The trouble with term limits: the public seems pretty well satisfied with term limits in California. They don't even seem to mind not knowing much about the legislature. But that doesn't mean everything's all right.

On the long, lonely stretch of Interstate 80 between the state capitol and John Burton's San Francisco home, the billboards stood tall. "Tell John Burton," they said, "that 38 years is enough."

Term limit supporters placed those signs on Burton's commute more to taunt the veteran leader of the California Senate than to win the hearts and minds of Bay Area voters. But the billboards probably didn't hurt the cause. Californians last March defeated Proposition 45, a Burton-backed measure that would have allowed state lawmakers to petition their constituents for the right to run for another four years in the Legislature.

So Burton, the longtime lawmaker who served in the Assembly, followed his more famous brother to congress and then came back to a second career in the Legislature capped by two terms in the Senate, is now, officially, a lame duck. He will serve two more years before he is forced to leave Sacramento and go home to San Francisco.

But while Burton is going, it's still not clear that term limits are here to stay. The votes had barely been counted last spring when term limit opponents and political consultants began debating whether the defeat was due to the electorate's unfailing fealty to term limits or to other factors, such as a small and overwhelmingly conservative turnout and a proposal that was easily attacked as confusing, if not underhanded.

It seems likely that another attempt will be made, perhaps within two years, to adjust or extend California's limits, which are, along with Arkansas, Michigan and Oregon, the toughest in the nation. Enacted in 1990, the Golden State's term limit law caps Assembly members at three two-year terms and limits senators to two four-year terms. Legislators who serve the maximum are then barred for life from ever running again.

Term limit opponents, ironically, have found some encouragement in the reaction of two men who helped lead the campaign to defeat Proposition 45--longtime activist Lewis Uhler and consultant Dan Schnur.

Uhler believes that the measure never had a chance because it was so awkwardly drafted. Rather than simply asking voters to give law-makers four more years in each house, the authors of Proposition 45, basing their decision on reams of research from polling and focus groups, tried an indirect approach. The idea: Reward only the best legislators with additional terms by requiring them to get the signatures of 20 percent of their voters before running for an extra term.

"The message was, we love term limits and we're just trying to help them," Uhler said. "People saw through that as soon as they saw that legislators were the sponsors. We made it plain that this was a duplicitous measure."

Schnur, a Republican consultant who got his start in California politics as a press secretary to former Governor Pete Wilson, went further, using the measure's complicated two-step approach to raise questions about its intent. Schnur, and the opposition's campaign ads, suggested that the signature-gathering efforts the initiative would establish were exempted from California's campaign finance limits, creating a loophole through which lawmakers could raise unlimited amounts from special interests.

Add to that the fact that those interests strongly backed this measure--giving it a $10 million to $1 million advantage--and you had all the elements opponents needed to raise doubts in the minds of voters.

"They gave us the white hat," Schnur said.

OPPONENTS RAN SMART CAMPAIGN

Although they were vastly outspent, the opponents ran a smart campaign. They began before Christmas to get a jump on the state's early March primary. They saturated talk radio with guests and ran low-budget ads on cable television. Just before the election, Uhler persuaded a fellow anti-tax activist from Colorado to come to California with his 12-foot tall Trojan horse on a trailer, which toured the state and picked up valuable airtime on the evening news in several markets.

Their message was simple: Proposition 45 would kill term limits. Say no to career politicians and special interests. Vote no on 45.

That message easily outflanked the more complicated theme of the proponents, which relied in part on ads evoking the civil rights battles of the 1960s to reinforce the idea that voters should have the right to elect representatives of their choice.

"It was very complicated to explain," said Senator Don Perata, an Alameda county Democrat who was a driving force behind the initiative. "Any time it is difficult for voters to understand an initiative they think you are trying to short-sheet them."

Or as Bill Carrick, a Democratic consultant who produced the ads in favor of the measure, put it: "In the initiative process, you are guilty until proven innocent." Voters, in other words, are inclined to vote no unless they have a very good reason to vote yes.

And that certainly wasn't the case with the idea of loosening term limits. Californians simply like the law. For some, that position might be fueled by memories of the Legislature that immediately preceded, and some would say provoked, the 1990 initiative. That body was fresh from a corruption scandal that sent half a dozen lawmakers and lobbyists to federal prison on felony charges. It was dominated by long-serving members. In a few cases, offices were passed down to longtime aides who may not have known the communities they were elected to represent.

The new Legislature is far more diverse, with more women, more minorities and more people with experience in local government. Contrary to predictions, it seems less cozy with lobbyists, in part because hired advocates find it so much more difficult to establish deep, personal relationships with lawmakers who come and go so quickly. And with legislative aides also turning over much more frequently, the Legislature has not, as some warned it would, become putty in the hands of an unelected staff.

But the law has also clearly caused problems that trouble academics and longtime legislative observers, if not the voters.

For one thing, the Legislature seems to have yielded some of its stature to the executive branch. Although the governor, too, is term limited, the nature of that position makes it more powerful, and that power seems harder to resist when a legislator hasn't been around for a few years.

"When you're just here for a couple of years, you don't realize you can stand up to the governor and live," Burton said.

Another problem, and this one is counterintuitive, is that the new legislators, rather than being citizen politicians happy to return to the ranch, law office or schoolhouse after doing their public service, seem even more ambitious than their predecessors. With political mortality assured, they are hardly in office a day when they start plotting what position they are going to run for next. Along with that comes the need to raise more money for their campaigns. Sometimes it seems as if most of the Legislature is running for some other office or fundraising in advance of such a campaign. In the March primary this year, 15 of the 80 members of the Assembly were running for higher office, and another 15 were forced from office by term limits. One member declined to run for a third term. That means that this December, at least 31 of the 80 members sworn into the Assembly after the fall elections will be freshmen--a number typical in this term-limited era.

STABLE LEADERSHIP MISSING

Finally there is the question of legislative leadership. Many academics and longtime observers of the Legislature fret that (especially in the Assembly, where speakers now serve less than two years each) lawmaking is suffering from a lack of leadership.

Since former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown was forced out in 1995, the body has had seven speakers and has now settled into a pattern of electing a new one every 18 months. Typically speakers-elect are sophomores with three more years to serve, but they leave the office in their final year and serve their last months as a sort of speaker emeritus.

"Nobody can trust a speaker in the final term to raise money for the caucus," said Bruce Cain, a political science professor at UC Berkeley. "They're going to ease him out and give him the gold watch before the election. We are doomed to that cycle."

The result is that Assembly leaders haven't developed the clout with their members to enforce any sort of discipline. The body has had trouble focusing on major issues and seems more fractured--and the clear evidence was its handling of the No. 1 issue of 2001.

Last summer, as Southern California Edison, the state's second largest utility, teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, the Assembly, the Senate and the governor's office couldn't get together to pass a plan to restructure the company's debts. The Assembly did manage to cobble together 41 votes for a bill, but the vote was little more than a symbolic gesture because all parties knew it contained provisions that were so strongly opposed in the Senate that the measure would not even come to a vote.

Former Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg, a Democrat from the San Fernando Valley, disputes the notion that the Legislature's disjointed response to the state's energy crisis was a product of term limits. He defends the Assembly's deliberation and ultimate action on the solvency of the state's second largest utility, even though the measure ultimately died in the Senate.

"We were willing to take risks, to have discussions and to set forth a proposal on what we should do," he says. "It passed our house. If the governor had taken it up on the Senate, it might have passed there too."

Hertzberg, who is writing a book on the legislative process, says it's a myth that the Assembly is hampered by the frequent turnover of speakers. Until Jesse Unruh became speaker in the early 1960s and turned the Legislature into a full-time body, he notes, it was commonplace for leaders to serve only a term or two. The current speaker, Herb Wesson, is the Assembly's 65th, Hertzberg says, and 50 of them served two years or less.

Even though long-term speakers were in vogue for only a generation, experienced committee chairs were common. But now they are gone, too.

With the state facing a $20 billion budget shortfall, the Assembly Budget and Appropriations committees are both headed by members in their second terms, while the Revenue and Taxation Committee has a freshman, Assemblyman Ed Chavez, as its chair.

Some, remembering the heavy-handed tactics used by some speakers in the past, see the frequent turnover as a strength.

"It's like the difference between a river and a pond," said Assemblyman Rod Pacheco of Riverside County, a former Republican leader. "A river is constantly refreshed. A pond stagnates."

But even some who support term limits acknowledge that they haven't worked out entirely as expected.

"Opponents did warn that the bureaucracy would gain an advantage, and that there would be a shift in power toward the administration," Senator Tom McClintock said in a speech about term limits. "I believe this has happened. Inexperienced members are more likely to defer to the judgment of so-called experts than experienced members who have independently developed their own expertise."

NEW CONCEPT ON LIMITS

Is there a way to address these problems without gutting term limits or even damaging them? Maybe. One idea floating around the Capitol is the concept of actually shortening the total time allowed in office-from 14 years to 12-but structuring it differently. Instead of limiting members to six years in the Assembly and eight years in the Senate, under this concept, they could serve 12 years in one house or the other, or any combination of the two that worked for them and their voters.

That would give legislators more stature to stand up to the executive branch, reduce the job-hopping and constant fundraising, and strengthen the leadership.

"That would make it possible for some members to stay in the Assembly and invest in becoming experts on the budget or health care or whatever and still turn over the membership of the house," Cain said.

Schnur, the consultant who helped defeat Proposition 45, thinks this idea might have a chance to win.

"As long as the overall limit is shorter," he said, "it's an easier idea to defend."

Uhler, the anti-tax activist who coauthored the original term limits measure, said he'd be inclined to oppose any change. But this one, he said, at least could be subjected to an honest debate. He noted that he once proposed a similar reform for Congress that would have given members 12 years to serve in either the House or the Senate or both, in any combination.

"Reasonable people can differ as to what they think is appropriate," he said.

But Carrick, the consultant who tried unsuccessfully to pass Proposition 45, says he doubts a measure to allow lawmakers to serve all their time in one house would pass. It would suffer, he says, from the same problem that plagued this year's measure: too complicated.

To accept such an argument, voters first have to have some awareness of the Legislature, its strengths and weaknesses. But Carrick said he sat through 11 focus groups on the issue and came away stunned by how little connection California voters have to their elected officials.

"In 1990 you could have a focus group and people could tell you a great deal about Willie Brown or [former Senate Leader] David Roberti or their own legislator," Carrick said. "But the Legislature as an institution, as well as individual legislators, has become nearly anonymous to most voters.

"They just don't know anybody, good or bad, in the Legislature anymore. There was that old dichotomy, I hate the Legislature, but I love my legislator--there is none of that anymore. And it's hard to make the case that you should extend peoples' terms if they don't connect with them at all."

Carrick also learned through his research that voters have little interest in the academic arguments about the flaws of term limits.

"There is no inherent desire to fix the term limits problem," he said. "All of us who have been involved in politics can certainly argue the negative aspects of term limits on the legislative process. The voters don't express any interest in those. If you're trying to fix a problem for the voters, they don't know what the problem is."

Yet, given all that, Carrick thinks voters still might be open to the simple idea of extending the terms, giving one more to senators and two to members of the Assembly.

"It strips away all the complexities," he said. "I'm not saying it would be an easy campaign. I think it would be tough." But doable.

Cain agrees. "The right way to do it is to do it straightforwardly and accept the possibility that the voters might reject it, but use it to try to actually educate the voters as to why some fiddling with term limits would make everybody better off."

Either way, any change will come too late to save Senator Burton, whose final term expires at the end of 2004. And who is lining up to replace him?

None other than San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, the man whose flamboyant tenure as Assembly speaker prompted the 1990 initiative and is probably more responsible than anyone for California's experiment with term limits.

Dan Weintraub is the California political columnist for the Sacramento Bee's editorial pages. He has covered the state Capitol for 15 years.