So nobly advanced

Seven score and eight years ago, the Union held, the great experiment in democracy carried on, turning on Abraham Lincoln's famous words to commemorate the national cemetery under construction at Gettysburg.

Then along came Willie Brown to turn democracy into a rigged game.

Not him alone, of course. You could say the system has been gamed from the get-go. Today U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, for example, leads his party in let's-filibuster-every-appointment-President-Obama-proposes-because-we-want-him-to-fail-at-every-step-and-serving-our-own-constituents-is-so-boring. Corrupt Democrats, reasoning rightly that their voters have forgotten they exist, take the under-the-table money and run, again, on their records.

Willie Brown, though, was the Grand Master.

He was Tip O'Neill "all politics is local" old school. He was good to San Francisco and The City loved him back, returning him many times to state office where his game board was set up to his deft maneuver.

The Assembly speaker learned from another Grand Master, former speaker and state treasurer Jesse Unruh who once said of lobbyists, "If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women and then vote against them, you have no business being up here."

Brown shook off almost every controversy that followed him. President Reagan had nothing on the Assembly speaker. Willie Brown's Teflon™© was weapons grade.

Accused by open-government activists of holding secret lawmaker meetings, Brown admitted to it and essentially told the public, "So what?" I took it a step further with this cartoon and put Brown in Lincoln's place; I figured this is a good week to post it. If he saw the cartoon at all, Brown might have smiled. Plink! See, not a scratch!

Only term limits could defeat Brown, who was the poster child for the term-limit initiative movement. Even then Brown bounced back as mayor of San Francisco, giving The City its very model of swagger and bravado and fedora-capped style. His nickname: Da Mayor.

The state has named the western span of the Bay Bridge — the older stretch that connects The City with Treasure Island — the Willie L. Brown Jr. Bridge.

Enough said.

Mr. Brown is upside down

Monument to the Old School politician. In these and the following, you can see Pat Oliphant's influence.

Then he re-formed into Da Mayor. Note the overwrought Ethics watchdog
in the top two cartoons.

I just read that a preparatory school named after Willie Brown, in San Francisco's under-served Bayview neighborhood, is closing because it could not deliver on its academic promise to students. In fact, it was one of the state's worst-performing schools.

It's too bad because, despite the former Assembly speaker and  San Francisco mayor's many faults and flaws, I think it's safe to say he looked out for the people he served.

Willie Brown was the target of many of my editorial cartoons, and if any of the Powers that Be ever even saw my cartoons, he would have cared the least. By far. He would have said "So what?!" because he bought weapons-grade Teflon®™, not the flimsy stuff Reagan wore. Nothing could bring Willie down, not scandals, ethics investigations, not even the Kryptonite that fells every other politician: Term limits. He just decided he'd like to be "Da Mayor" of The City, and took the job.

Brown was an Old School politician, no doubt having learned at the knee of his Assembly speaker predecessor Jesse Unruh, famous for two Old School quotes: "Money is the mother's milk of politics," and, about lobbyists, "If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women and then vote against them, you have no business being up here."

Even John Wayne couldn't do this. This was for what I believed was a
syndicate. That chicanery deserves its own future blog post.

That was Willie Brown, taking as much as he could, pushing the political envelope, and always seeming to one step ahead of his enemies.

Ethics investigations and FBI stings couldn't do it: He managed to elude any dragnets that ensnared others in his party.

Even those in his party couldn't get to him.

Lawmakers tried redistricting to nibble away at Brown's power. Nope, that didn't work, either.

et tu, Assembly?

Of course, I could be using the Bayview School's closing as an excuse to run my Willie Brown cartoons. Which is why I strongly encourage President George Herbert Walker Bush, former governors George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson,
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, former Attorney General John Van de Kamp, and anyone still bumbling about from the Reagan and Bush I administrations, to begin tweeting inappropriate pictures of themselves immediately.

George Deukmejian, Willie Brown, former Sen. Pro Tempore David Roberti … all part of that long tradition
of getting served by …  I mean, serving the people.