the opportunity to succeed.’ I say, ‘You need ganas,’ which means desire.”

The idea for the 2-inch buttons--blue letters on a yellow background--was his political advisor’s, Bustamante says. The consultant, Richie Ross, also encouraged him to go statewide with the classroom visits.

Ross says he told Bustamante, “What do you know about Jesse Unruh’s speakership? You know he made it a full-time Legislature. Willie Brown? He was speaker longer than anyone. You get one sentence. You can pick what you’ll be remembered for. It would be neat if you’d be the guy who went around to classrooms.”

Also, it could be smart politically at a time when education and children have become hot issues.

“Cruz really believes in ‘You Can Too,’ ” Ross says. “He knows people will say it’s simplistic, that it sounds like Nancy Reagan. But at the end of the day, it is real.”

Simple doesn’t necessarily mean simplistic. And, in politics, anything real generally should be encouraged.