Karen Bass: coalition builder: the first African-American female speaker in the nation has taken the reins in California.

• Author: Weintraub, Daniel

When Karen Bass came to California's Capitol in 1993 to be honored as one of 120 "women of the year," she was not impressed with what she saw. Then a community organizer in Los Angeles, Bass sat in on a committee and watched in horror as the chain-smoking chairman of the panel treated the public with disdain.

"I was appalled," Bass says. "At the end of the day I said, 'I would never do this. This was awful.'"

Eleven years later Bass was elected to the Assembly, her first elective office. And in May, she took over as Assembly speaker, the first female Democrat to hold the post in California and the first African-American woman to serve as speaker anywhere in America.

Bass will be working with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as he struggles to end California's perpetual budget deficits. She will also try to initiate a conversation about comprehensive tax reform in the Golden State, and probably, if she has her way, a tax increase. And she will work to provide hundreds of millions of dollars annually in additional funding for her top policy priority--foster care. She might even resort to a ballot measure to try to get that done.

That's an ambitious agenda for a legislative leader who already knows she will serve at most about three years in the job--she is termed out of office at the end of 2010. But Bass, 54, is not lacking in confidence. She believes she has the skills and the temperament to make progress in Sacramento despite the ugly fiscal situation and a polarized political climate.

"This is a heck of a year to become speaker," she says, sitting in her ornately restored office in the Capitol's historic wing. "In the best of all worlds, it would be wonderful to be speaker back in the days when we had tons of money and could build colleges and roads and do all of that. But I am very motivated in a crisis. I'm motivated to step up. I'm motivated to attempt to build the type of coalitions that I've been building pretty much all my life. If ever there was a place that needed a coalition, it is this place."

A PROBLEM SOLVER

Bass does not underestimate the challenge she faces in drawing together the competing interests in Sacramento.

"We need to build a coalition--in the Democratic Caucus," she says, smiling. Then, turning more serious, she adds: "You need to build one with the Republicans. You need to build one with the Senate. Part of what I have spent my life doing is bringing people together and solving problems. I am very pragmatic and...