The Most Invisible Job in Sacramento

One former holder of the job described his duties this way: Wake up, get the paper, check to see if the governor is dead. If he’s not, go back to bed.

That was intended as a joke, of course, but like the best humor, it’s painfully near the truth. As long as the governor lives, this state’s official second-in-command--the lieutenant governor--must grope for minuscule morsels of power. And because for 20 years California voters have selected the two from opposite parties, the lieutenant cannot even count on respect.

Behind his back, the governor’s people snicker: It’s Governor Lite.

Not only don’t they revere him, they don’t even trust him. That’s because of Article 5, Section 10, an antiquated wrinkle in California’s Constitution that requires a traveling governor to relinquish his power to the lieutenant whenever he crosses state lines. In the past, every governor’s aide knows, when the cat was away, the mouse did play: News conferences were sprung, doomed bills were resurrected, and in one case a politically unpopular judge was appointed.

Any lasting legacy is highly unlikely. While most Californians recall some contributions of former Gov. Ronald Reagan, only the most dedicated political observers can rattle off a single accomplishment of the three lieutenants who during his reign served a heartbeat away from the hot seat--Robert Finch, Ed Reinecke and John Harmer.

The resulting insecurity complex oozes from the pages of the National Conference of Lieutenant Governors’ newsletter. Should an emergency cause a lieutenant to take over, the publication advises: “Trust your instincts and have confidence that you can do the job. . . . There is no reason you can’t be an excellent governor.”

Even as governors-in-waiting they make a sorry lot: In the nearly 150 years since California became a state, only nine of 45 lieutenant governors have ascended to the top post, usually when death or higher office beckoned the governor. Only two were elected from the lieutenant post, as Democratic Lt. Gov. Gray Davis is attempting this year, without first inheriting the office.

Nor is the job a sturdy launch pad for national office. Since 1900, only five former California lieutenants have reached the U.S. Congress.

So who would fight to gain such a post?

This year, the answer is 13 people, not to mention several others who bowed out for reasons other than the job description. Influenced by factors as diverse as term limits and dreams of higher office, each hopes to render it a more significant post.

Some of those running are well-known in political circles--on the Democratic side, former Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante of Fresno and past acting Secretary of State Tony Miller; on the Republican side, two state senators--Tim Leslie of Carnelian Bay and Richard Mountjoy of Arcadia. Some have found success in other arenas, such as Noel Irwin Hentschel, a wealthy Republican travel company owner.

Into the job’s vacuum, each candidate vows to inject his or her own interests, often veering into areas over which the lieutenant governor has no official sway.

“I have the potential that perhaps few people have to make that job something really important,” said Bustamante, outlining plans that include increasing the state’s economic forays into Mexico.

Miller would continue his fight for campaign spending limits. Leslie would “fight to stop illegal immigration.” Irwin Hentschel would help lead California’s “economic revolution into the next century.”

As she travels across the state promoting her platform, however, Irwin Hentschel is constantly frustrated by the public’s befuddlement about the job. What does the lieutenant governor do, people ask.

“I want to change that,” she said. “I want it to be a position that is very proactive, where you could be a trouble-shooter so the governor could keep focused on the bigger picture.”

Trend Toward Joint Tickets

California’s lieutenant governor setup is hardly unique. Of 42 states with an elected lieutenant, 18 have separate tickets for the two top offices. What is unusual is the opposing parties--now only six other states have such a split. Any marriage can fail, but in those half-dozen cases the relationship begins with irreconcilable differences.

The trend has inched steadily toward the joint ticket, a la president and vice president, with the states preferring that method growing from one (New York) in 1953 to 24 today.

Lieutenant governors in joint-ticket states sometimes find themselves wholly empowered--as in Illinois, where the governor handed his lieutenant the Commerce Department to run--but others become the governor’s puppet. In California, for at least the third time this decade, proposals are afloat to make the switch here.

But polls consistently suggest that voters want the option to choose, perhaps a reflection of the same populist suspicion that led to the separation in the first place. In 1994, 29% of the voters who elected Republican Gov. Pete Wilson cast their ballots for Democrat Davis, according to Davis’ pollsters.

“In the original 13 states, there was [great] distrust of centralized power,” said Taegan Goddard, a former Connecticut state official who recently co-authored the book, “You Won--Now What?” “The lieutenant governor was to serve as a check on the governor, so they would run independently.”

How much of a check can California’s lieutenant provide when he holds no position in the governor’s Cabinet? A few years back, Davis even narrowly escaped the ultimate humiliation of being evicted from the Capitol altogether when Wilson decided to commandeer his office space. (Wilson later backed down.)

Other statewide elected officials rule such important areas that the governor is compelled to communicate with them whether he likes it or not--the superintendent of public instruction, who oversees policy for the state’s schools, for instance, and the attorney general, who pilots the justice wing.

But Wilson can, and pretty much does, ignore Davis. The two have no regular meetings and see each other face to face only occasionally, at public gatherings.

“Can you imagine Pete Wilson inviting Gray Davis into the Cabinet? Can you imagine [Davis] saying something nice about Wilson’s policies?” asked Assemblyman Brooks Firestone (R-Los Olivos), who dropped out of this year’s lieutenant governor’s race and is peddling one of the joint-ticket proposals.

“There’s a real place for a No. 2, but if it’s in competition, it’s counterproductive,” Firestone said.

Responsibilities Vary Widely

Lieutenant governors’ responsibilities vary widely from state to state.

California ranks below midpoint on a power gauge, beginning at zero for the eight states that do not bother with lieutenants and topping out with Texas, whose lieutenant governor runs the state Senate and carries at least as much clout as the governor.

Sometimes the duties are prescribed by mandate; sometimes they evolve through agreement with the governor or Legislature.

Running for the Florida lieutenant governorship earlier this decade, Buddy MacKay joked that in 15 years he’d be “the answer to a really hard trivia question.” But in fact Gov. Lawton Chiles assigned so many tasks to MacKay that the St. Petersburg Times declared him a co-governor.

Candidates for the California seat will remind you that for his $124,000-a-year salary--double the national average--this state’s lieutenant can break a tie in the state Senate. However, a 1996 Harvard University study indicated that Davis reported spending no time presiding over the legislative body, while most of his colleagues in other states with similar responsibilities said they ran the Senate at least 90% of the time.

California’s lieutenant governor also serves on a variety of boards and commissions. He heads the obscure state lands commission, which monitors land holdings and waterways, and chairs the state’s Commission for Economic Development, which forms strategies for attracting new businesses to the state.

Still, even on the powerful University of California Board of Regents, the lieutenant is but one of 26 votes and, after four terms of Republican governors, Davis finds himself among a handful of Democrats. He rose to speak passionately against ending affirmative action admission policies last year, but was steamrollered by the board’s broad support for the change.

In other words, the separate-ticket approach may afford the lieutenant more freedom to speak his mind, but what good is that if no one is listening?

That’s why former Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy, a Democrat who served under Republicans Wilson and George Deukmejian and later entered private business after losing a U.S. Senate bid, quipped that he would check the newspaper in the morning and go back to bed. It’s why Republican Mike Curb, who returned to the music production business after leaving office, once said he was embarrassed to have drawn a salary while toiling under Democrat Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr.

That is not to say that California’s lieutenant governor sits idle. Like his predecessors, Davis is busy, busy, busy--jetting here and there, meeting hither and yon, too busy to even respond to repeated requests for an interview for this article. But during an entire week in March, his staff reported that there was not a single hour when he had to leave the gubernatorial campaign trail to play lieutenant governor--and that was a week when he was acting governor because Wilson was in New York.

“I have a little news for you: I am the governor today!” a jubilant Davis told a standing-ovation audience of labor leaders gathered for a conference in Sacramento.

But as Davis began the boasting that characterizes stump speeches, most of his examples predated his four years as lieutenant governor. He spoke of his military service in Vietnam, then of his time as chief of staff to Gov. Brown in the late 1970s. “Those were the good years,” he said.

When he referred to his lieutenant-governor stint, it was largely to criticize Wilson as “insensitive at best, hostile at worst, to the working people.”

Perhaps a thorn in the governor’s side--or a sidekick--is the most California’s lieutenant can hope to be, a prospect that sets Indiana Lt. Gov. Joe Kernan to shuddering.

Kernan was handpicked as a running mate by his friend and fellow Democrat, Gov. Frank O’Bannion, after O’Bannion aced the 1996 primary. Since their election, the two Democrats have met weekly for lunch and they talk daily. Kernan often steps in for the governor at ceremonial events, runs the state Senate meetings, and directs both Commerce and Agriculture departments.

“It’s always a surprise to me that there are some states where you can have a governor and lieutenant governor of different parties,” Kernan said.

When you have a strong relationship going into the jobs, he said, “You don’t have to worry about having somebody that’s going to try to embarrass you, and that means you just have one more pair of hands to do the public’s business.”

In California, often those hands are arm-wrestling. Though Davis has largely kept a low profile, his news releases tend to skewer Wilson. The governor’s spokesman, Sean Walsh, acknowledged that the situation keeps the Wilson administration looking over its shoulder.

Voters Would Have to Approve Changes

Davis’ big chance to use the bully pulpit came when Wilson began campaigning for president in 1995, spending a third of his days out of state. Davis held a news conference lambasting the governor for holding up the budget, saying, “Come home, governor.”

But even that fizzled. When Wilson returned, he made it clear that if he got serious about the presidency he would get equally serious about pushing for a ballot initiative that would wipe out the lieutenant governor’s office.

Some of Davis’ predecessors have been more militant. Curb, in particular, is remembered for his political shenanigans.

During Brown’s run for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, Curb distinguished himself by trying to turn the tide of California politics from liberal to conservative overnight. In the most famous of his actions, he appointed a conservative judge to the California Court of Appeal. Brown reversed it. Curb waited for another trip and reinstated the appointment.

When Brown challenged the audacity in court, the state Supreme Court ruled that Curb acted legally--but also validated Brown’s subsequent withdrawal of the appointment.

Such is the lore of lieutenant governors--and not just when the top two officeholders come from different parties. Former California Gov. Earl Warren confessed years after he left office that he hid bills awaiting action in a safe deposit box when he was out of state to keep them from his lieutenant governor, a fellow Republican whom Warren suspected wanted to grab more power.

In Massachusetts eight years ago, the fact that Lt. Gov. Evelyn Murphy and Gov. Michael Dukakis were both Democrats did not prevent Murphy from slimming down the state’s budget while Dukakis campaigned for president. He returned to find his own salary cut.

Even running on the same ticket does not guarantee harmony, as New York’s George E. Pataki knows well.

He handpicked Elizabeth McCaughey Ross from a conservative New York think tank as his lieutenant. But soon after taking office she publicly opposed him on issues such as abortion (she favored restricting it; he did not). Eventually Ross was punished for her disloyalty by being banished from the governor’s inner circle.

Firestone says he regrets dropping out of the lieutenant governor’s race for an unsuccessful run at the U.S. Congress. He insists the lieutenant’s job is an important one, with crucial responsibilities.

But apparently not quite important enough. He has become the latest to introduce legislation that would nudge California into the mainstream of joint tickets.

Simply put, Firestone’s bill would allow each victor in the gubernatorial primary to enlist a running mate for the fall election. That, he believes, would encourage the governor to give the poor fellow, or lady, more responsibility.

In other states, team tickets have been a boon to women--18 of them are lieutenant governors, compared with none before 1945. But there is widespread criticism that gubernatorial candidates allowed to choose their own mate would err on the side of vote-getting diversity--gender, ethnic or demographic--over strength.

“Once they’re elected, they’re jettisoned like one of the solid-fuel rockets,” said Garry South, chief of staff and gubernatorial campaign manager for Gray Davis.

Much of Firestone’s bill was based on recommendations of the state’s Constitutional Revision Commission, which in 1996 forwarded dozens of suggestions to the Legislature.

Because the change would require a constitutional amendment, and even if the bill passes and is signed by Wilson, it will have to go on a future ballot.

There, its fate is far from certain. Polls conducted at the time of earlier incarnations of such proposals--in 1985, 1989 and 1995--consistently showed that just slightly more than a third of voters supported the change.

In an attempt to gain the backing of the current lieutenant governor candidates, Firestone pushed back the effective date of his bill until 2006--so they would not have to give up their chances of reelection in 2002.

But so far, none of the front-runners has agreed to back the bill. Asked recently whether such a joining of the two jobs seemed a good idea, Sen. Leslie cringed.

“Right now I am really excited about becoming lieutenant governor,” he said. “Ask me next year, OK?”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Political Pairings

California’s governor and lieutenant governor run for election on separate tickets and often are from opposing political parties. Almost six in 10 registered voters, or 58%, said they prefer to have the governor and lieutenant governor run separately rather than as a ticket of the same party.

*--*

Lieutenant Governors Governors 1943-53 Earl Warren(R) Goodwin J. Knight(R) Elected 1950 1953-59 Goodwin J. Knight(R) Harold J. Powers(R) Appointed 1953 Harold J. Powers(R) Elected 1954 1959-67 Edmund G. “Pat” Glen M. Anderson(R) Elected 1958 Brown(D) Glen M. Anderson(R) Elected 1962 1967-75 Ronald Reagan(R) Robert Finch(R) Elected 1966 Ed Reinecke(R) Appointed 1969 Ed Reinecke(R) Elected 1970 John Harmer(R) Appointed 1974 1975-83 Edmund G. “Jerry” Mervyn Dymally(D) Elected 1974 Brown Jr.(D) Mike Curb(R) Elected 1978 1983-91 George Deukmejian(R) Leo T. McCarthy(D) Elected 1982 Leo T. McCarthy(D) Elected 1986 1991-present Pete Wilson(R) Leo T. McCarthy(D) Elected 1990 Gray Davis(D) Elected 1994

*--*