Marston Has Seen the Enemy, and It’s Reelection : Politics: Brief period in Legislature reveals ‘collective mess’ that keeps lawmakers from making real changes, Republican contends. Now he wants ‘a full term to give it a full shot.’

SACRAMENTO —  For six short months last year, Jeff Marston was inside . As an assemblyman from San Diego, he was immersed in the political tempest known as the California Legislature.

He cast votes, pushed legislation, raised campaign money, suffered lobbyists, and sat through Republican caucus meetings. Now that he’s out, he wants the public to know one thing about the Capitol.

“It’s a mess,” Marston said over breakfast last week. “It’s a collective mess.”

The Legislature that Marston describes is a landscape dominated by partisan politics but devoid of political courage, a place “paralyzed” by lawmakers too busy “butt-kissing” and scared to death of taking a stand.

It is a place where cooperation is lacking, and legislators are often forced to conduct their business in an “information vacuum” when it comes to following the wishes of their constituents.

Marston, 35, said the lessons he learned were enough to shatter his illusions about public office. But his time in the rarefied air of Sacramento provided a private epiphany of sorts--he calls it an “attitude adjustment”--and now he wants back in.

“I feel like there’s unfinished business,” said Marston, vice president of the Flannery Group, a San Diego-based marketing firm. “I’d like a full term to give it a full shot.”

He spent only six months as an assemblyman, representing a cross-section of San Diego that includes the neighborhoods around Balboa Park, Hillcrest and East San Diego. His tenure stretched from June, 1990--when he won a special election to succeed Lucy Killea, who moved up to the state Senate--to December, after losing reelection a month earlier to former San Diego City Councilman Mike Gotch. During that time, he was in session three months and a lame duck for two.

Before his whirlwind incumbency, Marston said, he thought he knew what it was like to hold public office. After all, he had spent most of his life working for politicians, serving as an aide to former U.S. Sen. S.I. Hiyakawa (R-Calif.), Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Coronado), and former San Diego City Councilwoman Gloria McColl.

But all of that experience didn’t prepare him for what would happen after Election Day. “It’s like you step off a spaceship, and now you’re on a different planet,” he said last week on a return trip to Sacramento for business.

On the planet called State Legislature, Marston said, there are two groups--Democrats and Republicans. Each eyes the other so suspiciously that there is very little attempt to form bipartisan solutions on crucial issues ranging from low-cost auto insurance to accessible health care.

“Nobody works together up here, not on anything,” Marston said, adding: “It’s hard to believe just how partisan it is.”

Likewise, there is no attempt to bridge the differences between competing interest groups.

“You have insurance companies who go up against the lawyers who go up against the doctors. They never work together,” he said. “They’re never thrown into a room and told, ‘This is the auto insurance problem, this is the health insurance problem. Fix it.’

“Every one of those people--the medical people, the legal people, the insurers--have all told me, in no uncertain terms, that they could probably come up with something where they would all lose and live with it because they would lose equally. No one’s made them do it.”

Adding to the lack of dialogue is timidity on the part of legislators, who are obsessed with staying in office. Officeholders know only too well that even the most routine of votes can come back to haunt them in a “hit piece” mailed out during their next campaign.

“They are terrified of being defeated. They are terrified of losing their jobs. Reelection is all important to them,” Marston said of his former colleagues.

“You’re terrified of every single vote you make because of the way somebody is going to twist it on you. . . . Everybody is afraid to piss somebody off. So, therefore, if I don’t do anything, I don’t piss anybody off.”

Meanwhile, the individual legislator doesn’t even have the benefit of his constituents’ input on the overwhelming majority of the votes he must cast. Marston said that, in his 10 weeks during the legislative session, he cast about 1,600 votes--most of them taken in an “information vacuum” based only on Republican analyses of the bills and arguments presented in oral debate.

“In about 75% of the cases . . . I had no idea what people thought about these issues, these bills. No phone calls. No letters. No visits. Nothing. Not from lobbyists. Not from constituents. Not from organizations.”

The result of all this, said Marston, is a kind of legislative “paralysis” that not only serves the people of California poorly but abruptly changed his own plans for a career in public office.

“You get there and, sure, you start daydreaming about a future. You daydream about the state Senate, Congress, and all that stuff,” he said. “I was up here for six, seven weeks and it had all been shattered. Totally shattered . . . because of all the forces that were tugging you this way and tugging you that way, all of the butt-kissing I saw going on around here.

“I got the feeling that if I really wanted to go to the top in politics, I couldn’t stand the stress, personally. . . . The revelation was that, totally compromising yourself, and worrying about every little thing you were doing, if you vote this way or vote that way, the stress wasn’t worth it.”

So in the third week of August, Marston came home to San Diego, called his office staff together and told them how he felt. He said he was going to stop worrying about how he looked and start doing what he thought was right.

“I said, ‘Look, if we can get through November (reelection), I want you people to know that you may want to prepare yourselves for a two-year job and that may be it. . . . I am not going to purposely go out there and try to tick people off, but I’m going to tell them the truth, I’m going to tell them how it is.’ ”

He had dinner and went bowling with Democrats, and met personally with Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco).

He once got in a shouting match with a fellow Republican on the Assembly floor.

In the end, he managed to eke out one bill in his name, a measure that raised $2.1 million for a state referral service for the disabled and elderly. He also amended another measure to stiffen methamphetamine offenses, and helped persuade former Gov. George Deukmejian not to cut $5 million from independent living centers for the disabled.

Marston then turned his attention to the November campaign, where he received yet another lesson in hardball politics. Assembly Republicans turned a deaf ear to his pleas for campaign money. When opponent Gotch launched a last-minute, direct-mail campaign, Marston was caught financially unprepared.

He lost by 617 votes. Now, he’s on the outside looking in. Last week, he exercised his privilege as a former legislator by mingling on the Assembly floor with one-time colleagues and sitting in a temporarily vacant leather chair.

Martson admits he is nostalgic and eager to run again for the Assembly. But he says this time it will be with a different expectation of what he will find.

“I don’t think you have a lot of leaders here,” he said of the Legislature. “I think you have a lot of people who wet their finger and stick it up in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.”