The End of the Plank

SACRAMENTO — It was Monday night, and millions of Americans were watching the Chiefs battle the Steelers on television. Twenty-eight Americans were not. They were squeezed into plastic chairs in Room 122 of the Social Sciences Building at Cal State Sacramento. The course was Government 180, the topic was the separation of powers, and it was a credit to the instructor that only one of the students had nodded off to sleep.

Phillip Isenberg, veteran state legislator, novice college instructor, was doing all he could to pass along his passion for government. He read aloud from De Tocqueville. He told insider stories from his many days beneath the Capitol dome. He ruminated humorously about American politics and people.

“Forget about this,” he said, erasing an earlier diagram of a triangle of power shared evenly by the executive, legislative and judicial branches. “Instead, imagine government as a big bean bag chair that is kind of just moving down the pages of history all the time.”

Twenty-eight students hunched over their note pads and scribbled as one: Government. Bean bag.

“Americans,” he said, “are a peculiarly angry, distrustful collection of people.”

Americans. Distrustful.

“Everybody understands that a governor is supposed to be the big cheese. They don’t have a clue what the rest of us do. Sort of wander around in the political ether.”

Wander. Ether.

*

Just what Isenberg does do--or better, will do--is much on his mind these days. For 25 years, he has lived the political life. He has tasted the power, has run with, and at times battled, Willie Brown, Pete Wilson and the rest of the statehouse alpha-wolves. Along the way, he developed a reputation as one of Sacramento’s smarter cookies. Isenberg can make simple for wayward chroniclers the most awkward mechanisms of state government. He also can provide rare context, the long view, in a Legislature typically calibrated only to the crisis of the moment, the shootout of the day.

And now, at age 58, after 14 years representing Sacramento in the Assembly, Isenberg is about to become unemployed, given the old heave ho, 86’d. They have a new phrase here for what will happen to Isenberg and 33 of his colleagues come November. It’s called being “termed out.”

Termed. Out.

Six years ago, a peculiarly angry, distrustful electorate passed an initiative limiting state Assembly members to three two-year terms. Those already in office were given a maximum of six more years, the same as any newcomer. And now the time has come for the first wave to shuffle down the plank. Some go weeping, some scratching and biting, others litigating, hopeful a court will grant a reprieve. Still others, shifty as ever, have managed already to hop from one legislative house to another--nimbly defying the spirit of term limits.

There is much clucking around here about the coming waste of legislative experience, leadership, institutional memory. It also has not gone unnoticed that the citizen-newcomers who paraded in after term limits passed--”yeoman farmers from Palos Verdes,” as Isenberg slyly put it--have demonstrated no inclination to behave differently from those they replace. They are open for business with lobbyists, hew to party lines.

*

Isenberg seems almost bemused by it all. He has spent the past year preparing for his departure, plotting a second act for himself. He’s started to teach night courses, trying on the academic life. He is weighing offers from law firms. At the Capitol, he spends his days sorting through files, retreating from power.

He opposed term limits, and still believes they were a bad idea. How bad? He won’t say. Instead, he tells a story about Chou En-Lai. The Chinese leader had arrived in Paris for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. “Someone asked him,” Isenberg said, “ ‘Mr. Prime Minister, what do you think of the French Revolution now?’ And his answer was: ‘It’s too soon to tell.’ ”

He went on: “Now that maybe is an amusing way of avoiding a question, but the truth is nobody has a clue about what term limits will mean, other than that for some of us the experience has been personally meaningful.” His only prediction is that the eventual impact won’t measure up to the initial fuss, that the bean bag of government will keep tumbling along--with or without term limits, with or without Phillip Isenberg.

As he told his colleagues at a farewell ceremony: “It takes awhile, or it took me awhile, to understand that the facts are far more confused than I used to think.” As he told his class in Government 180 on Monday night: “There must be something to this screwy system of ours, because it’s the most resilient in the world.”

Screwy. System.