Wright Not Pulling Any Punches in Final Rounds

If there’s one thing that really infuriates state Sen. Cathie Wright, it’s when somebody isn’t straight with her.

Wright, 69, a scrapper from the coal country of Pennsylvania, got all worked up recently when the leader of her own Republican Party bounced her from the powerful vice chair position on the Senate Budget Committee.

“This is how Republican men deal with Republican women,” responded a furious Wright, the only woman among 15 Republicans in the Senate. “If you’re going to stab me, stab me in the front.”

It was vintage Cathie Wright--a feisty, quick-tempered, platinum blond bundle of energy who says what she thinks and doesn’t much care whom she irritates.

More recently, she called for the resignation of California Youth Authority Director Francisco Alarcon after a sex scandal broke at a Camarillo juvenile prison in her district.

“Francisco Alarcon isn’t worth his weight,” she said. “The Titanic is sinking and he’s moving the deck chairs.”

And when Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Northridge) confirmed last month that he intends to run for Wright’s 19th District seat as term limits force her out next year, Wright blasted her old rival as an extremist who is too conservative for her constituents.

“He’s a loner,” she said. “And he still has a tendency to pick up issues and do more to politicize them than to accomplish anything.”

Neither McClintock nor Alarcon would debate the senator.

But Ross Johnson, the Republican leader in the Senate, dismissed Wright’s complaint about her Budget Committee demotion as a rant.

“She’s entitled to be a petulant child if she wants,” said Johnson, another old Wright adversary. “I just think that Cathie is the kind of person who has to be the center of attention.” Wright laughed a big laugh when she heard that.

“Looks like I got under his skin, doesn’t it?”

A Long Record of Political Battles

The daughter of an upstairs maid and the town handyman in Old Forge, Pa., Wright has been getting under people’s skin ever since she first won a Simi Valley City Council seat in 1978. She perfected the trait while serving 12 years in the Assembly and six more in the state Senate.

“I’m tenacious, I’m irascible, I’m a fighter,” she said after throwing a haymaker or two at some of her favorite enemies. “You have to be tough in this business, you can’t just sit back and let them roll over you.”

A cardboard cutout of an elephant displayed in her Sacramento office sums up her statecraft: “It’s Better to Be a Stomper, Than a Stompee.”

A list of Wright’s fights is as long as her record of public service.

She fought an icy skirmish with another conservative Republican, Rep. Elton Gallegly, when he was still on the Simi Valley council.

He got the mayor’s job she wanted in 1980, and he failed to back her when state investigators later probed a developer’s questionable campaign gift.

For his part, Gallegly says Wright should have thanked his family when the Galleglys canceled their summer vacation to Hawaii at the last minute to host Wright’s fund-raiser during her first Assembly campaign.

“Cathie kind of forgot to say, ‘Hey, I appreciate that you did this for me,’ ” Gallegly said.

“I beg his pardon,” Wright responded. “I believe I gave his wife a bouquet of flowers. At least they were supposed to be delivered.”

Wright fought with former state Sen. Ed Davis, the onetime Los Angeles police chief, in a bitter factional feud among local Republicans. Would he ever support Wright? Davis was asked in 1992. “Maybe,” he replied, “if she was running against a mass murderer. But it would depend on how many people he had killed.”

She fought with her own party again when Republicans tried to dump Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown in 1988 and she refused to go along.

She fought with just about every Republican in the Legislature in 1997, when she voted for the Democrat-backed welfare reform bill opposed by Gov. Pete Wilson.

She fought with state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo) and most local public officials in 1998, when she opposed conversion of the old Camarillo State Hospital into the county’s long-awaited Cal State University campus.

“That’s the one big glaring disagreement we’ve had over the direction of Ventura County,” O’Connell said.

But Wright is no simple pug with a firm jaw, tart tongue and tough veneer.

By all accounts, she is a seven-day-a-week politician who has given herself completely to her role as a lawmaker. She is accessible, visible and turns up on weekends at parades, ribbon-cuttings and charity events. She is argumentative and opinionated, but true to her word.

She is a right-wing Republican who would ban abortions, loathes gun control, hates motorcycle helmet laws and harbors a strong dislike for rules that get in the way of business, industry and housing subdivisions.

To her, government should be small, and taxes should be low.

Yet, Wright, a Democrat until a midlife conversion in 1976, still generally gets along better with Democratic leaders than with the bosses of her own party.

“Initially I thought she was a pain,” said liberal Diane Watson, a 20-year Democratic state senator who left office last fall. “It was party line this and party line that. But I ended up liking Cathie. If she raised a red flag, we went in that direction and tried to compromise. And if we did, we got her vote.”

That is partly because of her maverick stances on issues close to her heart--the treatment of single mothers, mentally ill children and juvenile delinquents. But it’s also because she believes Democrats truly want women as statewide leaders, while Republicans only talk that talk.

Policy Draws From Down-Home Instincts

When her life’s experience bumps up against party politics, Wright remembers her humble origins and follows her down-home instincts when making policy.

At her core, she is a hard-working woman who graduated as valedictorian of her high school class, but then labored for a decade to send her brother to college; a homemaker who cared for an older, bedridden husband and raised their daughter on her income as a cable station manager and insurance saleswoman, and now a doting grandmother who helps support her divorced daughter and a 2-year-old grandchild she delights in taking onto the Senate floor.

And though she hesitates to talk about it, she is also the special friend of a Las Vegas entertainer who sings on cruise ships.

“That was the only good thing I got out of my [1994] campaign for lieutenant governor,” she said. “I met him at an Italian festival in Shasta County. He said, ‘I’ve never hugged a senator before.’ I said, ‘Now’s your chance.’ ”

Wright is a self-described “coal cracker” who does not like to see government tread on the little guy--or on a single mom.

Indeed, Wright has probably defined herself most flatteringly to women through her unyielding position on welfare reform.

As the Republicans’ principal negotiator on a welfare reform committee in 1997, she felt Democrats had compromised on key issues, and she balked at Wilson’s position that welfare mothers be forced to work 12 weeks after a child’s birth. So she was the only Republican to vote for the Democrats’ plan.

“There’s an enormous dissatisfaction” with her, because her “inexplicable” vote undermined GOP efforts for a stronger proposal, McClintock said.

But Wright knew from experience--she was struggling with her granddaughter’s day-care problems at the time--that a 12-week limit was unrealistic. She favored giving mothers a year or two to be trained for meaningful work and to arrange child care paid in part by the government.

“I just couldn’t see doing that to women, having been in a position where I was raising a child myself,” she said. “They wanted to throw these women out on the street.

“You can be hard-nosed and tough, but you also have to take into consideration that you’re dealing with people,” she said. “I always look at how I would want to be treated if I was in that situation.”

Budget Panel Removal Prompted Flare-Up

In a more recent intraparty flare-up, Wright exploded in January when Republican leader Johnson replaced her as vice chairwoman of the Budget Committee with Sen. Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga). That also took her off the influential conference committee where members of the Assembly and Senate work out their budget differences.

Of all her legislative jobs, those were her bully pulpit and the stage for her to shine. “Cathie was meticulous in the way she went through that budget,” Watson said. “There’s no other guy that’s going to do the kind of work Cathie does on committees.”

Wright believes the demotion was in part a payback for her vote on welfare reform. Johnson, she said, didn’t even call to say he was going to replace her.

“Maybe I’m a woman they’re afraid of,” she said. “I just don’t sit and take everything they want to dish out. I don’t plead and beg, and I don’t cry and whine. I just do. I think that’s a problem for them. And they also know that once I make up my mind, I’m not going to change it.”

Johnson said Wright is a valued member of the Republican caucus--but that her criticism is nonsense.

“The suggestion that I am in any sense anti-woman is ludicrous,” Johnson said, citing his large contributions last fall to female Republican candidates.

“There’s nothing to her assertion that this is somehow picking on Cathie Wright,” he said. “If she feels she’s being treated unfairly, that’s up to her. But that is just flatly untrue.”

Wright also has picked a new fight with an old rival, CYA Director Alarcon.

Face-to-face at a 1997 hearing in Camarillo, she accused Alarcon of covering up information involving a 50-year-old guard’s alleged rape of a 17-year-old inmate. Alarcon denied a cover-up, saying some documents were private by law.

Now amid new charges of sexual misconduct at the Ventura School juvenile prison, Wright has demanded Alarcon’s removal and that of other top administrators.

“Instead of trying to fix the problem, he says there’s no problem,” Wright said.

Alarcon declined comment on Wright’s conclusions, but did credit her with applying enough pressure that money was found in the Corrections Department budget to hire investigators who have built sexual misconduct cases against eight past or current Ventura School employees. Reform has taken place, he said.

“I don’t want to get into a point, counterpoint with the senator,” Alarcon said. “She has formed her opinions.”

Wright is awaiting a state inspector general’s report this week that she says will show the CYA has been a mismanaged man’s world, where inmates are molested and women employees are sexually harassed and punished for turning in misbehaving male colleagues.

“I can’t think of a person that’s more passionate about having things done correctly and right,” Deputy Inspector General Solange Brooks said. “She’s the type of senator that will not just let it go.”

Wright has been just as determined in her support of residents near the troubled Rocketdyne engine-testing facility in the Simi Hills, Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Encino) said. She has joined Wright in pushing for federal studies of potential health problems linked to the facility.

“She is just so hard-working and incisive, she always manages to ask the question that gets to the core of something,” Kuehl said. “She’s also willing to criticize my point of view where we diverge. I would say she’s undervalued by her [Republican] caucus, and underutilized for her talents.”

There may be good reason for that, say those who are not keen on working too closely with Wright. She can, they say, harangue colleagues who disagree with her, and she can baffle colleagues with her interpretation of the law.

John Theiss, a former Wright aide, said his old boss changes to meet the demands of her job.

“She’s a different Cathie Wright in Sacramento,” he said. “She walks around like she’s wearing a full coat of armor, and she’s ready to go to battle. That’s Cathie Wright being a woman in a man’s world. And there’s still a good old boys network up there.”

No Idea on What Retirement May Bring

Yet, Wright is convinced she can complete her career with a flourish. She will not stay on her party’s back bench for long, she said.

She will focus instead on expanding projects that help troubled children and young criminals.

A program she helped create in Ventura County in 1984 now aids emotionally disturbed children in the juvenile justice system in 36 counties.

But Wright has no clear idea of what she will do once she retires in December 2000. She is set financially, since her tenure before pension reform qualifies her for a retirement check of about $65,000 a year.

She thinks she might find additional work--either paid or as a volunteer--with groups that help the mentally ill or work with young mothers trying to get off welfare.

Wright likes the idea of spending more time with 67-year-old Las Vegas entertainer Carme Pitrello. She will welcome in the next millennium, she said, by watching his New Year’s Eve show in Laughlin, Nev.

And she will definitely spend more time with granddaughter, Marissa, who lives two blocks from Wright’s Simi Valley house, and who calls her grandma “nana.”

“I just love her to death,” Wright said. “She’s a bright little girl. She’s probably going to be a senator.”

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Profile

Name: Cathie Wright

Age: 69

Occupation: State senator, 19th District. Covers Ventura County, and parts of the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys.

Education: Two-year degree, Lackawanna Junior Business College in Scranton, Pa.; attended drafting and surveying classes at Scranton University.

Background: A Simi Valley resident for 32 years, Wright was elected to the City Council in 1978 and served as mayor in 1979. She was elected to the state Assembly six times, serving from 1980 to 1992, when she was elected to the state Senate. She lost a 1994 run for lieutenant governor to Gray Davis. She is one of the Legislature’s most conservative members.

Issues: Wright seeks statewide expansion of the Ventura Project, a program to aide emotionally disturbed children and reduce recidivism in the juvenile justice system. She wants to provide better training and child care for single mothers trying to escape welfare.