Doris Allen Paid Heavily for Crossing Her Party : Friends, Californians, assemblymen--lend us your ears. We come to bury Doris Allen, not to praise her.

If you want a glimpse into the soul of Sacramento, look no further than the ascent and the fell-or-was-pushed decline of Doris Allen, for 13 years a Republican back-bencher in the Assembly and, for a chaotic three months and nine days, its first woman speaker.

Allen died this week of cancer, four years after the wrathful might of the state GOP branded her a traitor and recalled her. The elephant indeed has a sturdy memory; a proposal that passed last week commending the dying woman for public service met with seething resistance from some Republicans who blamed her for the party’s dilapidated condition, and one who said the Assembly “doesn’t give resolutions to people who lose elections.”

What did Allen do to arouse this enmity? She became the first Republican speaker in a quarter-century--but to get there, she made a deal with the GOP’s devil, Willie Brown, and she did it without her own party’s votes. Her tenure was brief, combative and instructive.

This year, in the Capitol rotunda, the Latino Caucus put on display the photos and accomplishments of its members past and present, among them former Democratic Sen. Joseph Montoya, who did nearly five years in prison for corruption.

Last year, former GOP Assemblyman Pat Nolan, who served nearly two years for political corruption, returned to testify about prison reform. An old colleague declared: “We’re happy to have him back.”

You can go to prison, or thumb your nose at campaign laws or other transgressions, and under the golden dome they’ll still greet you with hail-fellow feeling.

Just don’t commit the unforgivable crime of crossing your own party.

*

Doris Allen may not have been the brightest bulb on Sacramento’s Christmas tree, but six times, voters in her Cypress district were satisfied enough to elect her.

From the get-go, she was an outsider, Orange County’s only GOP assemblywoman at first, a woman who felt like an outsider in her own party and felt treated like one, and so came to play by an outsider’s rules.

Her politics were passably conservative, scoring 75% from Right to Life, 100% from the state Chamber of Commerce, and 5% from the environmentalist League of Conservation Voters.

Yet the former school board member’s support of Democrats on some education measures transgressed the trench-warfare politics that were the order of the day. Her out-of-the-loop status rankled her, and when term limits opened up the speakership, her disaffection and ambition shook hands with Brown’s masterly tactics.

It was hardball politics at its hardest: Allen became the first speaker in a generation from a party that wanted the speakership but not for the likes of her. Brown, another outsider who became the ultimate insider, crowed: “Those white boys got taken, fair and square.”

From then on, to use a nuclear term, it was mutually assured destruction. Allen was recalled in a ruthless election which enlisted even Gov. Pete Wilson against her. She was replaced by Scott Baugh, a man very much in the loop, now the Assembly’s popular minority leader. Baugh, who was recently fined $47,900 for civil campaign violations in that election, said he was saddened by news of her death.

*

The day that Allen took the speaker’s gavel, a GOP assemblyman quipped: “The first thing she ought to do is her hair.” A caricature showed her tricked out like a hooker, wagging her rear end at Ross Perot.

Dismayingly, women still get targeted not for their politics, which is fair game, but for their gender, which isn’t. Gray Davis, then running for U.S. Senate against Dianne Feinstein, likened Feinstein to hotel-queen felon Leona Helmsley. Rep. Bob Dornan characterized as “lesbian spear-chuckers” some supporters of the woman who challenged him in the 1992 primary. In 1994, a Republican woman called Barbara Boxer an “aging cheerleader.” Hillary Clinton’s possible Senate run generates stories that she is consulting a plastic surgeon because she is “sagging.”

Facing recall, Allen uttered the unwise and withering remark, “Do I let a group of power-mongering men with short penises tell me what to do?” Her counterpart in the Senate, President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer, observed that Allen’s caustic line would immortalize the 1995 Legislature as “the Congress of Vienna Sausages.”

The old joke is that real equality will arrive when women can be just as mediocre as men and still be as successful as men are. Doris Allen was a woman ahead of her time just as her party colleagues were behind them.

*

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com