This week is a personal milestone, marking a half-century of writing about California’s ever-changing political ambiance.
My move into the Sacramento Union’s Capitol bureau on March 3, 1975, was part of its effort to become more competitive with The Sacramento Bee.
The Bee had a large Capitol staff and believed that its only real competition in the political arena was the Los Angeles Times. Al Donner, who had been the Union’s sole Capitol reporter, and I were determined to change that situation.
The Capitol was undergoing one of its periodic political upheavals, so it was — in a journalistic sense — a target-rich environment. Jerry Brown, the 36-year-old son of former governor Pat Brown, had been inaugurated as governor just two months earlier and was already becoming something of a political pop star.
Jerry’s vaguely left-leaning political persona contrasted sharply with that of predecessor Ronald Reagan, and he was making waves by filling his administration with civil rights advocates, farmworker-union sympathizers and environmental zealots.
Although Brown’s fellow Democrats held majorities in both houses of the Legislature, he was unpopular, having based his campaign on picturing the Capitol as a cesspool of corruption that needed cleansing. He had sponsored a successful 1974 ballot measure, the Political Reform Act, to limit campaign contributions and what lobbyists could spend on legislators to, as he put it, “two hamburgers and a Coke.”
Brown’s youth and brash disdain for unwritten Capitol protocol irritated a Legislature composed almost entirely of white middle-aged or even elderly men. One senator had been first elected to the Legislature in 1938, the year Brown was born.
There were a few women in the Assembly, but the first woman wasn’t elected to the Senate until 1976. Brown, on the other hand, appointed a number of women to major administration posts, most notably Rose Bird, whom he later named as chief justice of the state Supreme Court, and Adriana Gianturco, who earned legislators’ scorn for blocking new freeway construction and helping institute carpool lanes.
Brown’s clashes with the Legislature, his two presidential campaigns and battles between the two parties for control provided copious opportunities for scoop-minded journalism as Donner and I waged guerrilla war against the Bee. For several years, we beat everyone to the state budget before it was officially released by Brown.
Donner and I — and later a third Union reporter — had a lot of fun in those days. However, after covering the Capitol for a few years, I came to believe that California politics needed another approach and began writing a daily column about the relationship between California’s evolution and its politics.
That column launched in January 1981, continued for three years in the Union and 33 years more in The Bee before changing venues again in 2017 to CalMatters — about 11,000 columns so far, and still counting.
Among other things, the column allowed me to appraise the huge contrast between Brown’s first governorship and his second several decades later.
The contrasts extend beyond Brown’s persona, however. As California’s demography evolved, so did the Legislature’s — many fewer white men, many more women, Latinos and Asian Americans and many with gender identities or sexual orientations that people were less tolerant of in 1975.
That said, today’s Legislature is less overtly corrupt but more secretive and less deliberative than it was 50 years ago. Committee hearings on bills were genuinely pertinent then but are mostly meaningless charades now.
California has nearly twice as many people as it did in 1975 and its demographic attributes and its economy have undergone massive transformations. Sadly, the Capitol’s ability — or willingness — to deal with the political issues arising out of those changes has diminished.
