Real Slick Willie

So we learn, in Basic Brown, how this 50-years-married 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. “Sex Scandals and the Socializing Politician,” one chapter is titled. (His advice: Don’t apologize for your fun!) A separate 10 pages is devoted to sartorial cautions: “Don’t Pull a Dukakis.” (Avoid wearing brown shoes with your–tailored, of course–blue suit.)

If Willie had intended to provide a meaty political memoir, we might find due notice of the key personnel behind his remarkable 14 years in the second (first?) most powerful job in Sacramento. 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.

It is that period, more than Brown’s subsequent eight years as mayor in a naturally hospitable domain, that should most interest political wonks. His tenure as speaker confounded conservatives, to slick Willie’s undying delight, until finally they found an opening with a well-timed initiative for term limits. Only that delayed-action device could dynamite him from the state house. 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.

Instead, Willie has “written,” through an oral history provided to his ghost P.J. Corkery, a book that has the flavor of politico bar talk. Lots of other names are dropped along the narrator’s political trail, with an emphasis on gossipy goings-on. The Sacramento soap opera may drag for outsiders, but it’s easy to skip over parts and pick up the drift. All the while, the central character remains in character–and a character. Self-admiring, unabashed, racy, and nearly always triumphant, he is the straw that stirs this tale. 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.

Which he is. 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. He thinks Stanford would be a good corrective to his admittedly lousy education in Jim Crow schools. A wise man suggests San Francisco State instead. Willie Brown the racial warhorse would never acknowledge it, but his experience is the best argument for leaving admissions free of preferences. His skills grew apace with his opportunities as he advanced through then-second-tier Hastings Law School and local legal activism.

Mineola is where the Willie Brown legend started, but it also provides one of the more intriguing bits of political color. Inevitably this Willie nods admiringly to the other one who usually made sport of his GOP opponents, Bill Clinton. The two were doing some horse trading after Bill became president when California Willie suggested an Amtrak stop for his lowly birthplace. The town had been bypassed by the railroad in the years since he’d boarded there for the West Coast.

Not surprisingly, Amtrak resisted tossing yet another uneconomic political bone. Few surveyed would get off a train there, Washington Willie relates. Brown says it’s who wants to leave that’s important. Sure enough, a little follow-up by the reader will discover that Mineola service resumed in 1996, and now there’s a refurbished station. About 10 people a day are served.

In the state house, Brown’s deft courting of legislators of both parties helped him maintain the speakership. The partisan battles, though bruising, were rather a sideshow. The Democratic interest groups ensured that market-oriented policy reform, applied to education or welfare or environmental controls, was going nowhere. Republican governors during nearly the entire period were felt on the margin, but any basic change depended on the ballot-initiative process.

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. 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.

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.

That such grinding gridlock followed so many liberal-left advances in the 1970s–enacted by Brown and other protégés 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. Those who attacked it from the right were, in his eyes, racists, dimwits, and bad dressers to boot. And to make matters worse, they came up with that silver bullet, term limits, with Willie’s name on it.

All that said, conservative activists will find common cause, so to speak, with Willie on one point: his open welcome to money in politics. As speaker he was early to grasp the power of channeling the dollars through his office, for distribution to needy (and loyal) members of his caucus. This served his interests and, he argues, theirs: He insulated the weak from being tempted by an ugly solicitation. Natty Willie Brown, you see, is too clean and smart to take a bribe. 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.

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. He could make a good case that the up-or-out world of Sacramento today has left the capital with relative political pygmies.

Then again, if stasis is the order of the day, does it matter?

Tim Ferguson, a native Californian, is an editor at Forbes.