Dan Walters: Flournoy's passing recalls era

As Capitol old-timers tell the tale, Houston Flournoy, a young college professor who had been elected to the Legislature in 1960, was playing poker with some of his Republican cronies in 1965 and told them that he'd decided to quit because he couldn't support his family on his $6,000 state salary and part-time teaching.

Flournoy's pals urged him to remain in politics and on the spot collected enough money to pay his filing fee to run for state controller – which, if nothing else, illustrates the random x-factor in political life.

Flournoy did run, and with Ronald Reagan leading the GOP ticket in 1966, defeated Democrat Alan Cranston and went on to serve two terms as controller before happenstance intruded again. Although Flournoy wanted to run for governor in 1974, as Reagan was stepping down, the popular governor had a handpicked successor in Lt. Gov. Ed Reinecke and Flournoy's chances were scant until Reinecke was involved in scandal and forced to resign.

Having captured the GOP nomination by default, Flournoy then found himself pitted against the survivor of a multicandidate Democratic primary, Secretary of State Jerry Brown, whose father, Pat, had been defeated by Reagan eight years earlier.

The two ambitious young politicians with polar-opposite personalities duked it out for the governorship of the nation's largest state and an automatic role in national politics. Brown was – and still is – an unpredictable, left-leaning will-o'-the-wisp fond of punchy quotes and symbolic acts while Flournoy was a serious-minded, even somewhat boring, academic with a centrist ideological bent.

Flournoy depicted Brown as a neophyte trading on his father's name while Brown capitalized on the Watergate scandal that had driven Richard Nixon out of the White House, and championed a political reform ballot measure. And the race was neck-and-neck until fate interceded once again: Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him two months before the election, inadvertently bolstering Brown's campaign theme. Brown won the governorship by a paper-thin, 177,000-vote margin.

This is all political history – ancient history to many. But it's worth recounting because Flournoy died this month at age 78, having lived long enough to see his old nemesis, Jerry Brown, return to state politics as attorney general and position himself as a likely candidate for governor in 2010.

Flournoy's passing is also noteworthy because he was one of the few living veterans of a particular age in Capitol politics, the 1960s, that many consider to be the golden age of personal camaraderie and political progress. Centrists such as Flournoy dominated the Legislature's Republican contingent in those days and pragmatists controlled the Democratic majority, making agreement possible on a variety of issues. But the 1966 election also marked the beginning of the end of that era.

Voters approved a ballot measure making the Legislature a full-time body, and while it also raised legislative salaries, it also made legislative careers more attractive to political careerists, which led to ideological polarization and what one might term cultural implosion. Politics ceased being the means to the end of policy as professional politicians turned their attention to fundraising and other career-enhancing moves. And as that syndrome took hold in the 1970s and 1980s, it led to scandal and a voter backlash in the form of legislative term limits.

Centrists such as Flournoy – centrists of either party – could not survive in today's Capitol. Their few latter-day successors, such as former Assemblymen Keith Richman (a Republican) and Joe Canciamilla (a Democrat), were ostracized by their caucuses when they attempted to reinstate the kind of intraparty cooperation that thrived in the 1960s.

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