Ex-Governors Blame Legislature

Four former governors of California gathered on a Silver Lake sound stage Tuesday night and shared ideas about how the state could reform its political system and overcome its crippling dysfunction.

In a freewheeling conversation to be televised statewide Thursday, the former governors -- Gray Davis, Pete Wilson, George Deukmejian and Jerry Brown -- said safe legislative districts and term limits had created a polarized culture in the capital that bedeviled any incumbent.

The former governors, representing 30 continuous years in office, also traded thoughts on the challenges facing their successor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And they commiserated on the trials of doing business with 120 members of the Legislature, focusing much of their one-hour chat on how to make lawmakers shape up.

“Gray had maybe the most irresponsible Legislature within memory,” Wilson said.

The remark was one of several by Republicans Wilson and Deukmejian that might have proved useful last year to Davis, a Democrat, when he was fighting for survival in the recall race.

“My friend Gray Davis over here, he started out in his term trying to go down the center of the spectrum,” Deukmejian said, but lawmakers of his own party “just kept pressuring and pressuring and pressuring him to spend more money.”

The former governors agreed that a major problem in Sacramento was the safe districts that lawmakers had drawn to protect incumbents. The lack of competition in all but a handful of races in the November elections has made party primaries the key legislative battles, leaving the Legislature more and more polarized as lawmakers appeal above all to their party’s base.

Wilson called it a “flagrant, inherent conflict of interest” for lawmakers to draw their own district lines. Deukmejian called for an independent commission, perhaps composed of retired appellate judges, to draw district lines.

“This would bring about a good structural change,” he said.

“Why don’t you have retired governors?” Brown suggested to laughter from the five dozen guests watching the discussion. “You have the four of us, two Democrats, two Republicans.”

Another reform proposed by Deukmejian was to legalize casino gambling to generate new tax revenue.

“I’m very surprised that my conservative friend here is advocating it,” retorted Brown, now the mayor of Oakland. “But once the horse is out of the barn, you have all this money, and I tell you we’ve got some problems in Oakland, and a good casino would go a long way to solve them.

“Give me a few new billboards, a few on scenic highways, and a few gambling casinos, and we’ll make it, let me tell you. We’ll have no more fiscal challenges.”

“That’s what you think,” Wilson said.

The gathering of four governors came as Schwarzenegger was struggling to resolve the multibillion-dollar budget hole that opened during the dot-com bust under Davis.

Just before the round-table talk at the KCET studios on Sunset Boulevard, the moderator, Lisa McRee, interviewed Schwarzenegger for the same program, “California Connected.”

To the central question of the program -- Can California be governed? -- he responded that it was “just a matter of attitude.”

“I don’t settle for it-can’t-be done,” Schwarzenegger said.

Schwarzenegger, who ousted Davis in the October recall election, touted his efforts to work with both Democrats and Republicans in the Legislature, arguing that the partisan gridlock that stymied Davis was a thing of the past.

“All this old politics is out the window,” he said.

Schwarzenegger left the studio before the round-table began, but a tape of his interview was played for the former governors when they took the stage.

Davis, his head cocked left to view it on a monitor, watched expressionless as Schwarzenegger blamed overspending by unnamed “politicians in Sacramento” for the state’s present mess.

The governors’ talk kicks off the third season of “California Connected,” a series jointly produced by four public television stations: KCET in Los Angeles, KPBS in San Diego, KVIE in Sacramento and KQED in San Francisco.

The program will run at 10 p.m. Thursday on those and six other public TV stations around the state. Public radio stations will rebroadcast the show at various times in the days ahead.

Producers of “California Connected” invited the former governors on the show to talk about what made it difficult to do their job and what they thought could or should be changed.

“I don’t think it’s a question that’s asked very often, and I think it really resonated with these governors,” said executive producer Marley Klaus, who described the series as “an entertaining public-policy show.”

“We feel really shocked and honored that this whole thing came together,” she said.

Schwarzenegger’s appearance at the studio was tightly controlled.

A phalanx of KCET publicists blocked reporters and photographers from witnessing his arrival at the studio. He posed for photographs with the former governors, but reporters were barred from seeing him.

“We’re following the request of the governor,” said Laurel Lambert, director of publicity for KCET.

Times staff writer Jia-Rui Chong contributed to this report.