On Welfare, Sen. Wright Looks Beyond the GOP

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, 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 Sacramento.

“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. Backing 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 jobs when their babies are 3 months old, something she sees as unrealistic.

In breaking with her party and defending her vote for the plan on the Senate floor Monday, the iconoclastic Wright has been suddenly 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 won Wright praise from unlikely sources.

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

Many who know Wright said the strength and empathy come 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 or softened her trademark sharp tongue, which she uses to describe the exasperating rhetoric that passes for discourse on the welfare issue.

“My guys [Republicans] think everyone on welfare is lazy,” said 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.

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

When Cal State Northridge President Blenda Wilson acted surprised at the reprieve effort and questioned the dollar amount, Wright released a letter showing that Wilson was in the loop and a report showing the amount came straight from the university.

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

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) as she brow-beats 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 said he is espousing the GOP Assembly caucus views, while Wright is voting the Democrats’ agenda. He grows weary of Wright’s lectures.

“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 said she operates under 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.”

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

The Democratic co-chairman of both the Welfare Reform and Budget Conference committees, Sen. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena) is a Wright fan.

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

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

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But even if term limits are thrown out and she were to face voters, Wright said, she could explain herself. They are, after all, used to her maverick ways.

Wright survived in office despite being branded a Willie Brown pet when she asked the former Assembly speaker 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 some see her repeating with Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward).

A native of Old Forge, Pa., Wright likes to say she ran away from her family home at the age of 32 and moved to California. Until then, after attending two years of junior college, she lived at home and turned her paycheck over to her mother.

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 quit her job and became a homemaker and mother of daughter Victoria.

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

Wright 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.

Although Wright has an aloof air 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.)

Some of Wright’s style can be interpreted as a coping mechanism for someone who came to Sacramento in the years when there were few female legislators and an Old Boys Club atmosphere was pervasive.

“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.”

Wright said 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.’