Real Slick Willie
FERGUSON, TIM
Real Slick Willie The uncrowned king of California politics remembers—selectively. BY TIM FERGUSON It’s a safe bet that jaunty Willie Brown, the longtime speaker of the California Assembly and...
...He just isn’t telling the whole good story...
...Willie Brown the racial warhorse would never acknowledge it, but his experience is the best argument for leaving admissions free of preferences...
...BY TIM FERGUSON It’s a safe bet that jaunty Willie Brown, the longtime speaker of the California Assembly and then mayor of San Francisco, would not write a boring book...
...Few surveyed would get off a train there, Washington Willie relates...
...That such grinding gridlock followed so many liberal-left advances in the 1970s—enacted by Brown and other prot?g?s of Philip Burton, the San Francisco congressman and builder of an enduring machine—meant this: In the 1980s and early ’90s, Speaker Brown, onetime street lawyer for the dispossessed, owned the status quo...
...The town had been bypassed by the railroad in the years since he’d boarded there for the West Coast...
...This, to his undying bitterness—as can be inferred from the fact that he has barely anything to say about the slip-up by which it passed and doesn’t as much as mention the name of Pete Schabarum, the longtime Los Angeles County supervisor who engineered the exit...
...One would be Richie Ross, who as a Brown chief of staff and afterward, as a political consultant, shepherded the coalition of Democratic party interest groups—the public employee unions, the environmental and trial bar, and the social-welfare lobby—that put and kept the liberal black Democrat Willie Brown in power through the state’s last Republican era...
...A wise man suggests San Francisco State instead...
...The Sacramento soap opera may drag for outsiders, but it’s easy to skip over parts and pick up the drift...
...Then again, if stasis is the order of the day, does it matter...
...This served his interests and, he argues, theirs: He insulated the weak from being tempted by an ugly solicitation...
...Hastings Law School and local legal activism...
...A separate 10 pages is devoted to sartorial cautions: “Don’t Pull a Dukakis...
...The prisons and their guards, big donors to all, gave no quarter when it came to budgets, and all efforts to undo the Democrats’ districting gerrymander were thwarted...
...Which he is...
...The Democratic interest groups ensured that marketoriented policy reform, applied to education or welfare or environmental controls, was going nowhere...
...About 10 people a day are served...
...Instead, Willie has “written,” through an oral history provided to his ghost P.J...
...His advice: Don’t apologize for your fun...
...As speaker he was early to grasp the power of channeling the dollars through his offi ce, for distribution to needy (and loyal) members of his caucus...
...And to make matters worse, they came up with that silver bullet, term limits, with Willie’s name on it...
...Those who attacked it from the right were, in his eyes, racists, dimwits, and bad dressers to boot...
...At times, he is so much the story that only a third-person reference to “Willie Brown” will do, as if the man is already the legend...
...Natty Willie Brown, you see, is too clean and smart to take a bribe...
...All that said, conservative activists will fi nd common cause, so to speak, with Willie on one point: his open welcome to money in politics...
...Selfadmiring, unabashed, racy, and nearly always triumphant, he is the straw that stirs this tale...
...Of course, he relishes recounting how the FBI tried to nail him on just that, only in the end to sting one of his GOP foils instead...
...He is as full of himself as a good storyteller can be...
...It is that period, more than Brown’s subsequent eight years as mayor in a naturally hospitable domain, that should most interest political wonks...
...He could make a good case that the up-or-out world of Sacramento today has left the capital with relative political pygmies...
...most powerful job in Sacramento...
...The two were doing some horse trading after Bill became president when California Willie suggested an Amtrak stop for his lowly birthplace...
...Ultimately, to his credit, Brown goes beyond the dinner-party riff to offer a spirited case for the practicing politician, whose art he mastered and of which he is genuinely proud...
...So we learn, in Basic Brown, how this 50-yearsmarried man—he and the Missus long ago reached an understanding—squires lovely things around town only after bracing them to be ignored while he works the room...
...Brown says it’s who wants to leave that’s important...
...All the while, the central character remains in character—and a character...
...Mineola is where the Willie Brown legend started, but it also provides one of the more intriguing bits of political color...
...Corkery, a book that has the fl avor of politico bar talk...
...Thanks to this basic balance of power, stasis remains the order of the day in California lawmaking even now, such that Indian casinos—funding wildcards, in fact—are, by far, the most active battleground for political action in our largest and once most interesting state...
...The partisan battles, though bruising, were rather a sideshow...
...His skills grew apace with his opportunities as he advanced through then-second-tier Tim Ferguson, a native Californian, is an editor at Forbes...
...He thinks Stanford would be a good corrective to his admittedly lousy education in Jim Crow schools...
...And he hasn’t...
...Sure enough, a little follow-up by the reader will discover that Mineola service resumed in 1996, and now there’s a refurbished station...
...Republican governors during nearly the entire period were felt on the margin, but any basic change depended on the ballot-initiative process...
...Lots of other names are dropped along the narrator’s political trail, with an emphasis on gossipy goings-on...
...If Willie had intended to provide a meaty political memoir, we might fi nd due notice of the key personnel behind his remarkable 14 years in the second (fi rst...
...Proposition 13’s big property tax cut in 1978 had hamstrung the novel spenders even as it shifted power to Sacramento (which kept the high income tax), and the state schools cornered the biggest slice of the pie with a subsequent initiative constitutional amendment...
...Avoid wearing brown shoes with your—tailored, of course—blue suit...
...Only that delayed-action device could dynamite him from the state house...
...Inevitably this Willie nods admiringly to the other one who usually made sport of his GOP opponents, Bill Clinton...
...In the state house, Brown’s deft courting of legislators of both parties helped him maintain the speakership...
...Arrived in San Francisco in 1951 from bootblack origins in Mineola, Texas, initially to stay with a bookie uncle, Willie brought his single mom’s brio and brass...
...Not surprisingly, Amtrak resisted tossing yet another uneconomic political bone...
...His tenure as speaker confounded conservatives, to slick Willie’s undying delight, until fi nally they found an opening with a well-timed initiative for term limits...
...Sex Scandals and the Socializing Politician,” one chapter is titled...
Vol. 13 • April 2008 • No. 29
