Cathie Wright

The media reports say Cathie Wright is retiring. But there is nothing retiring about Cathie Wright.

Never has been. Never will be.

She is concluding a 22-year political career that has included stints on the Simi Valley City Council, the state Assembly and state Senate. It has been a 10-round prizefight all the way.

Feisty, quick-tempered, a self-described “coal cracker from Pennsylvania,” Wright, a 70-year-old Republican, has fought with the best and the brightest on both sides of the aisle.

Her featured opponents have ranged from former Gov. Pete Wilson to former state senator and LAPD Chief Ed Davis (When asked if he would endorse Wright, Davis replied, “Maybe, if she was running against a mass murderer. But it would depend on how many people he killed.”) to state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo) to the leadership of both parties.

Her admirers see her as passionate about issues, making sure things are done right. She has been accessible and visible in her district, which includes all of Ventura County except for Santa Paula, Ventura and Ojai, plus portions of the Santa Clarita and San Fernando valleys.

She is a self-described conservative who nonetheless often has found herself siding with Democrats such as former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown of San Francisco and Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl. In 1997, she voted for a Democrat-backed welfare reform bill that was opposed by Wilson.

It was a trait that got her bounced from the powerful vice chair position of the state Senate Budget Committee last year by her own party leadership (“This is how Republican men treat Republican women,” she huffed at the time).

But she leaves political life with no apologies. “I don’t plead and beg. I don’t cry and whine. I just do,” she said about her style.

The Times recently talked to Wright about her career.

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Question: Your legislative career is ending because of term limits. Do you think term limits should be revised or terminated?

Answer: When it was first being discussed, I had no problem with the idea of term limits. But I thought there should have been much discussion and a consensus as to what was the right time frame. Term limits was something that was devised out of vindictiveness on the part of [former Los Angeles County Supervisor] Peter Schabarum. He didn’t get what he wanted out of the Legislature and so decided he would get even with them.

Q: Do you see anything being done about it in Sacramento?

A: It’s not going to happen until the people of the state of California see what it has done. It’s adding to the costs of campaigning because you have so many open races all the time.

Q: Have you enjoyed being a state legislator?

A: It was the most fulfilling job I have ever had in my whole life, and believe me, I’ve had a lot of jobs. It was fulfilling because no two days were the same. If I bitched about anything, it wasn’t bitching about the job, it was bitching about some of the people I had to deal with. You really have to keep in mind when you get into office that you’re dealing with people’s lives. You don’t see their faces, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not making some, in most cases, positive effect on people’s lives.

Q: And the downside?

A: Too many of these fellows get into political power: How do we get the other guy to do something wrong so we can use it against him in the next campaign? And we sit and we have meetings trying to decide what issue we can build up to a great crescendo so that everybody wants to come out and vote for us.

Q: Looking back on your career in Sacramento, what are your proudest accomplishments?

A: First of all, there was the Systems of Care mental health program. In 1984, Ventura County was the site for a state-funded pilot program that demonstrated the benefits of a community-based interagency case management approach to the delivery of services to emotionally disturbed children.

It didn’t create a new program. It took programs that were available for children and put them all in contact with each other, a collaboration of all the agencies that deal with the youngster. This year was the first that I got Systems of Care for the children completely funded for the entire state. Now we have been able to expand it to adults.

Then there was welfare reform. [Gov. Pete] Wilson wanted to be tough because we have all these lazy people. Well, if you really looked at the population on welfare, most of it is single mothers. What they were going to do was tell women that 60 days after a child was born, they had to go to work. And with no child-care provision.

I had never believed that my voice didn’t, or couldn’t, have a part. Working hard, you could make a difference. And to me, child care was a difference, mental health was a difference, drug use was a difference, and certainly alcohol abuse. You don’t get a person to get up in the morning and go to work if they have a mental health problem. I got in the bill what I thought was important.

When it came, then, to dealing with the governor, there was some compromise, of course, but we got at least federal money where you could take care of drug addiction, alcohol addiction and child care.

Q: How have things changed in Sacramento since you first arrived?

A: It’s very sad, what’s going on in Sacramento. Because you have people coming in with no knowledge and changing the rules to suit themselves, instead of looking at what worked. Sure, by a majority vote of the floor you can always waive the rules. But it’s important that 99% of the time you follow the rules, because that’s how people work together.

Q: What is the most pressing issue now in Sacramento?

A: Dealing with the electricity deregulation mess. I’m getting a kick out of watching [Senate minority leader] Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga) and [Senate Budget Committee head] Steve Peace (D-El Cajon) try to pussyfoot around it. In our caucus, deregulation was “it!”

“This was wonderful! Oh, you’ll be thrilled because, after all, aren’t we for free enterprise?” Well, there are some things that maybe shouldn’t be [left to] free enterprise. Also, there’s transportation. A good portion of this surplus money should be used on transportation: freeway construction, smarter freeways, improvement in the roads. I think you can look at what wonderful things we did here when we had the Olympics. I don’t say that whole program could have gone on indefinitely, but there were good sections of that program that could have.

Q: What is the status of women in the Republican party?

A: A year ago, Brulte had a press conference in which he said he was not going to give any more money to white males. He was going to go for the minorities and for women. And guess what’s going on in the Senate Republican Caucus? No women. And believe me, when you’re in the caucus you don’t get treated well, either. State Sen. Ray Hanes (R-Riverside) thinks I’m a whiner. But he’s only been around about six years. When he’s been around 20 years, I want him to come back and call me a whiner.

Q: What advice do you have for Republican women who want to enter politics?

A: First of all, you’ve got to have the stomach for it. See, I’m a coal cracker from Pennsylvania. We’re tough back there. We didn’t mind walking in the snow. We hated it, but we did it because we knew we had to if we had to get someplace. So I have that kind of background. I never asked for favors, but I sure wanted what was due me. And you had better be prepared to stand on your own two feet and go toe to toe with the fellows. And not necessarily the Democrats--Republicans too.

Q: What are your post-retirement plans?

A: That’s a good question. I don’t know. But I’d better do something, because otherwise I’ll get into trouble. I’ve got too much energy not to keep doing something.

You know, I left home a single woman and came to California on a 60-day leave of absence from my job. At the end of 60 days, I took a two-week leave of absence from a job I had in California and went back to Pennsylvania and walked into the office and gave them my two-weeks notice. Something said I had to do it.

Well, in the same instance, I never thought of myself running for office. Back in Pennsylvania women didn’t do that. But someone said to me in 1971, “Why don’t you run for office if you think you’re right?” because I’d always complain. I said, “That’s a good idea. I think I will.”

I didn’t go home to my husband and ask him, “May I?” I went home and told him I was going to do it. And I ran for City Council. I ran in ‘72, I ran in ‘74, and I ran in ’76. If somebody said to me, “You’re going to be a state senator,” I would have told them they were crazy.

The door opens, you make a decision: Will I walk through or not? That’s what I did. In 1980 when I ran for the Assembly, I certainly didn’t have the Republican Caucus in Sacramento supporting me. In fact, they had a man move into the district to run against me. And I was dirt, I was a woman. Well I fooled ‘em, I beat them. And beat them ever since.