California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass earned her political stripes on the streets as a grass-roots activist for more than a decade. Her Community Coalition helped change the landscape of South Los Angeles by shutting down seedy low-rent motels and converting liquor stores to grocery markets.
Her colleagues in Sacramento had such faith in her, they elected her speaker last year, after her first term in the Assembly.
Now the powerful post looks like a booby prize, as the state battles its worst budget crisis in history and Bass tries to deflect voter anger with action.
And she has found that her activist days spent corralling competing community interests, battling entrenched bureaucracies and staring down a big-money liquor lobby is nothing compared to her new job: trying to persuade lawmakers to cooperate and keep the state solvent.
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Bass marked her first year as speaker this month -- just a few days before voters roundly rejected the bailout plan that she helped the governor campaign for. Her district includes the affluent and the poor, from Cheviot Hills and Westwood to parts of South Los Angeles. I visited her at her Wilshire Boulevard office on Friday, just before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled proposed cuts that would slash services for the elderly and infirm.
She told me she knew she was in trouble months ago, when she called legendary deal maker Willie Brown and asked the former speaker, "Mr. Brown, what advice do you have for me?"
Brown came up empty. "He told me 'None.' That basically he had never seen a situation this bad before."
Bad, and getting worse, it seems, by the minute.
There are a lot of places to cast the blame: An antiquated tax system that leaves the state too vulnerable to economic ebb and flow. An initiative process co-opted by special interests that has chipped away at the Legislature's spending power. Ego-driven politicians who hunker down in ideological foxholes.
And voters who are tired of buck-passing and posturing by the people they've sent to Sacramento.
That message seemed pretty clear to me last week, when voters defeated the stitched-together package of borrowing, tax hikes and program cuts intended to narrow the budget gap.
But where I heard "disgust," Bass heard "confused."
"I think the subject matter of the election was very confusing," she said. "And then I think there's a general confusion about why Sacramento's so complicated. It seems like, 'Why can't you guys get along?' "
