Term Limits Inspire a Turn Toward Home

When Tommy comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah,

We’ll throw him a big election then, hurrah, hurrah,

The left will cheer while the right will shout

The voters--they just might turn out

And we’ll all feel, uh, exhilarated, when Tommy comes marching home.

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News flash: Tom Hayden is getting out from under the golden dome of Sacramento.

He is leaving one of those 40 big red leather swivel chairs in the state Senate to come back to L.A., to take a shot at one of the 15 big brown leather swivel chairs on the Los Angeles City Council.

Brown or red, Eames or Adirondack--whatever the style and shape, they’re all musical chairs in term-limits California these days.

Term limits mean Hayden’s 18 years as assemblyman and senator are up. He’ll be running for Councilman Michael Feuer’s 5th District council seat, which is empty because Feuer himself, one election away from being termed out, is running for city attorney, a job that will be vacant because the present occupant, James K. Hahn, is running for mayor, a job that will also be vacant because Richard Riordan has hit the two-term limit.

Now, can anyone read that and say politics is boring? This stuff is like a daytime soap with really terrible wardrobe. If you can follow “Days of Our Lives,” deconstructing term limits is a piece of cake.

The cheerleaders for term limits thought they would mean politicians would be terminated.

Not so fast. Term limits are a political squeeze play: so many politicians, so few jobs. Politicians who choose to stay in “the life” may move between the Senate and the Assembly, and then their choices are up and out--to Congress, to statewide office--or down and out, to city and county offices.

Speaker-almost-for-life Willie Brown was magnificently disdainful of the pothole politics of local government--until term limits nudged him out of Sacramento and into a different showman’s mantle as mayor of San Francisco.

Wally Knox, termed out of the Assembly and losing to colleague Sheila Kuehl in this year’s primary for a Senate seat, thought about running for Los Angeles city attorney. And Assemblyman Bob Hertzberg also considered running for city attorney unless he got the job of Assembly speaker, which he did.

Sometimes you plant a seed, and what comes up bears no resemblance to the picture on the packet. The seed of term limits has brought forth some odd blossoms.

City councils were always the cradles of politics, nurturing new characters for bigger futures. With term limits, we are left asking whether local governments will be the farm teams of major-league politics, or its retirement homes.

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The downside to term limits is that they are wasteful. They turn politicians into pro ballplayers, with intense but brief careers followed by comparative oblivion. Term limits mean that legislators who cultivate expertise on welfare or Medi-Cal or the highway system don’t get to exercise it for long.

The upside--besides allowing new people, especially women and minorities, to have a crack at “the life”--means that some politicians can bring their statewide stripes to their own backyards.

Tom Hayden, like him or despise him, is one of the smartest guys under the Legislature’s golden dome, and an example of how statewide savvy might be brought home.

This very week, Gov. Gray Davis will decide whether to sign a bill to reverse the one-way flow of local tax money into state pockets, a flow that began with the recession of the early 1990s. The League of California Cities is begging him to sign it. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which rarely agrees on the time of day, unanimously asked him to do the same thing.

When it comes to the mechanics of state politics, ex-state legislators who come home to local politics can wield their wits and wiles on matters like the tax cash flow with an insider’s know-how.

But state politicians may also bring something else home with them from the Wars of Sacramento, something as welcome as a case of the clap--partisanship. Hayden’s politics predated his party affiliation; he was protesting at the Democratic convention in 1968 when he made his bones, and he has savaged Sacramento’s Democrats and Republicans both.

But most local government in California is nuts-and-bolts governing, not fruit-and-nuts partisanship. The cities may welcome their big hitters home from Sacramento--so long as they check that R and D baggage at the door.

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