Next week, Anthony Rendon will step down as Speaker of the California Assembly and enter the political books.

The 55-year-old is the third-longest-serving speaker in California history, behind only legislative titans Willie Brown and Jesse Unruh. Rendon’s tenure is even more remarkable given that he did it in an era of term limits, with a personality far more cerebral and restrained than the Machiavellian eloquence of his predecessors.

Rendon and me

First

met about four years ago and were so friendly that we text each other about once a week, rarely about politics, mostly about food and literature. He is running for state treasurer and will continue to represent his district until he retires in 2024.

I think he would have more fun teaching philosophy at his alma mater, Cerritos College. Yet he is not a shrinking pansy.

The Rendon I know is a funny, blasphemous man who lives to learn and learns lessons, even from humiliations. Like the first time he sat down with Brown, in an old-fashioned steakhouse in San Francisco, shortly after he became a speaker.

He’s way in the back and I see him holding court, Rendon told me

last Friday

while enjoying a delicious lunch at Str8t Up Tacos in Lakewood, a favorite of his. Old-school funk played in the background as zillennial diners chatted around us. Everyone said, you know, ‘He has cataracts, his vision is terrible.’ I waited about 20 minutes.

“And then I’m finally like, I better tap him on the shoulder so we can go eat,” he continued. ‘ And he said, ‘I started to wonder if you’d stare at me all night.

Rendon helped win back a Democratic supermajority in the Assembly, allowing the chamber to embark on an ambitious liberal remake of the Golden State, envied by progressives across the country and turning us into conservative punching bags. That is what makes his political denouement so surprising. Assemblyman Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) will replace him after a years-long battle that divided California Democrats.

If the departing speaker is bitter, he certainly didn’t show it during our lunch.

He wore his usual jeans and an ironed white shirt with the sleeves rolled up

just now

to his elbows. On his left wrist was a black leather bracelet. I didn’t want to experience the greatest hits of his career because that would have been boring. Instead, I threw random questions, and he offered short and long answers and always thoughtfully entertaining.

Rendon said Dadaism is a better guide to governing well (it’s all Situationism) than political biographies (unbearably boring). He ridiculed LA Councilman Kevin de Lens on performative politics: You walk down Skid Row for 30 minutes, I don’t care. That doesn’t impress me.

Rendon characterized a recent LA Times investigation of how the income of his wife, a consultant and nonprofit executive, grew as his power in Sacramento grew as sexist.

Most interesting about our hour-long conversation was Rendon’s skepticism about the role of his profession in creating a better future for the state.

I asked how he feels about California right now.

The same way I thought it would come in

He chewed on his taco for a moment.

A lot of good and a lot of bad. I think we have not inspired ourselves in the same way that we inspire others. It’s amazing to what extent California has such a paranormal appeal to people. And I don’t know if we think that way ourselves.

He blamed politicians for deflating public optimism about the state, mostly by trying to control the definition of the California dream. As an example, he cited a speech by a well-known legislator whom he did not want to name officially.

My fellow politicians were like, oh, he’s so good. Hey, so good.’ And I thought, he’s kind of boring. And he’s better than most! But it just sounds like boosterism. In California, I mean, the boosterism has sometimes been deadly.”

He credited William Mulholland, the Los Angeles civil engineer whose creation of a massive aqueduct that brought water from the Owens Valley to the San Fernando Valley changed the state’s water policy forever. Mulholland was also the architect of

the

St. Francis Dam, which collapsed in 1928, leads

LED

until the death of

more than

450 people the second largest loss of life in California history after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

It is best for politicians to give others a voice, Rendon concluded. I think that’s the best we can do.

Rendon has every reason to be suspicious of his colleagues. A #MeToo scandal among Democrats in the Assembly led to the resignation, temporarily ending the party’s supermajority. Closer to home, so many government officials in the cities Rendon represents in Southeast LA County have been charged, arrested, or convicted of political crimes that he memorably described the area as a corridor of corruption in 2021.

It was non-politicians who took the region from the brink, he said, eventually running for office himself when they didn’t like what they saw.

Do you want to hear my perverted theory? he said with a smile. Twenty years ago you were a good student from the Southeast [L.A. County] high school, and you go to college. And then you graduate and you go live in Pasadena or Westwood, wherever. House prices then made it unaffordable for people to do anything but go back to Mom and Dad.

And then you buy the house or you see the house across the street and you buy that, which is much cheaper than, you know, where your college-educated peers live. So you live in the community, and then you find out you don’t have the amenities, whatever that everyone else has, and you decide to run.

There are still a few suckers in the Southeast LA County government, Rendon concluded. But there is a whole new generation. They are not yet ‘in’ politics

HERE HE STRESSED THE “IN” LIKE THE SAYER “BE IN THE GAME NOT OF THE GAME”

. And they are good. They are really very good.

What advice would he give to Rivas, his successor?

I’m from Western California, and so is he, he said. We got the job done with Eastern California. You draw a straight line through California. Coachella, Inland Empire, Central Valley all the way to Redding and beyond. We’ve done our best to make sure everything comes close to fairness in terms of resources on their end of the line.”

During an election cycle, Rendon remembers storming the state to support candidates with multiple speeches a day and sometimes you recycle emails, right? And I’m giving a speech in Westwood. I’m giving a speech in San Francisco, giving a speech for Santa Barbara, and then I don’t know where I was, maybe near Hanford. I started giving this speech about the California dream.

“I looked around and thought, F. This isn’t the place for that. It’s false. It’s lying to people.”

He described his ignorance as typical of the “internal colonialism” that governs California politics, a sin made worse for him because the cities he represented have long lived in Los Angeles’ shadow.

You have to feel like you’re a kid in Bell of Walnut Park, and like you’re looking down at “the Alameda Corridor” and like, ‘Wow, look at that. There’s a job. There’s a job. And it goes right under me. And it just passes me by.’

What’s happening in Sacramento is important from a symbolic standpoint,” Rendon continued. “It’s important to formalize things. Politicians can sometimes stand in the way of change. But when the culture changes, everything changes.

I asked the last, obvious question: How would history remember him?

My chief of staff recently said: You were a wartime speaker who referred to the famous “consigliere in wartime” line in The Godfather, with the smartest advisers being the ones who stand up to face problems and know how to fight.

Rendon rattled off just a few of the trials California has been through since 2016 when he took the speakership: Donald Trump. Drought. COVID 19. Civil unrest in the summer of 2020. Misinformation about elections since then. A multi-billion dollar budget deficit that Rivas now has to deal with.

So we went through a lot of hard things, he said. And instead of curling up in a ball and just trying to protect

what we

what we had, we were aggressive and tried to do even more.

Rendon stood up and a voter meeting beckoned. He started walking out the door and then remembered a pack of tortillas he had left on the table. He grabbed them, grinned, and offered me one last “Godfather” quote.

Don’t forget the cannoli.