Natural Leader to Become Speaker, but Will the Assembly Be Led?

He once formed a teen gang. Later he successfully coached youth football. Soon he’ll be herding cats--the apt job description for Assembly speaker.

Herb Wesson (D-Culver City) is affable and doesn’t seem flappable. We’ll see. He’s steady and self-confident. Now.

He appears to have what it takes to handle the job: street smarts, energy. . . . Everything except legislative experience, the norm for a speaker under term limits.

But his fans say the second-term assemblyman is a fast learner. Perhaps he’ll quickly learn how to prioritize and promote, push and pull--and not only reward, but punish. All while keeping his poise. His predecessor, Speaker Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks), tried hard, but the Capitol consensus is he was too high-strung and scattered.

Wesson, 50, a former chief of staff to L.A. County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Councilman Nate Holden, is slated to be elected speaker Jan. 10 and assume the powerful office Feb. 6.

He’ll be the fourth Democratic speaker in roughly five years; the seventh speaker in all since Willie Brown reluctantly departed in 1995. Wesson also will be the second African American speaker in history; Brown was the first.

It was Brown who said that trying to lead 79 diverse, demanding, independently elected lawmakers is like trying to herd cats.

Wesson thinks he can be a cat-herder. “My entire life, I’ve always been--I don’t even know how it happened--like a leader,” he says. “Ever since I was a kid, everybody would just come over to my house. ‘Herbie, what should we do?’ Or ‘Herbie, I’ve got a girlfriend problem.’ It was just natural.”

A natural pol.

Wesson’s background is blue-collar, the product of working-class struggle in Cleveland, Ohio. His dad was an auto worker.

“We weren’t poor, but we weren’t real comfortable,” he recalls. “I didn’t know I didn’t have everything. My whole life was spent as a kid organizing my community. I had like a 12-block territory. . . . I started a gang, seriously. Called the C-Gs. Continental Gents.”

Wesson’s a short guy--now 5-5, weighing 150. In junior high in the mid-’60s, he was a shrimp. Easy prey. The family lived in a rough area where other kids looked for fights and often picked on Herbie and his pals. “I brought all the guys together and said we need to form our own gang. Not that we’re going to go out and rape and pillage and steal, but for our own protection.”

They protected themselves by moving in packs. But sometimes fights couldn’t be avoided. Wesson says after one gang leader “beat the snot out of me--I wouldn’t quit--I told him my guys are better athletes than yours. We should play football. We lost the game, but cultivated a relationship through sports. . . . The whole little community became peaceful.”

An early lesson in party unity and bipartisan cooperation.

He wasn’t as good at classroom lessons. Wesson was accepted by only one college, Lincoln University, an African American school in Pennsylvania. He dropped out his senior year because his dad became terminally ill, but ultimately graduated in 1999 by completing a correspondence course.

It was at Lincoln in the early ‘70s that Wesson caught the political bug. He was assigned to escort a visiting new congressman, Democratic liberal Ronald V. Dellums from Oakland, a gifted orator. “He struck me as being just a regular cat. . . .

“I’m telling ya, it was almost like a calling. Ten minutes into his speech I remember turning to my frat brothers and saying, ‘That’s what I’m gonna do.’ ”

Wesson moved to L.A. because “I saw an advertisement of a woman on a horse riding down the beach.”

New pals pointed him toward a hot congressional race and he set out to volunteer. But he took a wrong turn and wound up at the headquarters of state Sen. Nate Holden instead of Assemblyman Julian Dixon, where he’d been sent. Dixon beat Holden and was a revered 11-term congressman until he died last year.

The gregarious Wesson became close to Dixon, who persuaded him to run for the Assembly in 1998.

Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa--”Antonio’s like a brother”--named Wesson chairman of the coveted Government Organization Committee. “Juice” flows there as special interests lavish campaign money. Wesson raised $3 million, he estimates, and gave it to other Democrats while securing their support for speaker.

Ask Wesson how he intends to herd these cats and he proudly talks about coaching Pop Warner football--his record of 12 playoffs and one national title.

“Get them to believe in the team concept. Maybe that’s what’s been missing,” he says. “Every position is important. I want to be the quarterback, but I’m going to throw the ball around a lot.”

And try not to fumble, a habit of rookie speakers.