The lame-duck state.

• Author: Foster, Douglas
• Position: California

California government is going to be a lot different when term limits take effect--and when Speaker Brown departs the scene after 30 years in power.

Behind the electronically controlled door to his corner office in the state capitol, Willie Lewis Brown Jr., slouched low in his executive's chair, fidgeting with a wad of telephone messages. Brown's secretary had written his phone messages in extra-large print on low-glare yellow paper because he has retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease that he's suffered in secret for years. A collection of African art was on display to his right, and an oversize computer screen partly blocked the view of sloping, lush green grass through the window to his left.

As speaker of the California Assembly, Brown is one of the most powerful politicians in the country. But he is also marked for extinction. Three years ago, California voters, enraged by economic recession and political corruption, focused on Brown and his Sacramento cronies as the cause of their pain and passed a radical term limits measure. After one more session, the man who once referred to himself as the "Ayatollah" of the Legislature and has boasted that his only political ambition was to be Speaker for Life will be pushed out of the institution he's served for more than 30 years--along with the entire legislative leadership.

I spent a few weeks in Sacramento at the end of the 1993 legislative term, talking to Brown and observing the effects of term limits on one state government. Term limits are a fad these days, and in some form or another have been imposed on some 16 state legislatures; active campaigns to impose them exist in six more states.

During the time I watched him, Brown went purposefully about the business of adding to his legacy, as if to show the voters just who it was they had cast off. But there was evidence of a fraying temper, as I noticed when Phil Schott and Richard Robinson, two powerful lobbyists for California-based insurance companies, stopped by to try to talk Brown into changing a piece of workers' compensation reform legislation that Brown considered his crowning achievement in 1993.

"We want to do some persuasion," Schott said smoothly as he entered the office.

"You can try. It ain't going to work!" Brown snapped, motioning the two of them to seats at his conference table.

Schott and Robinson cleared their throats, smoothed their color-coordinated green ties, and pressed their clients' case anyway: Insurance companies in California had been placed at a disadvantage in relation to national firms, they argued, by "an ambiguity" in the law. "Look, the legislation was designed to get the consumer the best possible deal," said Brown, moving toward an angry crescendo, the consummate insider delivering a populist performance in the presence of a reporter. "I'm telling you now not to f___ around with workers' compensation. That's what I'm telling you! Don't f___ with me on it!" he barked.

After the two lobbyists had departed, Brown said, "You know, there are no term limits for lobbyists."

Up by His Bootstraps

Sacramento, set gleaming on a dry, brown wedge of floodplain where the Sacramento and American rivers conjoin, was the fourth choice for California's capital. It stands remote from the state's power centers. Ringed by pear orchards and cornfields, it used to be primarily a farming town, but it now is assuredly a government town, swarming with bureaucrats and lobbyists. For the last 12 years, to get anything done here you had to go through Willie Brown.

An up-by-the-bootstraps migrant from a poor family in Mineola, Texas, Brown was a trial lawyer in San Francisco before being elected to the Assembly in 1964. Despite his credentials as a Great Society liberal, he won the speakership in 1980 by cutting a backdoor deal with Republicans. Second in power only to the governor, Speaker Brown has a hand in regulating the affairs of 31 million people and managing the eighth-largest economy in the world, a $780-billion-a-year enterprise. His style is comic opera, full of quick-witted wisecracks and bold poses. It played well when he was a maverick, speaking up for the underrepresented, but it has worn thin during the prolonged, painful decline of California's economy and highly publicized corruption probes that reached into Brown's circle.

California is still in the throes of an economic panic. The unemployment rate is the highest among industrial states. Nearly one in five jobs lost during the national recession vanished in California; one in five disappeared from Los Angeles County alone. So, spurred on by an organization led by former Los Angeles County supervisor Pete Schabarum, voters here did the natural thing--they blamed their elected representatives.

Few in Sacramento doubt that the speaker was the chief target of Proposition 140. "If Willie Brown had not been speaker in 1990, term limits would not have been passed," Jim Brulte, the lumbering Republican Assembly leader, told me shortly after I watched him conferring amiably with Brown on the Assembly floor. "Willie Brown is a very, very visible, colorful and controversial figure who evokes great passion in people. Because he is so controversial and so visible, it was easy to lump all the ills of the Legislature in his suit pocket--and then blame him."

If you say "term limits" in his presence even sotto voce, the speaker snaps to attention. "Terrible! Terrible! Terrible!" Brown said during one of our first interviews, shrugging his shoulders in rhythm with the exclamation points. "God awful!" Brown's is the standard anti-term limits litany: term limits are undemocratic because they force individual voters in particular districts to change representation when they ought to have the right to re-elect incumbents unto death (as they often do); and term limits shift power from the people's representatives to the governor as well as lobbyists, who never have to stand for election.

"I still can't believe it happened here," Brown said, the gnome-like grin long gone. "Participating in the electoral process is no longer a career option. It is simply a temporary way station, to be occupied by either those who are marginal or those who are extremely wealthy and idle."

Brown's dour prediction could be sloughed off as the self-serving bleat of an expiring politician. He's a dealmaker, a power broker, a convener of interests--in short, the living definition of the career...