SACRAMENTO — Even on the extremely fast track paved by term limits, Antonio Villaraigosa's race to power in Sacramento was lightning quick.
Only three years after arriving here as a rookie legislator, in his first elective office, Villaraigosa gathered enough support in the Assembly to push his popular colleague, Cruz Bustamante, out of the speakership months before he wanted to go.
Building allies in the Assembly as party whip and later as majority leader, and tirelessly campaigning for fellow Democrats across the state in the 1996 elections, Villaraigosa quickly captured the speaker's job.
In the back-slapping, favor-trading environment of the Capitol, he turned his considerable skills as a bipartisan schmoozer into a record of constructive compromise--including marshaling a massive, $9.2-billion school bond issue in 1998 and a $2.1-billion parks bond issue in 1999.
Although he served only two years and three months as speaker, he benefited hugely from a booming economy, which buttressed him as he shepherded bills through to expand health care for poor families, establish peer review of teachers and impose bans on assault weapons, among others. The accomplishments form the bulwark of his campaign for mayor of Los Angeles against City Atty. James K. Hahn, which ends in the June 5 runoff.
Yet Villaraigosa's inexperience also showed: A lackluster detail man by his own admission, he was forced by his weaknesses in the mechanics of policy to lean heavily on a strong staff as well as on intellectually gifted colleagues who didn't always agree with him.
Some fellow Democrats accuse him of padding his resume by claiming credit for bills on which others had done most of the hard work. He suffered a bitter break with his longtime friend and successor as speaker, Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks), that colored the last year of his term. Hertzberg is conspicuously absent from Villaraigosa's list of endorsers.
In his relatively brief tenure at the top, Villaraigosa was blessed with good timing. There were none of the fiscal or natural disasters that circumscribed the actions of past state figures. Nor was he there long enough to be saddled with a continuing crisis.
Yet his tenure did change him. The liberal who arrived here in 1994 after being elected from Los Angeles' ethnically mixed 45th Assembly District--fresh from tenures as a teachers union leader and president of the local ACLU chapter--emerged six years later with bouquets from conservative Republicans.
