(In which the consumate politician pulls off the consumate con.)
Given San Francisco’s colorful – and often lawless and corrupt – history, former mayor Willie Brown may not be the most powerful politician the city has ever known. But on a state-wide basis, he was arguably the most powerful politician in California history. It wasn’t his longevity (eight years as mayor of San Francisco, 30 years in the California Assembly and – thanks to term limits – a never-to-be-broken record 15 years as Speaker) that gave him his power. Rather, it was his innate grasp of deal making, his patient ruthlessness and his use of financial backers that made him a force to be feared and respected. Nor is it the transformation of the San Francisco skyline and the Manhattanization of a hitherto lovely town that will mark his legacy, but rather one of the greatest public cons of them all, Assembly Bill 3300, formally known as the “Trial Court Delay Reduction Act,” but commonly referred to as the “Speedy Trial Act.” It was a thank-you present, so to speak, to Willie Brown’s big boy playmates and a gut punch to a California public that still doesn’t know what hit it. * Willie Lewis Brown, Jr., has made much of his humble roots in Mineola, Texas, where Jim Crow thrived and even the local cemetery was segregated. According to his official on-line biography, his “only hope of rising in the world was to leave East Texas for San Francisco, California, where an admired uncle had made a home for himself.” He evidently fancied Stanford University, but settled for San Francisco State, working his way through college and law school at a series of menial jobs. But he ended up playing with the big boys. After law school, Brown started an inner-city practice, ran unsuccessfully for the California Assembly in 1962 and was finally elected in 1964. I wasn’t around these parts back then, but he allegedly ran afoul of then-Speaker Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh, and spent the next couple of years of his Assembly career out in the cold, cementing friendships, demonstrating party loyalty and preparing for tomorrow. After nearly ten years in the Assembly, he put his name in for Speaker when Unruh stepped down. He was roundly defeated and would not be elected to that post for six more years. But once again he spent those years productively: courting powerful development interests throughout the state and particularly in his home base of San Francisco, and building up a lucrative law practice devoted largely to using his legal skills and political contacts to smooth the way for multi-million-dollar development projects. Brown’s efforts on behalf of the big boys paid off handsomely. On a legislative salary equal to that of a corporate middle manager, he commuted between San Francisco and Sacramento in speedy Italian cars and wore $6,000 speedy Italian suits. Even today, members of the California Assembly only earn about $116,000 per year plus a modest per diem and you’ll catch damned few of them wearing Brionis. In 1980, backed by a formidable fund-raising capacity and his ability to spread the wealth around to the re-election committees of those who sided with him, he was finally elected Speaker. For the next 15 years, until made ineligible by a new term-limits law, Willie ruled the California Assembly, doling out choice committee assignments and developers’ money to his friends and punishing his enemies the way he had been punished as a junior legislator (when he had challenged Unruh a few years before, he had been banished to an office the size of a broom closet.) He referred to himself as “the Ayatollah of the Legislature,” and others referred to the California legislature as a “barely disguised swap meet,” where Brown would collect “campaign contributions” from business interests in exchange for shepherding or blocking bills, and capitol lobbyists were routinely referred to as the “third house” in the legislature. But for all his power, that’s all it was: power. Brown himself admits, in his semi-autobiography, “Basic Brown,” that "[s]ome have criticized my years as speaker as having been without an agenda." This is unfair criticism, of course, as his agenda was very clear: power as its own end. * During his 30 years in the Assembly, he neither sponsored nor shepherded much in the way of legislation beneficial to anyone other than his rich friends. So was it a conscious legacy he was after when he sponsored AB 3300, a solution in search of a problem? Or was it, more probably, more payback to the monied interests? Nobody knows but Willie, and he’s not telling. (To be continued.)