State Sen. Steve Glazer pushes his brand of politics.
Steve Glazer is Democrat who is progressive on social issues, such as gay marriage. But he is fiscally responsible when it comes to finance and public employee unions, particularly ones like BART when they want to strike. The former Orinda mayor represents central Contra Costa County’s sprawling 7th district and puts himself in a centrist political camp. Glazer began his career and association with Gov. Jerry Brown as Brown’s San Diego State campaign manager while a student there in the 1970s. After a career in Sacramento as a Democratic strategist, he managed Brown’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign. He became a state senator earlier this year after winning a bruising special election against fellow Democrat Susan Bonilla to replace Mark DeSaulnier, who was elected to Congress. The Glazer/Bonilla donnybrook attracted $4 million of nondistrict money, much from unions supporting Bonilla. She will not run against Glazer next year. Unions targeted Glazer because he came out against BART workers striking. I caught up with Glazer at his Walnut Creek district offices.
Paul Kilduff: You’re a self-described centrist. Isn’t that an endangered species?
Steve Glazer: I’m trying to take it off the endangered species list and build a broader constituency for the center and what that means for improving our quality of life.
PK: How? Today, all you hear about, especially in D.C., is that there is no communication between the Left and the Right. Nothing can get done.
SG: What’s noteworthy is that a recent study about polarization in legislatures across the country found that California was the most polarized legislature. If you took the average distance between a Republican and Democrat in California, it was the widest chasm. When they took that same examination and the applied it to Congress, they found that California was twice as polarized as the United States Congress. So it’s apropos that you would give an example that you thought your readers might relate to better. Yet on a practical level, California is even more polarized than what they see happening in Washington.
PK: I’ve heard it said that most people are not completely conservative or liberal; that it’s issue-based.
SG: In my senate district, I think the common characteristics are that most people here are socially progressive yet much more fiscally conservative. So neither party speaks to their aspirations. This is a broad-brush analysis, but people see the value of government helping people. Yet all those values are grounded against budget constraints that somehow have to balance that desire to help people with what you can afford to do. Let’s use BART as an example. Would we like to see train operators make more money? I think most people would say we’d like them to make a good wage. But can we afford to pay them a greater amount, given the other challenges that BART is facing with an aging rail car system, with outdated technology, with station upgrades going unfunded.
PK: You tangled with BART’s employee union. Do you have something against public employee unions?
SG: That’s not my issue. They have the right to advocate forcefully for their point of view. In the case of BART, I felt that they should have worked it out at the bargaining table and not engaged in a strike [in 2013]. The consequences were too great for the people that need to get to their workplace, need to get to their medical appointment. For the ability of our economy to hum along, you can’t do it within a BART strike. I felt that it’s too critical an enterprise in our region to allow for a strike, and so I spoke out against it.
PK: Job one of the Democratic Party seems to be whatever unions want, they get.
SG: I think the Democratic Party fighting for the working class is an important value. The Democratic Party needs to reconcile all these various needs and desires in terms of advancing a party platform that you can govern by, and I think that’s where it runs into its problem. That to govern well and long is to be able to more carefully balance these values. Caring about working people and also wanting to be fiscally responsible for the long term.
PK: Is Gov. Brown a role model?
SG: Sure. I would definitely include him. Even in the ’70s, he was personally frugal, but he was also fiscally responsible in his governance of the state. It was mostly ignored because of other things that got in the way of that analysis. I worked for him in 1978 when he was re-elected as governor. I was in charge of 20 universities for him in that election, and then I was his deputy campaign manager for the United States Senate in 1981 and ’82.
PK: Did you get to ride around in his “everyman” Plymouth sedan?
SG: Yes, I did.
PK: Was it roomy?
SG: The back seat was pretty roomy, yeah, sure. I thought it was a fine ride.
PK: What do you drive, a Prius?
SG: No, I don’t. I don’t have anything unique about my ride.
PK: One issue that put you front and center was your legislation to rid California of all references to the Confederacy on public buildings, not including city names, so apparently Fort Bragg doesn’t have to change its name.
SG: For now.
PK: This was in response to the shooting earlier this year at the black church in South Carolina. If we hadn’t had that horrible tragedy, would we have had your legislation?
SG: I don’t know. But it woke my staff and me up to see whether there were any examples in California where we were celebrating the treasonous acts of the Confederacy. That’s where we then discovered that a couple of schools had been named after a Confederate leader and a few other things that we thought weren’t appropriate in California.
PK: It does kind of come across as being the ultimate politically correct thing to do.
SG: It has nothing to do with being politically correct. If you think that Thomas Jefferson was not somebody that we should put on our currency, because despite his amazing leadership and the writing of the Declaration of Independence, he had a slave, is that the same? Let’s have the debate about it. I can tell you a big difference. He didn’t vote to break up the Union, and he didn’t go to war to protect his point of view.
PK: What did you think of Gov. Brown’s veto of the bill?
SG: I thought the veto was a hollow defense of an unacceptable status quo. Local leaders have had decades to remove Confederate leaders’ names from places of honor in California.
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Age: 58
Birthplace: Sacramento
Astrological Sign: Leo
Book on Nightstand: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
Motto: When I dropped my daughters off to school every day, I’d tell them, “work hard, be nice, have fun.”
Favorite curse word: “Darn it.”
What would you do in the event of a zombie apocalypse? “Can I get seconds on that pasta?”
Website: SD07.Senate.Ca.gov
