Political Odd Couple in Tiff Over Edison

You knew it would come to this. You knew their uneasy union was bound to crack.

One politician is pure volcanic emotion, the other a public portrait of cool control. One man is blunt and uncensored, prone to spouting expletives. The other picks his words cautiously, ever wary of political faux pas.

They are the oddest of odd couples, united by circumstance and party affiliation but little else. And this month the shaky detente between California’s two most powerful leaders--Democrats Gov. Gray Davis and Senate leader John Burton--shattered in full view. As their relationship tatters, it threatens a host of initiatives, from the proposed rescue of Southern California Edison to a state park bond measure and any number of upcoming gubernatorial appointments.

The break occurred in the final moments of the legislative session, past midnight, with only fellow lawmakers, media and a covey of lobbyists on hand. Tempers were frayed, bodies sleep-starved.

Davis was making a last-gasp drive to pass a plan to keep Edison out of bankruptcy. Failure would mean an ugly smudge on his record one year before reelection time. What’s more, the governor feared the bankruptcy of a company employing 12,000 would jolt the state on the heels of terrorist attacks and amid signs of a looming recession.

Burton, however, saw the Edison deal as a corporate bailout that unfairly socked consumers with the bill. He was not alone. The package lacked enough support to pass, so Burton refused to bring it up for a vote.

That’s when the gloves came off. In an unusual act, the governor breached protocol by chastising the Senate and firing off a news release calling for a special session to reconsider the deal--before informing legislative leaders.

Burton hit the roof. In a profanity-laced tirade that drew bipartisan cheers on the Senate floor, he denounced the governor and said Davis had “damn near doomed” any chance for an Edison rescue bill. As for the special session, the Senate president said he would be on jury duty that week.

What becomes of Edison’s bid for economic salvation in the Legislature is unclear. Davis insists he remains intent on winning legislative approval of the rescue plan, but unless it gets a radical make-over, Burton is unlikely to budge.

Far more obvious is this: The state’s top two Democrats have a problem, and it is spilling into the policy arena.

“Squabbling like this--even among members of the same political family--is not new,” said Barbara O’Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at Cal State Sacramento. “But the magnitude and the nasty, public nature of this is different. And it’s not over yet.”

Indeed, in the days after the Edison episode, rumors spread that Davis plans to veto a $2.6-billion park bond bill that Burton had championed. Burton, in turn, says that if Davis “messes” with him, he can forget about Senate confirmation of future appointments.

“You can’t pass anything without us,” he said in an interview. “The Senate can be magnanimous, and the Senate can also be tough and uncooperative.”

For those who know the two men, the standoff is not surprising. Beyond the stylistic distinctions, they have fundamentally different senses of political purpose that naturally put them at odds.

Phil Trounstine, Davis’ former communications director and now a communications consultant, sums it up this way: “It is a titanic clash of worldviews.”

While the two agree on issues such as support for abortion rights, the mutual interests don’t stretch far beyond that.

Burton is an old-guard Democrat who first and foremost wants to use government to help the less fortunate. He opposes the death penalty and favors more spending on the mentally ill. Pro-labor, he wants the state to boost workers’ compensation benefits for people hurt on the job, a cost borne by business. He also believes unemployment benefits should be increased.

Davis, meanwhile, is a moderate Democrat through and through. He supports capital punishment and, after signing some early bills on gun control, has shown little interest in signing any more. Organized labor backed his candidacy when he ran for governor, and he has handed unions many victories. But he has vetoed efforts to raise unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation benefits.

“John Burton is a true-blue liberal and proud of it,” said veteran Assemblyman Bill Leonard (R-San Bernardino). “And he just doesn’t like it when he sees Democrats like Gray Davis acting like Republicans.”

As befits their personalities, Burton, 68, agreed to talk about the stormy relationship and Davis, 58, would not speak in detail about it. In an interview, the governor said, “I’m not going there. . . . I like John Burton. I respect his abilities. We occasionally see the world the same way. Occasionally, we don’t.”

Burton, meanwhile, said it boils down to the fact that he and Davis have radically different priorities.

“My worldview is you’re in government to do something for the betterment of society and people who can’t do for themselves,” he said. Davis, he believes, “subscribes to the trickle-down theory that if you take care of big business, somehow it will help everybody else.”

Both Are Lifelong, Savvy Politicians

Though the two men have never been close, they have known each other 30 years, and both are lifelong, savvy politicians with a talent for fund-raising.

Except for a six-year break after his treatment for drug addiction, Burton has been in public office--including four terms in Congress--since 1965. He became Senate president in 1998, elevated by colleagues who, though leery of his mercurial temperament, say they can bank on his word and value his can-do style.

Davis served as a chief of staff to Gov. Jerry Brown and as an assemblyman, and then plugged away in unglamorous statewide jobs, first as controller, then lieutenant governor. Though short on charisma, his methodical pursuit of the state’s top elected office got him the job in 1998.

Burton did not endorse Davis--or anyone else--that year. But he said that at the dawn of Davis’ term, with Democrats in the governor’s office and controlling both houses of the Legislature, “You had to be upbeat.

“I thought he’d sign a workers’ comp bill,” Burton said. “I thought that after 16 years [of Republican governors], we’d see programs to help poor people.”

Instead, Davis did what he said he’d do all along--governed from the middle. At the same time, the governor struck what lawmakers considered an imperious posture toward them, reflected in his now-infamous 1999 comment that the Legislature’s job was to “implement my vision.”

Though Burton brushed aside that remark, friends say he has been deeply disappointed by Davis and the sense that a great opportunity is being squandered.

Burton is at the height of his power and influence--and eager to advance causes he holds dear. He is the most prominent remaining link in one of the most potent political machines in California history, the one he and his late brother, the legendary congressman Phil Burton, helped create. With a Democrat in the Capitol’s corner office, it should be a great time to add to the Burton legacy. But time is running short. Term limits will boot him from the Senate in 2004, and his leftist politics make a successful statewide candidacy iffy at best.

Davis, meanwhile, is on a different glide path. He plans to run for reelection, and some Democrats believe that if he works his way out of the energy debacle, he could wind up in the White House someday. Such goals fuel his naturally cautious tendencies; he prefers incremental change over bold strokes.

As such, he slays many of his fellow Democrats’ most ambitious pieces of legislation--either by veto or by letting it be known it’s pointless to pass them and plop them on his desk.

If the two men were able to hash out differences, to search for common ground, the ideological gulf might be bridged. But friends of both say they rarely share meaningful talk. Virtually all their conversations are brief and elliptical. When they conclude, aides are left wondering what the words meant and often call one another to decipher what was said.

Even on big issues, such as boosting workers’ compensation benefits, Burton and Davis never had serious negotiations about what each wanted in the bill that Burton delivered to Davis this year. Will the governor sign it?

“Beats me,” Burton said, though others assume a veto is likely.

The two can also be rude to each other. The governor keeps Burton waiting, and the senator has been known to yell and swear at Davis, and even storm out of his office. Davis aides try to gauge Burton’s mood by the number of times per minute that Burton uses his favorite curse word.

Burton acknowledges his volatility, but a personalized T-shirt his staff gave him sums up his position on that topic: “I Yell Because I Care.” Davis, the senator says, doesn’t care about things that matter greatly to him. “He’s entitled to his opinion,” Burton says, but periodically it sets off the senator.

Burton Has Helped Push Davis’ Agenda

Nevertheless, Burton insists that he is, in fact, “the cheapest trick in town,” someone willing to help the governor push his agenda so long as it doesn’t trample his core beliefs.

On many occasions, in fact, Burton says, he has helped smooth the way for the governor’s budgets and proposals in the Senate--even when he personally objected to them. He and others opposed the governor’s program to award merit scholarships to smart children, for example, but Burton tied it to another program to expand grants for poor students and got it through.

The squabbling delights Republicans who enjoy watching their political foes bicker among themselves.

Aides to Davis’ potential GOP rivals, for instance, see opportunity in an open feud between Democrats.

“Gray Davis is heading into a very difficult reelection campaign next year,” said Dan Schnur, an advisor to Richard Riordan, who is contemplating a run for governor. “This is normally a time in the cycle when he’d want to be mending his political fences and shoring up his base, not fighting with other Democrats.”

But Davis realizes that there are worse fates than being a Burton target. It’s not such a bad thing for the moderate governor to have as a foil a San Francisco liberal, who is viewed by some business leaders with apprehension.

But most immediately, the issue is Edison. And on that matter, it’s Burton who sees himself as the moderating force. After months of back-and-forth over terms of the deal, the final version--passed by the Assembly and embraced by Davis and the utility--was too generous to Edison, Burton said, and disproportionately burdened small-fry ratepayers with the task of paying off the utility’s $3.9-billion debt.

Davis says he will come up with a new proposal in time for the special session in early October.

“This is a matter that transcends relationships,” he said. “This is bigger than who talks to who. This is, ‘Do we let the second largest utility in California go bankrupt?’ Nothing good happens in bankruptcy. People get laid off. Rates go up. Bankruptcy is bad news.”

Burton shrugs when asked about the prospects of a revived Edison deal. But Davis notes that he’s gone around liberals before, forging coalitions with Latino lawmakers and sometimes with Republicans. And he may try to do it again.

The feud was of little consequence in past years, when California was enjoying economic plenty. But now that the economy is slowing, taxpayers no longer will rain money down in Sacramento. Spending choices will become more painful, and that can only add stress to an already wobbly relationship.

“The relationship didn’t matter too much when we were going through good times,” said one legislator who asked not to be named.

“But now that we’re managing scarcity and managing in an energy crisis, it’s very different. You’d like to see them reach more common ground and at least have some shared sense of vision and values.”