When Will Gov. Cautious Show a Little Vision?

These are great times for the state of California, but not so great that Gov. Gray Davis has any great notions for Lourdes Cordero and her sick boy.

“I’m a single working parent of an 8-year-old child with a serious emotional disturbance,” the Van Nuys aerobics instructor recently wrote, lobbying Sacramento for some sort--any sort--of respite care for parents of mentally ill children. “He lacks the ability to control his anger. For this reason, he has been hospitalized twice.”

The letter omits the suicide threat, the neglected sibling, the impossibility of holding a regular job between therapy appointments and crises--in short, the facts of life for people with children in California’s “system” of mental health care. Instead, the mother writes that if she could have gotten a break, just for a few hours, to stave off her own emotional exhaustion, maybe she could have kept her child from going back to the hospital last year.

Respite care (which the state has funded for decades for families of developmentally disabled children) is just one small idea based in big-picture thinking that has failed to capture the governor’s reed-thin imagination in these great times. Gray Davis wasn’t kidding when he campaigned on caution. From health care to crime and even to education, the issue on which he claims to have been boldest, Davis has leaned toward convention almost every time.

This has been especially true in mental health, though it has allegedly been the governor’s wife’s “issue,” and though social problems, from poverty to violence, never get solved unless they’re pulled out by the roots of their psychologies. This month, as Sacramento has descended into budget season, Davis has shown how far a conventional pol will go for a constituency that is weak, truculent, stigmatized, disturbing and cash-strapped:

Just about as far as you’d think.

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It might be harsh to single out Davis on this issue, except that this state’s mental health care system has been back-burnered for so long. Some politicians, given a $12.3-billion surplus, might invest in some vision. The state Senate, for instance, has proposed a $300-million funding increase in mental health care, buttressing its plan with a report that declares the system to have been “underfunded from the start.”

Davis’ budget increases mental health funding by a third of that figure--less, actually, if you discount the chunk that is really a law-and-order program for parolees. He cut corners so he could pander to middle-class taxpayers with a $1.7-billion, $150-a-head rebate. It’s not clear what a middle-class taxpayer would do with this “windfall,” which is barely big enough to cover a month of middle-class lattes at Starbucks. But for a fraction of it, California could fund decent school-based mental health services, bring the state’s suicide hotline network into the modern era, streamline the patchwork system of care for children and still have enough left over to offer respite to families.

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There were members of Davis’ party who thought he was just pretending to be this cautious--and self-interested--a Democrat. There were some who said he was just triangulating the Dan Lungren vote. There were some who had him pegged, but settled because he was: a) known and b) not Pete Wilson. “When your pipes are broken,” a Westside friend confided then, “you don’t need a visionary. You just need a plumber.” That was Davis: nuts and bolts.

But a lot can happen in two years. Those pipelines can unleash great gushers of money--so much money that a state can relax and dream and imagine its own greatness again. Suddenly, “fiscal prudence” and “tough on crime” and even “no-taxes-for-

teachers” just sound shallow, even as slogans. Suddenly it’s out with “Home Improvement” and in with “Gladiator.”

“I intend to resist the siren song of permanent expenditures, whether it comes from the left or right,” Davis droned this month upon releasing his revised budget. No Russell Crowes in swords-and-sandals on these Capitol steps.

And that’s too bad. It is true that there are few votes in causes like mental health care. The people who end up in the system are voiceless, unlovely, often unsympathetic and predominantly poor. They tend not to be eligible for tax rebates because most don’t earn enough to owe taxes. They can’t speak for themselves, and if they try to, people dismiss them. There’s nothing but the obligation a society has toward the least of its members to say we should go the extra mile for people like Lourdes Cordero and her son.

But great times should bring out the great notions in people--and in governors, as well. Food for thought as this least visionary of Sacramento seasons moves into full swing now.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address isshawn.hubler@latimes.com.