Crusading Legislator Never Lacked Self-Esteem

SEN. VASCONCELLOS STUCK TO HIS IDEAS DESPITE LONG ODDS

Ten months after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down at a
Memphis motel, a young California lawmaker helped launch a campaign to
honor the slain civil rights leader with a state holiday.

The controversial idea became law -- 12 years later.

At the height of the Vietnam War, the same San Jose Democrat was rebuffed
three times when he sought to lower the voting age from 21 to 18. Two years
later, President Nixon signed the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,
giving millions of young Americans a voice in the nation's political process.

From creating a day of peace and a state self-esteem commission to
providing clean needles for drug addicts and marijuana for cancer patients,
John Vasconcellos has made a career as the California's Legislature's St.
Jude -- a champion of lost causes who occasionally beat the odds and gained
a measure of mainstream respectability.

As he heads for retirement this fall, this 72-year-old lawmaker is ending
his tenure much as he began: Tilting at windmills and enduring a torrent of
ridicule for his crusades.

Before term limits end his 38-year career, Vasconcellos is pushing to give
Californians as young as 14 the right to vote, overhaul state campaign
finance laws, cut fines for minor marijuana convictions, and require high
school students to take a parenting course before they can graduate.

"John Vasconcellos is insane," said Santa Clara resident Jim Bahn, a
marketing director at Hitachi Data Systems and father of two teens who was
infuriated by the state senator's voting age plan.

But derision doesn't deter the tousle-haired lawmaker, who has a fondness
for wearing withered Hawaiian leis over his faded suits around the state
Capitol.

"I'm not afraid to break new ground," Vasconcellos said during a recent
interview. "To be here and cover the old ground is really kind of boring.
Why bother?"

Charting new terrain became a hallmark early in Vasconcellos' career. In
many ways, Vasconcellos, who was first elected to the Assembly in 1966,
came to embody the stereotype of California as the loopy Left Coast.

Maui Home

He retreats to his Maui home to write treatises on the state of politics in
California and credits decades of therapy with keeping him grounded. He
once urged friends to envision themselves using tiny brushes to clean his
weakened arteries after heart surgery, and uses New Age phrases like
"wholeness" and "healing" to describe his philosophy. He's even proposed a
12-step recovery program for California that would extend term limits, have
the public pay for political campaigns and make it easier to raise taxes as
a way to repair the state's dysfunctional political system.

Of all his crusades, though, Vasconcellos will likely be remembered best
for his plan to create a special state body to examine ways to improve
residents' self-esteem.

The California Task Force to Promote Self Esteem and Personal and Social
Responsibility made national headlines in 1987 when Pulitzer Prize-winning
"Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau made it the butt of his jokes for two
straight weeks.

While Vasconcellos said the strips gave the self-esteem movement an
invaluable platform, it also forever tied him and his legacy to the
touchy-feely proposal that produced a report, sold all 60,000 copies and
closed up shop. Since then, Vasconcellos has worked to promote self-esteem
nationwide, pushed for laws that required state officials to integrate
self-esteem programs into their agencies, and worked to encourage
self-esteem programs in prisons and foster homes.

Claremont McKenna College government Professor Jack Pitney called the
commission "a sensible idea taken to extremes" of social engineering.

"In some cases he was ahead of his time, and in other cases he was simply
out of political time," Pitney said.

The self-esteem movement still elicits snickers, but it has become a
lucrative industry.

Among the senator's kindred spirits is Jack Canfield, author of a series of
inspirational books, including "Chicken Soup for the Soul," "Chicken Soup
for the NASCAR Soul," and "Chicken Soup for the Dog and Cat Lovers Soul."
His books have sold 85 million copies in 37 languages.

"It's a testament to John's self-esteem that he is not addicted to other
people's approval," said Canfield, who served with Vasconcellos on a
national self-esteem commission. "He is someone who stands up for what he
believes in."

While the self-esteem movement brought Vasconcellos national notoriety, the
senator has a long track record of taking on contentious causes that
eventually gained broader acceptance.

Early on, Vasconcellos was a strong advocate for bilingual programs. In the
1970s, he called on elections officials in largely Latino areas to print
sample ballots in Spanish and school districts with large numbers of
Spanish-speaking pupils to hire bilingual workers in their administrative
offices. While such programs are commonplace now, bilingual education in
schools produced a major backlash in the 1990s when voters moved to scale
back such programs.

In 1975, he pressed for a ban on the use of chlorofluorocarbons in hair
spray and other products in a bid to combat global warming, long before the
1997 Kyoto treaty took global aim at ozone-depleting chemicals.

And, almost from Day One, Vasconcellos fought to destigmatize marijuana. He
has carried more than 20 bills dealing with the illegal drug. Twice in the
mid-1990s, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed narrowly crafted Vasconcellos
bills that would have allowed Californians with AIDS, cancer, glaucoma and
multiple sclerosis to use marijuana to ease their pain.

The vetoes paved the way for medicinal marijuana activists to win support
for a ballot measure that makes it much easier for Californians with mild
maladies to obtain medical marijuana. The victory led to similar crusades
across the nation, with voters in more than a half-dozen other states
embracing the idea.

Tried and Failed

Other Vasconcellos crusades never got off the ground. He tried and failed
five times in the 1980s to get California to officially declare a "day of
peace." In 1972, he fought to abolish the death penalty. And he fought
furiously to fend off the popular "three strikes, you're out" anti-crime
laws in the 1990s, only to reluctantly support an unsuccessful, last-ditch
compromise meant to head off a tougher initiative.

Geoff Long, who worked with Vasconcellos for 12 years, much of it during
the lawmaker's chairmanship of the powerful Assembly Ways and Means
Committee, compared his former boss to an eccentric artistic genius who
sometimes paints a bad canvas or has a few awful songs on his album.

"He's a pioneer, and like most of the pioneers he probably got lost a few
times," said Long. "But they're also the ones that discover everything. If
you're not willing to get lost, you're probably not willing to find anything."

Not everyone sees the senator's quirky ideas as good policy -- and there
are more than a few in Sacramento who see Vasconcellos as a prime example
of a career politician who has been in office too long and needs to be
quietly put out to pasture, though none would say so for the record.

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the University of Southern
California, said that she sees the merits of term limits and that
Vasconcellos "to some extent, seems to be burned out."

"I'm beginning to think that for almost anyone 30 to 40 years in any one
position is too many," she said. "You lose your perspective, you lose your
idealism, you lose your creativity."

Vasconcellos remains unfazed. With time winding down, the senator is fond
of quoting former U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold.

"There's no such thing as courage," Vasconcellos said, paraphrasing the
Swedish diplomat. "Once you believe in something you just do it. That's how
I operate. If people want to laugh at it, that's their option."