Maverick Wright Defends Welfare Stand

On the day after she voted for the Democrats’ welfare reform package in committee and hours after some GOP cohorts criticized her for doing so, state Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) was on the phone in her Capitol office arranging child care for her baby granddaughter.

The ongoing struggle to find someone to watch 10-month-old Marissa, whose mom works odd hours at a supermarket, is an important factor in Wright’s decision to back a welfare plan that has been trashed by every other Republican lawmaker in town.

“There’s an enormous dissatisfaction” with her “inexplicable” vote, said Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Northridge), who represents some of the same West Valley and Ventura County territory. Her backing of the Democrats’ plan undermines the GOP’s efforts for a tougher proposal, McClintock said.

But in deciding how to reform welfare, the platinum-blond grandmother said she focused on how policy changes would play out in the everyday lives of real people, some of whom must secure child care or conquer drug problems before they can get a job.

“I’d rather provide child care than a welfare check,” Wright said, “except when child care isn’t there. . . . From my own experience, I know there is a crisis in infant child care.”

Wright’s most serious breach with her fellow Republicans is over their insistence that welfare mothers get a job when their baby is 3 months old, something she views as unrealistic.

In breaking with her party and defending her support of the plan on the Senate floor last Monday, the iconoclastic Wright has been thrust into the center of a divisive and emotional debate.

She is prepared for the heat.

As the Senate Republicans’ chief negotiator on welfare reform, Wright, 68, spent six months immersing herself in its intricacies. She knows it cold.

That level of devotion to detail, along with a willingness to put policy before politics, has earned Wright praise from unlikely quarters.

“She’s come a long way, baby,” liberal Democratic Assemblywoman Diane Martinez (D-Monterey Park) said of Wright. “She’s found her heart.”

Many who know Wright said the strength and empathy stem from her own struggles as a working woman with a bedridden husband and a daughter to raise.

“She basically was a single parent taking care of a dying husband and raising a daughter,” said Randy Feltman, who is in charge of welfare reform for Ventura County and has worked with Wright on social-service issues since 1985. “That’s created some sensitivity.”

It has not, however put a dent in Wright’s tough veneer nor blunted her trademark sharp tongue, which she puts to good use describing the exasperating rhetoric that passes for discourse on the welfare issue.

“My guys [Republicans] think everyone on welfare is lazy,” says Wright, rolling her eyes in disbelief. “Our liberal friends” want nothing to change. And the governor’s proposal, Wright said, is not a reform plan, but a political statement.

“We just complain about welfare and paint everybody with the same broad brush,” Wright said. “I want to solve it.”

In the same week she toiled on the welfare plan, Wright tried to solve the CSUN athletic funding shortfall by identifying and securing funding for the four varsity teams the school said it was cutting.

When CSUN President Blenda Wilson acted surprised at the reprieve and questioned the dollar amount of the bailout, Wright retorted swiftly by releasing a letter showing that Blenda Wilson was in the loop and another report showing that the bailout amount came straight from CSUN.

“She better not pick a fight with me,” Wright said.

But Wright has picked a few fights herself.

As a member of the powerful Joint Budget Conference Committee, Wright frequently wags her finger at Assemblyman Gary Miller (R-Diamond Bar), browbeating him about what she sees as the discrepancy between the GOP’s talk about family values and his vote on issues that affect families.

“If she says I’m against family values, it’s a very loud sound from a hollow gourd,” Miller said.

Miller added that he is espousing the GOP Assembly caucus views, while Wright is voting the Democrat agenda. He has grown weary of Wright’s lectures at his expense.

“Cathie feels she has the right to be on the soapbox and lecture people,” Miller said. “If I want a mother, I’ll go home.”

But Wright says she operates within the same general guidelines as other Senate Republicans--with one added principle: “I still feel we have to care for those less fortunate and who can’t help themselves.”

A few Senate Republicans are openly appreciative of Wright’s influence on the plan and her decision to support it after Democrats yielded to many of her demands.

“She moved the Democrats significantly closer to the Republican position,” said Sen. Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga). “They listened to her.”

Like Brulte, Sen. Ken Maddy (R-Fresno), a close ally of Wright’s, said he understood her vote for a welfare reform plan that she mostly favors but added that some Republicans wonder if Democrats didn’t influence Wright more than she influenced them.

These days, it’s easier to find a Democrat to praise Wright than a Republican.

Sen. Mike Thompson of St. Helena, the Democratic co-chairman of both the welfare reform and budget conference committees, is a Wright fan.

“She’s one of the hardest-working, most policy-oriented colleagues I have,” Thompson said. He called her vote for the welfare plan “tremendously important” in that it reflected an understanding of the issues that came from months of hard work.

Because term limits force her out of office in 2000, Wright doesn’t have to worry about running again in her conservative northwest San Fernando Valley and Simi Valley district.

But should term limits be thrown out and she were to face voters, Wright said she could explain herself. Her constituents are, after all, used to her independent ways.

Wright survived in office despite being branded as a Willie Brown pet when she asked Brown (then speaker of the Assembly) to intercede in getting a lenient sentence for her daughter in traffic court.

Always somewhat of a maverick in her caucus, Wright was viewed as closer to Brown than to her own leadership, a pattern GOP critics see her repeating with Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward).

Ties with the Democratic leadership have garnered good committee assignments for Wright, who talks matter-of-factly of her own party’s lack of support for women candidates in primaries in which a man is also running.

Wright experienced it firsthand when she ran for lieutenant governor on the ticket with Gov. Pete Wilson.

Although the Wilson camp needed her for gender balance, Wright said she was patronized by the Wilson campaign staff and not given sufficient financial backing to win the race.

Although Wright has been in office, first in the Assembly, since 1982, the defeat in the statewide race was not her first loss.

She laughingly recalls running for the Simi Valley City Council four times before winning a seat in 1980.

A native of Old Forge, Pa., Wright likes to say she ran away from her family home at age 32 and moved to California. Until then, after attending two years of junior college, she had lived at home and turned her paycheck over to her mother. Any money for higher education was earmarked for her brother.

Wright said her mother didn’t believe in women voting or married women working.

Her husband, whom she met at a piano bar, agreed that married women shouldn’t work, so Wright became a housewife and mother of a daughter, Victoria.

But the family had barely moved from the Los Angeles area to Simi Valley before financial and health problems struck.

Wright, who studied accounting, became the family breadwinner after her husband became incapacitated with heart and lung problems. She took a series of jobs ranging from producing and reading the news on a cable station to selling insurance and managing an ice-skating rink.

Wright is still sensitive about her relative lack of higher education.

“If anybody tried to tell you I’m a dumb blond, I was valedictorian of my class,” she said.

In 12 years of schooling, Wright missed only five days, and her attendance at Mass is equally impressive. Wright says she’s missed just two Sundays in 33 years.

Although Wright has an aloof air about her and preens a bit as she strolls about the Senate chamber, she does her own cleaning, cooking and shopping and displays a sense of humor at hearings. (“Do the Wright thing” is a favorite maxim.)

Her annual Italian dinners for 40 are well-known in Sacramento. Homemade ravioli, cannelloni and as many as 10 flavors of pie are frequent menu items.

Wright also likes to sing and does so--and well, fans say--at all her fund-raisers. Her repertoire includes: “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Stranger in Paradise” and “I Believe.”

Some of Wright’s blunt style can be interpreted as a coping mechanism for someone who came to Sacramento at a time when there were few women legislators and a pervasive old boys club atmosphere.

“Watching her, I understood why she sometimes comes on so strong and in your face,” said Jane McAndrew Rozanski, a Camarillo health care administrator. “That’s the mind-set up there.”

As the lone woman Republican in the state Senate, Wright knocks on the door before entering the all-male sanctum of the caucus room, a place she is as entitled to be as anyone else.

After knocking, Maddy said, Wright warns them aloud that if they are talking about her or any locker-room stuff, it’s time to stop.

Despite her open assertion that women get less support in the political arena, don’t expect Wright to buy into feminism or allow herself to be described as a women’s rights advocate.

“Not really,” she said, cringing at the thought.

Wright says she believes a woman can do and be anything she wants. “But don’t be shocked if you lose. . . .” she said. “Just pick up your body and go on to the next battle.”