Mr. Inside & Mr. Outside : The Audacious Berman Brothers Built A Powerful Progressive Machine in California. But Can They Survicve a New Political Order?

By ALAN C. MILLER

March 29, 1992 12 AM PT

<i> Alan C. Miller is a Times staff writer based in Washington</i>

IT’S D-DAY ON THE REAPPORTIONMENT FRONT. A STATE SUPREME Court-appointed panel has released its proposed election districts. Michael Berman, a brilliant, blunt Democratic political consultant, is ensconced in his Beverly Hills office, located on the second floor of a nondescript high-rise. As usual, Berman, cigarette in hand, is disheveled, preoccupied. Fax machines clicketyclack with maps and demographic information. Phones ring nonstop. On one, Michael confers with his older brother, Howard, a resourceful, respected Los Angeles congressman; on the others, Democratic politicians eagerly await Michael’s analysis of their political futures.

For months, Howard and Michael Berman have been the point men on reapportionment for California’s congressional Democrats. Michael and Carl D’Agostino, his partner in a high-power political consulting firm, had crafted three plans for redrawing election lines following the 1990 Census. Howard had helped steer all three through the state Legislature. But Republican Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed them--sending the remapping task to a state Supreme Court dominated by GOP appointees. The court selected a panel of retired judges to recommend new lines.

Nothing cuts closer to the political bone than this decennial rite of survival, and no one knows that better than Michael Berman. After all, he had been instrumental in mapping the lines in 1970, and again in 1980, when the state’s Democrats opportunistically carved out districts to expand their congressional majority and pave the way for several of Michael’s closest political friends, including Howard, to step from the state Legislature into seats tailor-made to carry them to Washington. Now, those seats could be in jeopardy.

The early word this December afternoon is grim: The Democrat-controlled Legislature is up for grabs in 1992, GOP congressional gains appear inevitable and Westside Democratic incumbents are on a potential collision course. Rep. Henry A. Waxman and Assemblymen Burt Margolin and Terry B. Friedman--close Los Angeles allies of the Bermans--drop by to find out the latest. The smoke-filled office has an election-night feel; people anxiously sift through rough initial maps and demographic information, assessing the damage to the Democrats. Michael Berman strides from from one room to another, where youthful aides run the data through computers. He makes quick voter registration estimates. “Things will work out,” he reassures Friedman and others who wander in.

He means for “the guys”--a unique alliance of liberal lawmakers and well-heeled political fund-raisers based in Los Angeles’ Westside and the San Fernando Valley. Often called the Waxman-Berman Machine (Waxman, a Hollywood Democrat, and Howard Berman are the founding partners) this loose-knit confederation excels at manipulating the levers of political power and enhancing the lawmakers’ clout as advocates for causes such as Israel, environmental protection, health care, civil liberties and abortion rights.

Howard and Michael Berman are the Mr. Outside and Mr. Inside of Southern California’s most potent collective political force; the brothers rank among the state’s most powerful figures at a time when incumbents everywhere are on the run and respect for politicians is plummeting.

Yet underlying their careers is a central paradox. In pursuit of progressive, even idealistic goals, the brothers have resorted to tactics that critics call coldblooded and cynical. With a kind of swagger that has bred resentment among Democrats as well as Republicans, the Bermans have tenaciously clung to power, pushed partisan advantage to the hilt, turned their backs on personal and ideological allies--even taken them on. Both began as political reformers, but since they gained power, they have repeatedly fought reforms. Reapportionment, as vital as it is arcane, has been at the heart of many battles.

“They always run a little scared,” says Marc Nathanson, chief executive of Falcon Holding Group, a Westwood-based cable television company and a loyal Waxman-Berman fund-raiser. “They remember where they came from, how hard they worked to get there and how much they want to stay there.”

As it turned out, this year’s reapportionment neither led to the opportunities that the Bermans had sought for their allies nor proved to be Armageddon. Under the new plans, Howard Berman got a safe seat for reelection, though he was pushed deeper into the San Fernando Valley, as did most Waxman-Berman associates. State Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles), a charter member of the alliance, faces a big-bucks primary challenge by Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), a longtime antagonist, but several other formidable incumbents decided not to oppose the campaign muscle of the Bermans and their friends in fights for newly drawn districts. Most significantly, popular Democratic Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson, who saw the heart of his Westside-San Fernando Valley district merged with the core of Waxman’s Hollywood turf, opted to run for a new Valley and Ventura County seat. The guys, Howard Berman says, “could come off this relatively unscathed, and maybe with a new U.S. senator.”

This last will be their biggest challenge in a decade. Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica), a senior partner and the group’s ambitious blue-blood, is seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate to succeed retiring Alan Cranston. Michael Berman and D’Agostino are masterminding the campaign. Levine, though submerged in the polls, has stockpiled a massive campaign war chest and has lined up the broad support of more than 100 elected officials statewide.

“It’s a natural progression of their political machine,” says Bruce Cain, associate director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies. But, Cain says, Levine’s candidacy, while representing a potential breakthrough, is hardly do-or-die for Waxman-Berman. “Their power is derived from the fact that they are regarded as the smartest suckers in the party. They’re persistent. They pick their spots well. They’ll continue to march on.”

THEY ARE CALIFORNIA’S MOST POWERFUL POLITICAL SIBLINGS SINCE THElate Philip Burton and his brother John, both San Francisco Democrats, served in Congress together. After nearly a decade on Capitol Hill, Howard Berman has emerged as a key player on a range of domestic and international issues. He chairs an influential Foreign Affairs subcommittee. He is a leader on immigration. And he gained new stature by sponsoring a measure to impose economic sanctions on Iraq long before it invaded Kuwait. In a vote that antagonized many longtime backers and friends, he then supported the war against Iraq.

Michael Berman and D’Agostino--who named their firm BAD Campaigns, for B erman a nd D ‘Agostino--ran the bare-knuckles campaigns for California Democrats in 1990 that defeated propositions to overhaul the reapportionment process and that tried to turn back a term-limit initiative (which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn earlier this month). The state congressional delegation paid them $250,000 to devise its reapportionment plans. And in addition to Levine’s Senate bid, they are handling advertising for state Controller Gray Davis’ uphill campaign for the other U.S. Senate seat up this year.

The brothers are political gamblers--if they have the control to lower the odds. Indeed, they had tried to create their own gubernatorial candidate for the 1990 election. Their main motive: the expectation that a Democratic governor would sign redistricting plans protecting incumbents and creating new seats for other Democrats, including the Bermans’ friends in Sacramento who have congressional aspirations. Given California’s notoriously weak party organizations, if Waxman-Berman must act as if it is its own Democratic Party, so be it.

So, the brothers went “shopping” for a winner. Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, the early front-runner for the Democratic nomination and a longtime friend, had sought their endorsement, but by mid-1989, the Bermans had decided that Van de Kamp was a sure loser. They talked to Rep. Robert T. Matsui, a Sacramento Democrat, then courted former baseball commissioner Peter V. Ueberroth as prospective gubernatorial candidates. Both demurred. Next, Frank G. Wells, president of the Walt Disney Co., who had previously considered running for the U.S. Senate, was intrigued enough to join the Bermans, Waxman and Levine for lunch in Washington. But Wells, too, demurred.

Others were approached, among them actor James Garner and Joseph A. Wapner, the former California Superior Court judge who presides over “The People’s Court.” Both declined. Finally, former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein and her husband, Richard Blum, approached Michael Berman and D’Agostino late in 1989. Berman and D’Agostino asked Blum to put $3 million into the campaign upfront and made their standard demand: They would decide how every dollar was spent. Blum and Feinstein found such heavy-handed terms unacceptable. The Bermans were left without a horse. And, as they feared, Republican Pete Wilson was elected governor, with veto power over reapportionment.

For most politicians, such an effort to invent a candidate would be hubris. But the Bermans are not like most politicians.

“If you don’t test the limits, there’s a tendency to sell yourself short,” Howard Berman says. “And many of our endeavors are done with the notion that there’s a high likelihood of failure, but the stakes are worth pursuing. And in the end, what’s the loss? A little time and the tarnishing of an image that’s probably more mythic than real.”

HOWARD LAWRENCE BERMAN AND MICHAEL BARRY BERMAN HAVE BEEN TESTING the limits throughout their political lives, and at every turn, controversy has accompanied chutzpah like a third sibling. They have always been different, outsiders in a way, the vanguard of Jewish political power in a changing Los Angeles. Yet they have learned to play the insider’s game with great panache. In the process, they have allied themselves with others traditionally shut out of the ruling elite--blacks and Latinos. And Howard Berman has become a champion of historically underrepresented groups: farm workers and immigrants.

Theirs is a tale of family and friends that function as one, told with a distinctly Yiddish accent against a backdrop of an increasingly heterogenous state. But it also has a subtext of political hardball, for the Bermans will turn on allies if they believe they must do so to protect their own backsides. In 1980, Howard boldly tried to replace his patron, Democratic Assembly Speaker Leo T. McCarthy, triggering a prolonged, bitter struggle that still scars California’s Democratic Party. A decade later, the brothers spurned Van de Kamp, a fellow liberal who considered them friends.

“He was not just an underdog,” Howard Berman says emphatically. “Absent the most incalculable circumstances possible--like all the opponents dying--he couldn’t pull this race together.”

Van de Kamp, now in private practice, bitterly contends that loyalty proved to be a one-way street. “There’s an old line in politics that, unfortunately, in this case they proved,” he says. “In politics, there’s no such thing as permanent friends, and there’s no such thing as permanent enemies. There are only permanent interests.”

The irony is that the Bermans are renowned for an informal code of loyalty. This is unusual both among politicians, whose rivalry for turf, campaign funds and the limelight tends to produce loners, and political consultants, who are often hired guns. But Van de Kamp was never part of the innermost circle. He was never “family.”

On the surface, Howard and Michael are opposites--”Jekyll and Hyde,” quips an associate. Howard, 50, is polished, engaging. At committee hearings, dressed in conservative suits, he mixes one-liners with probing questions. He swims three times a week in the House pool. Michael, 44, is unkempt, chain-smoking, puffy-eyed and publicity-shy. He’s most at home in the confines of his office, filled with maps and overlays of the political and ethnic makeup of L.A.’s legislative districts. As for physical fitness, he has said: “I am a 40-year-old man in an 80-year-old body.”

Howard is a mensch , liked even by political adversaries. Curly-haired and often bespectacled, he is disarmingly unassuming, given his reputation: A Republican brochure once called him the “coldblooded” boss of a “ruthless political machine.” Michael is abrasive, irreverent, stunningly frank in private, though he rarely speaks on the record. Yet friends find him entertaining, challenging, even endearing. Howard is married; Michael is not. Janis, 46, and Howard have two daughters. The family moved to a Washington suburb in 1983, but Janis never warmed to the capital’s self-important ways, and the family returned to Sherman Oaks in August.

Michael Berman lives in a one-bedroom condo above the Sunset Strip; friends describe the decor as “early library”--books and magazines strewn everywhere. He tends to eat in dark, smoky, meat-and-potatoes places. He drives an old Chevrolet Caprice Classic littered with cigarette butts. “In a good year,” D’Agostino jokes, “Michael must spend $200 to get his clothes pre-wrinkled.”

But, for all their apparent differences, the Bermans are described by associates as being two sides of the same coin. “They’re both shy. They tend to be intensely private, fiercely loyal. They’re generous to the core of their being. The similarities are much greater than the contrasts,” says Alameda County Supervisor Don Perata, who worked for Howard and with Michael for five years. “To say they are brothers does not do them justice. . . . It’s as though they pick up each other’s thoughts by radar.”

Both love to gamble. Howard’s game is poker--where his ability to read his opponents and mask his own hand parallels his legislative skills. Michael is so adept a blackjack card counter that friends say he has been asked to leave Las Vegas casinos. Waxman recalls playing hearts with them in college: “After every game, Howard and Michael would analyze every play, every hand. They loved the challenge of trying to figure out how to win.”

Two stories reflect their mutual regard. A political strategist who has worked with Michael Berman on various campaigns says Berman has a standard retort when a candidate can’t or won’t do something that he recommends: “Howard could do it,” he mutters. “Howard would do it.”

Gene Smith, Howard Berman’s administrative assistant, recalls presenting him with a tough hiring decision. Candidate A was a Princeton graduate with an MBA; Candidate B had not completed college. Smith’s recommendation was Candidate B, but she wasn’t sure Berman would agree. “The smartest person I know never graduated from college,” Berman responded. “My brother.” They hired candidate B.

JOSEPH BERMAN, HOWARD AND MICHAEL’S FATHER, WAS A SCHMATAH SALESMAN; he peddled textiles door to door. Born in a Polish village, he was 12 and spoke no English when he arrived in New Jersey. He learned quickly and graduated from New York University, where he met Eleanor Shapiro, a fellow student. They were married in 1934 and, several years later, moved to Los Angeles.

Joe Berman had studied to be a rabbi and remained an Orthodox Jew. “The notion of anti-Semitism loomed large in his perspective,” Howard Berman recalls. “Israel was very important, not simply as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy but because what happened in Germany could happen anywhere.”

Such attitudes made their mark on the sons. Nathanson, a longtime friend of the Bermans, calls it “the Jewish bund mentality”--a reference to communal pulling together in European ghettos. “It came from the kind of turbulent politics of their parents,” he says. “You go into government service and you help the underdog. You do it tough and you do it mean and, above all, you do it to win. But you don’t put money in your pockets.”

The brothers grew up in the middle-class and heavily Jewish Beverlywood neighborhood. Howard attended UCLA and became active in the local chapter of the California Federation of Young Democrats. In 1959, he befriended Henry Waxman, a fellow student who headed a committee to draft Adlai Stevenson for the presidential nomination. They were drawn together by political values and something else, Berman recalls--”not having a lot of dates.”

Against a backdrop of the anti-Vietnam War and free-speech movements, Waxman and Berman led a Young Democrats reform faction that wrested control of the group from Assembly Speaker Jesse M. Unruh, whom the young insurgents accused of bossism. Michael Berman organized a Young Democrats chapter at Hamilton High and, still too young to vote, helped elect Waxman to the Assembly.

In 1968, Waxman decided to take on Democrat Lester A. McMillan, who had represented the Westside for 26 years. Michael, who left Berkeley and UCLA before graduating, and Howard Elinson, a young UCLA sociologist, ran the campaign. They devised a new approach to canvassing: They carved the district into three basic demographic segments and sent separate mailings to each, based on ethnicity, race and age. This was how politicians have communicated with constituents for decades--”You probably did not send a lot of Jewish committee members to Irish wakes,” Michael Berman says--but now it was being implemented with computers. Waxman won.

In 1971, Waxman became chairman of the Assembly committee that oversaw reapportionment, and Michael Berman joined the committee staff. They tried to create a new district for Howard Berman in his back yard of Beverlywood and Cheviot Hills, but Gov. Ronald Reagan vetoed the plan. Undaunted, Howard moved into the district that ran along the Santa Monica Mountains from Hollywood through the San Fernando Valley three months before the primary and challenged Republican Assemblyman Charles J. Conrad, another 26-year incumbent. Through public records and door-to-door stumping, Michael gleaned individuals’ party affiliation, age, occupation and ethnicity and tailored the mail. After Berman won an 11-candidate primary, Michael was concerned that President Richard M. Nixon’s impending landslide would drag his brother down. So he got an endorsement from a GOP group and used it in a mailer to 5,000 registered Republicans proclaiming, “Republicans for Nixon-Berman.” It read: “Mr. Berman and President Nixon have many traits in common. Both are hard-working, practical men who avoid radical extremes.”

Berman won easily. Nearly two decades later, Howard Berman acknowledges: “It certainly was expedient. I never said I was pure, and I never said I was proud of everything that I did.”

Howard Berman quickly made his presence felt in Sacramento, helping elect McCarthy as Speaker. As a reward, McCarthy made Berman the youngest majority leader in California history. Berman also allied himself with Gov. Edmund G. ( Jerry) Brown Jr., and helped to enact the nation’s first agricultural labor law. He steered measures to Brown’s desk creating the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and imposing stiff penalties on California banks that joined the Arab boycott against Israel.

By late 1979, McCarthy was eyeing a 1982 bid for statewide office. Berman was McCarthy’s chosen successor, but as the 1980 elections approached--with reapportionment to follow--the Bermans and other Democrats feared that McCarthy would use the speakership to fill his own campaign treasury. Berman also worried about his succession prospects. When the Speaker refused a bold Berman plan to swap jobs, Howard, at Michael’s urging, launched a campaign to unseat him.

With the allegiance of a narrow majority of Democrats, he took the bitter fight to the voters, running a dozen races against McCarthy-backed candidates. Campaign spending for Assembly races nearly doubled between 1978 and 1980, soaring to $13.7 million. Ultimately, McCarthy backers and the GOP minority agreed to make San Francisco Democrat Willie Brown the Speaker. McCarthy became lieutenant governor in 1982.

Such a defeat would have ended some careers. But the brothers moved on. Philip Burton, the Democrats’ point man on congressional reapportionment, made Michael his partner in redrawing the lines. Burton and Berman pushed Democratic gains to extremes and took care of their friends. In 1982, Howard Berman got a seat in a district that stretches from south of Mulholland Drive over the Hollywood Hills to Studio City and Sherman Oaks and into the northeast San Fernando Valley. Levine, an Assembly lieutenant, got a coastal district. And Matthew G. Martinez, an obscure Monterey Park councilman whom the Bermans guided to a 1980 Assembly victory, also went to Congress.

In Congress, Berman has been aided by his ties to Waxman and Levine and their prodigious fund-raising bases; the three, who collectively contribute to other candidates, gave $601,924 in 1989-90. Advocates of campaign-spending reform say this is tantamount to influence-buying within Congress.

In the House, Berman played a key role in negotiating the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. He authored measures to curtail the spread of anti-ballistic missile technology and to prohibit the Administration from selling arms to nations that support terrorism. And he has gone to bat for social services for immigrants.

“He’s willing to spend a lot of time on issues that aren’t very sexy but are important to people they affect,” says Rep. John Bryant (D-Tex.). “There aren’t many people like that here.”

MICHAEL BERMAN RUNS POLITICAL campaigns much the way he plays blackjack. By devising a disciplined game plan and astutely observing the playing field, he can systematically lower the odds of defeat in a process over which he has limited control.

He’s also willing to make up his own rules. Berman regards polling as a waste of funds because he can either figure out the information himself or acquire it for free from media surveys. He conserves advertising dollars until shortly before Election Day. And he distills campaign messages down to simple, direct points--overly simplistic, even misleading, critics say--to capture voters’ attention and move them.

Berman and D’Agostino, 57, formed BAD in the wake of the speakership fight, primarily to run campaigns for their friends and their causes. D’Agostino, a charming man with a trim white beard and a doctorate in physical chemistry, jokes: “We’re the only company in the country with an Italian as the accountant and a Jew as the hit man.”

Late in the 1986 primary season, when BAD’s races included Gray Davis’ bid to become state controller, Berman fractured a knee bone and was confined to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Computers were brought in. Aides took his dictation in eight-hour shifts. “It was our most productive year,” D’Agostino recalls. “He was a captive. I’ve threatened every election since to break his leg and send him to Cedars.”

Berman and D’Agostino are exceptionally talented, but they also benefit from a mystique created by their association with powerful officeholders. Politicians often assume--sometimes incorrectly--that hiring BAD brings “the guys” along. Thus, a combination of a Waxman-Berman endorsement and BAD’s involvement can be enough to scare off would-be primary opponents.

The consultants have made their presence felt through “micro-targeted” mailing and heavily televised ballot-initiative campaigns, tactics that provoke howls of protest. “Slate mailers” are a uniquely California device. These cards tout endorsements from prominent politicians and community leaders and urge voters to back candidates for public office--from governor to local boards--and to support or oppose various ballot initiatives. Berman and D’Agostino’s is the impartial-sounding “Voter Guide”--but it includes a picture of a donkey and the words “Vote Democratic.” It contains a required disclaimer that it is not an official party mailer, but critics complain that it still looks like one.

In 1990, BAD sent out 8 million full-color slate cards and follow-up “mailograms” in the primary and 9 million in the general election--with hundreds of thousands of variations. Assumptions are made based on characteristics such as whether a woman uses Ms. or Mrs. or whether a resident owns or rents. Most candidates listed on the mailer, and groups supporting or opposing a given ballot measure, pay to be included. In 1990, the partners received a total of $5 million in slate-mailer fees; their profit exceeded $1 million. Yet, Berman and D’Agostino say profit is not their motive. BAD rejected a lucrative offer from tobacco firms to oppose a 1988 cigarette-tax initiative and pitches by timber, insurance and other industries.

“There’s a lot of fakes in the consulting business, but those guys are good,” says state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), an unlikely admirer. “It’s too bad they are not ‘Have Talent, Will Travel’ so they could be hired by Republicans.”

BAD has as many critics as fans. In 1984, it attacked Proposition 39--a proposal to shift the reapportionment process to a panel of retired judges--by charging in TV ads that it would politicize the judiciary. After the election, Assembly Speaker Brown, who helped pay for the ads, called them “the most exten sive collection of con jobs I’ve ever seen.”

In 1990, BAD portrayed reapportionment Propositions 118 and 119 as efforts to help fat-cat special interests (presumably by electing more Republicans in the guise of reforming government). Actors James Garner, Jack Lemmon and Bea Arthur appeared in ads that raised the specter of environmental plunder and higher insurance rates. Republicans called the Democratic campaign a fraud; some of the same industries that the ads excoriated helped finance the Democrats’ $5.6-million campaign. But Brown called this campaign “a work of genius.” The ads were widely credited with overcoming the propositions’ commanding early leads in the polls.

“I think the reapportionment ads were brutally honest,” says Michael Berman, twisting his unruly black hair in his fingers. “I don’t think anybody is that interested in reapportionment altogether. It’s consummate insider baseball. A slight plurality favor, in the name of ‘reform,’ a process that is intrinsically biased one way or another. Nothing else was at stake.”

He is indignant when asked about the firm’s reputation for playing hardball. “We don’t play fast and loose with the truth,” he says. “We’ve never attacked a candidate personally. We’ve never hired a private eye. Whatever dirty things campaigns do, we don’t do. Do I have any questions about attacking a guy’s public policy record? No.”

What about going for the “hot buttons” in the TV ads? “Do they want them to be the ‘Federalist Papers’?” he responds. “The other side can make them just as hot.”

Berman and D’Agostino weigh in heavily with their candidates. Berman worked closely with L.A. City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who aspired to run for mayor in 1989, to win high-profile victories for the citywide slow-growth Proposition U in 1986 and the anti-oil drilling Proposition O in 1988. Then, in 1988, memos written by Berman for Yaroslavsky’s mayoral campaign were leaked to The Times (Berman said they were stolen). In acerbic language, Berman told the lawmaker not to waste his time attending City Council meetings; instead, he should pursue affluent fellow Jews for contributions so tenaciously that “the Yaroslavsky campaign becomes the United Jewish Appeal.” He urged the councilman to become the candidate of environmentalists: “Hug every tree, moon every mountain, stop every building.”

After the leak, Yaroslavsky awkwardly distanced himself from the firm. Eventually, he abandoned the race.

The Yaroslavsky memos, Waxman-Berman confidants say, were mild compared to their colorful predecessors. No more. “The memo he did for Mel (Levine’s 1992 Senate race) was so boring it was like a piece of white bread,” laments attorney Lisa Specht, one of many who miss the BAD old days.

THE FUNERAL HAD BEEN A somber affair on a chilly Sunday at Hillside Memorial Cemetery. Joe Berman had died during surgery after a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day, 1989. At a friend’s Beverly Hills home, amid coffee cake, fruit and wine, Howard recited prayers for his father. There were heartfelt hugs from Waxman and Levine, Assemblymen Margolin and Friedman, state Sen. Rosenthal and City Controller Rick Tuttle--all charter members of the alliance.

“There are the family, the friends and the clients,” says a Sacramento aide familiar with the Waxman-Berman operation. This was family.

Waxman and Berman have long resented being called a “machine”--with its connotation of Chicago-style ward politics. They have no jobs to dispense, and no one has ever accused them of enriching themselves in office. But they do control electoral turf--California-style. And some contend that the young anti-Unruh reformers of the ‘60s have become, in some respects, the political Establishment of the ‘90s.

“They have spent too much of their time defending the status quo and not enough using their might to promote progressive change,” says Harvey Rosenfield, founder of Voter Revolt, a nonprofit citizens’ group.

For example, as an assemblyman, Howard Berman introduced a bill for Common Cause, the self-styled citizens’ lobby, to fund legislative campaigns publicly and limit spending. But before it got to the floor, he suddenly dropped it. Common Cause claimed that he yielded to colleagues’ fears that the measure would lead to strong challengers. Berman says that Michael persuaded him that the bill would have made it impossible for challengers, like Howard was in his 1972 race, to offset the advantages of incumbency.

In 1988, BAD handled the campaign opposing two initiatives to overhaul California’s campaign finance rules. Both passed, and Proposition 73, which received the most votes, was enacted, although the courts later struck it down as unconstitutional. Howard Berman says the spending limits for Proposition 68, which included partial public financing, were too low, and that both propositions would have banned the transfer of contributions between candidates and would have undermined party discipline. It also would have curtailed the clout of Berman, Waxman and Levine.

Michael Berman concedes that public financing might decrease corruption “at the margins.” But, he contends, limiting spending means restricting campaign involvement and free speech. The American political system, he says, “is uniquely open, uniquely hurly-burly and probably shouldn’t be messed with for only marginal gain.” In the end, Howard Berman acknowledges, he is more interested in advancing progressive goals than in changing the process--especially if the reforms undercut his political agenda.

Newly imposed term limits for state lawmakers, which the Bermans fought unsuccessfully, may mean more frequent battles for Waxman-Berman to defend its turf. But with its campaign and fund-raising clout, the political turnover may create new opportunities for the alliance.

When it comes to reliance on well-to-do contributors, Levine’s Senate race is Exhibit A. Drawing heavily from affluent Jewish donors and the Hollywood community, Levine has already raised more than $5 million. Although he supports campaign-spending reform, Levine has declined a call by opponent McCarthy--the Bermans’ old nemesis--to limit spending, on the grounds that it would favor the better-known lieutenant governor.

Levine has been dubbed the “Stealth” candidate because of his low public profile. This is vintage Berman and D’Agostino: Focus on fund raising until voters tune into the campaign; then unleash a barrage of TV ads and targeted direct mail. Political pros consider this a high-risk approach during a year when four hotly contested Senate primaries, as well as the presidential race, may make it difficult to cut through the cacophony of paid commercials. But BAD has proven the experts wrong before.

“This will be the defining year,” says Levine, who calls his bid “a mission to redefine the Democratic Party.” The question remains whether he and his allies can win a big race and raise their national profile.

Waxman, meanwhile, aspires to move up in the House; and despite rumors that Howard Berman is considering a 1993 mayoral bid, he sees his immediate future there as well.

Where, then, do the Bermans expect to be in 10 years? “There’s this childish quality about us,” Howard Berman says with a wry smile. “We keep thinking that we control our destiny. We rarely do.”