Visiting Michael Berman, the political savant and California kingmaker who died last week, was a throwback to another time.

Hey worked

from a shabby office, blinds drawn to thwart every ray of sunshine. A blue curtain of smoke hung from the ceiling, like a nicotine curtain.

Lunch might have involved a spirit drink, or two.

But it’s not Berman’s defiantly unhealthy lifestyle that stood out among the tanned and beautiful people who surrounded him in the glossy climes of Beverly Hills and

Los Angeles’

the west side.

Rather, it was his extraordinary political acumen coupled with a passion for anonymity.

It was a standout feature decades ago, when Berman was at the height of his abilities as the operational brains behind the powerful Berman-Waxman political machine in Los Angeles.

It’s all the more remarkable in today’s era of relentless self-promotion, when even the most mediocre political strategist turns up at post-election seminars, podcasts, and the gaseous cable talk show circuit.

Berman spoke sparingly to reporters, rarely agreeing to be identified if he did. Anus newspaper Saturday The night of his death at age 75, the LA Times scrambled to find a photo to illustrate Berman’s obituary.

There was nothing to get.

“He was running things,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a retired USC political science professor and longtime friend of Berman’s. “He didn’t run for stuff.”

Before time and technology caught up, the Berman-Waxman machine was an irresistible force in California politics, grooming candidates for positions from City Hall to Sacramento to Washington.

The principals were Michael Berman; his older brother, Howard; and their former colleague in the UCLA Young Democrats, Henry Waxman.

“Machine” is a word they hated.

“It implies patronage and corruption,” said Waxman, who became one of the country’s most prolific and influential liberal legislators during 40 years in Congress. “That was not what we were about.

The Berman-Waxman Machine and we’ll stick with that designation since the currency wasn’t about greased palms or leveraging public services like garbage collection in exchange for votes. Rather, his strength was campaigning and political communication. And that was years ahead of its time.

Michael Berman and his cohorts pioneered the pooling of campaign money to elect like-minded ideological allies, as well as the art of sophisticated targeting and voter persuasion. It is standard political practice today, but relatively new decades ago and quite labour-intensive.

Tom Epstein recalled how it worked in a special election for the state assembly in 1977. After data

what were

Collected manually from voter data, the recruiting firms received specific demographic information to use when they knocked on doors in West LA and Santa Monica.

“We got four color-coded brochures with different photos and messages aimed at different audiences,” said Epstein, a campaign staffer in the Assembly contest who went on to work as a political strategist in the Clinton White House.

“One was for older people,” Epstein recalls, “one for younger people, one for Republicans, and one for middle-aged Democrats.”

It was decidedly low tech, but effective. Democrat Mel Levine won the race and eventually served in Congress alongside Waxman and Howard Berman.

In addition to campaign advice, Michael Berman has long been the Democrats’ indispensable man in the highly partisan process of redistricting, the drawing of political maps once every decade that follows every census. With an encyclopedic knowledge of population and voting patterns statewide, he helped the party cement its power in Washington and Sacramento.

It’s impossible to trace everything back to him, said former Democratic Party chairman John Burton. But we know.

Of course, Berman was hardly infallible.

Before moving to Congress in 1983, his brother helped wage a costly, ugly, and ultimately unsuccessful battle to install Howard Berman as Speaker of the House that tore the legislature apart.

In 1988, a leaked strategy memo, in which Michael Berman made racist and sexist remarks in addition to a number of insults, helped undermine the mayoral prospects of then-Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky.

Berman, who disbelieved in polls, suffered the consequences when he dropped out in a few races in the US Senate in 1992. (Levine and Gray Davis were defeated by Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, respectively,

in the Democratic primaries

).

In perhaps the greatest humiliation, Howard Berman lost his seat in Congress when he and fellow Democrat Brad Sherman secured a newly elected seat in the San Fernando Valley in 2012. By then, California voters had taken redistribution out of the hands of politicians and the likes of Michael Berman and turned it over to an impartial citizen panel.

Whatever Michael Berman thought of that

highs and lows remained unspoken for public consumption anyway.

“He didn’t mind putting his face out there,” said Bill Boyarsky, a former political writer and city editor of the LA Times, who often sparred with Berman.

“He didn’t care about being nice to a reporter, pleasing a reporter, or dealing with the press,” said Boyarsky, who hosts a podcast, “Inside Golden State Politics,” with Jeffe. “It was of no value to him.”

What Berman cared about was winning elections, which he did more often than not for a long time.