A democrat pines for Pete Wilson

A couple of months ago, I was doing an on-air interview with KPFA radio about the state budget and found myself saying out loud “I never thought I’d ever say this, but I want Pete Wilson back.”
The interviewer burst out laughing.
Yes, Gov. Pete Wilson did things I strongly disagreed with, such as when he vetoed a bill on employment discrimination against gay people and when he frequently chose business over environmental protection — but he knew how to be governor.
If you have to have a Republican governor, it would at least be nice to have one who didn’t have to go through on-the-job training — and Wilson had actually been a mayor and state legislator along the way.
When the budget crisis of the early 1990s hit, he was a realist. He knew that new taxes and big cuts were needed.
He was very pragmatic about it. Each side would do the part they most hated. The Democrats would decide the cuts, the Republicans the taxes. And when a deal was reached, the governor called Republicans into his office one by one and used the power of his governorship until the number of votes was reached to pass the budget by a two-thirds majority.
Fast forward to 2009. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stubbornly refused to sign or support bills that needed to be approved by midnight Tuesday morning to keep the state from going into the hole by a few billion dollars more. Digging a $20 billion hole deeper for an abstract principle verges on political malpractice.
Schwarzenegger publicly said on Tuesday, “The legislators didn’t do their jobs.”
But what about him doing his?
The strange thing is that the governor’s relationship with the legislators of his own party is probably worse than with the legislative Democrats. Legislative Republicans believe he doesn’t work with them and isn’t committed to any of the same things. Most believe he doesn’t even know who they are.
Last September, when the governor attended a meeting of the Republican Assembly caucus, the then 32 Republican members of the Assembly greeted the governor by all wearing nametags that said “Hello, My Name Is . . .”
Years ago then-Gov. Ronald Reagan reportedly would stun legislators by just walking in to their Capitol offices on unannounced visits. That seems like ancient history.
The governor’s budget style in the most recent rounds is to present a “compromise budget,” one that includes things that any side wouldn’t necessarily like. But then he fails to take the next step. He’s inflexible in moving from his proposals, and he doesn’t spend the chair time with the individual parties finding out their bottom line and pushing them to get there.
When his “compromise” inevitably fails as a result, he attacks legislators for their ideological rigidity and assigns blame for the failure.
Last winter he actually installed a clock outside his office to show how long it had been that the legislature had failed to come up with a budget. I thought a similar public relations opportunity was missed by legislators for not installing a rival clock to mark the time since the governor last persuaded a single legislator to support one of his budget proposals.
I worked hard to get along with the governor and his office during my six years in the Legislature. He signed almost 70 of my bills, and I give him credit for going places that no Republican governor would go.
On levee protection and other items, I actually carried the administration’s legislation. He did have a staff that was pragmatic when given the opportunity.
But leadership comes from the top, and the question now is what the next steps will be. Being governor is not about being the blame-assigner-in-chief. It’s about making sure the job gets done. It’s realizing that the buck really does stop at the governor’s desk.
Right now, the governor should be assembling the parties in his office and presiding over them with hard-nosed diplomacy. He owns the veto pen, so no matter what is negotiated, he’ll get a lot of what he wants. But he needs to be flexible, and he needs to use the power of his office. And he needs to do it every day, most of the day, until this gets done.
Sometimes the best work of an elected official is not observed by the public. But the results are. That should be the motivator right now.
It is not productive to throw new issues on the table hours before budget deadlines, when those issues are not budget issues and have not been publicly discussed as part of the budget. The goal should be to identify differences and one by one resolve them, not dream up new differences and place them on the table for the first time at the last minute.
One of the dramatic failures of the current process is that Republican legislators have the power to block the two-thirds budget approval, a power they are exercising right now.
But we are months into the greatest state budget crisis in modern times — without them publicly saying what kind of complete budget they would support.
The governor and the legislative Democrats each have a budget proposal in its entirety out in public, but the legislative Republicans do not. You can’t get to a compromise unless you know what the each party’s positions are.
The Republicans have no public position, except that they don’t like taxes. Then what’s their proposal? There is no public proposal. The governor should use the power of his office to force one. That would bring a deal closer — and there could actually be a genuine public discussion about the options with every negotiating group having a proposal on the public table.
This process has been painful to watch from the outside. Closing 220 state parks? Kicking almost a million kids off health care? Stopping scholarships to those trying to pull themselves up? Limiting life-saving HIV drugs to Californians? We shouldn’t even be considering these.
It’s never too late for the governor to do his job. And if there was ever a time for him to start, this is it. He could make me not want Pete Wilson back.
John Laird of Santa Cruz is the former Assemblyman representing Scotts Valley and San Lorenzo Valley. He wrote this for his sfgate.com blog.