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Even his Republican opponents agree that the savvy John Burton is "good for his word and shows respect."

In the 1970s, after a fancy San Francisco bar ejected him for being long-haired, he filed a bill forbidding discrimination on the length of one's locks. The bill passed. Those were the good old days. In the 1990s, frustrated with policies that he said hurt the poor, he offered, with angry sarcasm, a bill to make being poor a crime. It did not pass.

Today, bills filed by John L. Burton have a better chance, because he is California's second most powerful politician, after Governor Gray Davis. At 68, after a career in Congress, as Democratic state chairman, and in California's state Assembly and Senate, he has become a gadfly with clout. One of the last liberals of his era, Burton is the man to see in Sacramento.

The 45th president pro tempore of the state Senate keeps in mind a constituency he calls "ordinary people, poor people, working stiffs." He is presiding over a resurrection of liberalism in California as remarkable as his own. Twice, Burton has heard rumors of his own demise.

In 1999, a mild heart attack at a Lake Tahoe labor dinner led to emergency angioplasty. In 1982, he courted death and threw away a career in Congress "because I was whacked-out and chemically dependent on cocaine and nitrous oxide. I started going goofy, and I put myself into Bethesda [Naval Hospital in Maryland]," he recalls calmly. "If I'd had another $10,000, I'd be dead. I had no money. I owed the drug dealer, owed loan sharks, couldn't beg, borrow, or steal money. It was within 24 hours of the filing time" for the US House seat he had held since 1974, "so I was unopposed. I walked away from a safe seat."

Burton's experience reinforced his empathy with underdogs. When he speaks on alcohol or drug addiction, legislators listen. They also listen because in a time when politicians consult pollsters on what to say and do, Burton's beliefs are vividly authentic. He counsels younger politicians, quietly and without his trademark saltiness. "Say what you mean. Mean what you say. Vote your conscience," he tells them. Photos of famous politicians adorn the Victorian opulence of his office in the 1874 State Capitol, along with a quote from John Quincy Adams: "Always vote for a principle though you vote alone, and you may cherish the sweet reflection that your vote is never lost."

Persistent and passionate, he is the most Massachusetts-like of California Democrats. "He's like Tip O'Neill," says Leon Panetta, a former White House chief of staff and a former member of California's congressional delegation. "John has fundamental beliefs, something you don't see much in politics today. Guys like Tip" - speaker of the House from 1977 to 1986 - "had a bottom line. Sure, you cut deals, but there was a sense of right and wrong, and you don't cross that line." Panetta recalls the time, as congressmen, "when some of us thought we'd find him at the bottom of the Potomac. Now he's back at the pinnacle of what he loves to do, committed to serving the public. At the same time, he can stand back, look at the whole picture, and laugh. He's in nobody's shadow now."

Another Bay Stater some compare Burton to is Senator Edward M. Kennedy, one more "kid brother" who has emphatically made it on his own. The most frequent comment I heard from California politicians was "John was always in Phil's shadow." On the San Francisco shoreline, towering as he did in life, stands a 10-foot statue of Phillip Burton. In Congress from 1964 until his death in 1983, Phillip Burton helped welfare mothers, minimum-wage workers, coal miners, and the environment. The statue stands amid parkland rescued from real estate developers. Were it not for Burton, the area near the Golden Gate Bridge might today resemble a high-rise Fort Lauderdale. He was also a genius at gerrymandering, redistricting California's congressional map to a huge advantage for Democrats.

Phillip Burton hoped to be House speaker, but in 1976, he lost by one vote a contest for majority leader to Jim Wright of Texas. In California, his savvy produced a parade of proteges, including his brother, John, whom Phillip helped send to the state Assembly in 1964, then to Washington in 1974. "Was I hung up with the little brother complex? No," John Burton says when asked. "When I went to Congress, people would say, 'That's Phil Burton's little brother.' It gave me an identity. Being his brother was always fine with me. I'd pick up his friends and very few of his enemies. Tip was wary of Phillip, but Tip was OK with me."

O'Neill said in 1975, "If Phil had half of Johnny's blarney, he could be president, not just speaker." The late John Jacobs titled his 1995 biography of Phillip Burton A Rage for Justice. US Representative J. Joseph Moakley of Massachusetts, who served with both brothers in the House, says: "Phil ate, breathed, and slept politics, and nothing else. John has more interests and more charm." The interests include sports, books, and movies, amid an encyclopedic taste for trivia. Tom Hayden, the longtime California activist who served in the state Senate, cites Burton's ethnic roots: "He comes from a working-class Irish background, where he inherited a strong belief in fairness and justice."

John Burton's mother, of Irish descent, married a doctor who moved his family from Milwaukee to San Francisco in the 1930s. The younger son has the Hibernian gift of gab, a long memory, and a short temper. His friend Warren Beatty used Burton as a model for Bulworth, a movie about a politician afflicted with fitful attacks of furious candor.

In Sacramento, those who know John Burton endure the occasional Vesuvius of vulgarity because they know they might also hear the latest joke, a political tidbit, a relevant lyric from Rodgers and Hart or Gilbert and Sullivan, a tip on a horse, or a recommendation on movies, of which he sees many. Burton speaks his mind in a demeanor that state Senator Dede Alpert, a San Diego Democrat, calls "volcanic, morphing into Irish charm." State Senator James Brulte, the Republican floor leader, who has argued with Burton for years, says: "If I yell at you, we're enemies for life, because I never yell. John yells at the drop of a hat. The yelling doesn't mean anything. That's John's way of letting off steam. Frankly, since his heart attack, we want him to release steam rather than keeping it in."

Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr. of San Francisco, Burton's friend for half a century, says: "We scream and argue almost every day about issues. But there's no malice. It disappears almost instantly. Five minues later, it's as if nothing happened." Because Burton's heart is on his sleeve, because his father taught him "to put a dime in the blind man's cup," his temper and gruff mien may be a defense mechanism. It has not hampered his progress from class prankster to supreme pragmatist.

"It was 1951 at the ROTC at San Francisco State [College]. We were lined up alphabetically, and to my left, as always, was John Lowell Burton. That's how we met, and the friendship was instant," Brown recalls over breakfast in San Francisco's North Beach. "John was a basketball player on a team with all black guys. He was captain, a two-hand shooting guard. And a roustabout. He was as poorly dressed then as he is now. But he was also a social activist." After college, Burton served two years in the Army, then worked as a bartender in North Beach, which in the 1950s was home to jazz, the beat generation of poets, and a plentitude of marijuana.

"He'd been doing grass forever," Brown says. During Burton's addiction troubles in the 1980s, the two stayed close. "John never lost his dignity," the mayor says. "But he was erratic." During that time, Burton was divorced (he remains single), and one of his best friends, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, was assassinated in his office at City Hall. But he says of his descent into drugs: "No excuses, no excuses." In 1982, "He quit cold turkey," Brown says. A three-week rehabilitation in Arizona did it. "I was lucky," Burton allows.

He practiced law until Brown, then speaker of the Assembly, asked him to run again in 1988. "I won't run, but I'll walk," Burton groused. So he did. A term-limits referendum pushed Brown out of the speakership, so he ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1995. In 1996, term limits forced Burton out of the Assembly and into a run for a state Senate seat, which he won easily. After he became Senate president in 1998, friends in both parties called to congratulate him, including Vice President Al Gore and US Senator Thad Cochran, a Mississippi Republican. "John Burton! What a great story!" exclaims House Democratic leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri on a visit to San Francisco. Lou Cannon, the longtime California reporter who covered Burton in Sacramento and Washington, calls it "an American success story. A lot of people get second chances. They get voted out of office, but they don't always do well with a second chance. John's a better legislator the second time."

John Burton and Willie Brown were elected to the California Assembly in 1964 as committed liberals at the high tide of the Great Society. But after Ronald Reagan was elected governor in 1966, Burton reacted to a conservative era with impish whimsy. During an annual ritual, a class photograph outside the Capitol, Reagan sat smiling amid the legislators, including future governors George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson. Far to Reagan's left in the front row sat long-haired Assemblyman Burton, grinning and flashing his fingers in a V-shaped peace sign. In 1973, Reagan called Burton "a nut" and added: "Sometimes I think Assemblyman Burton is the one man in Sacramento who has the most to fear from the squirrels in Capitol Park." Burton was fighting a Reagan-backed anti-spending ballot question. After California voters rejected the plan, Burton invited reporters to watch him feed the squirrels. Burton also led and won the fight to override Reagan's veto of more funds for mental health hospitals.

Almost three decades later, as some Sacramento Democrats opposed a special vanity license plate honoring Reagan, "I got a call from Mrs. Reagan, who wondered why the bill was bottled up in committee," James Brulte, the GOP floor leader, recalls. "I spoke to John, knowing that he hates all these special plates. 'He was a president,' I told him. 'He is a Californian.' John got back to me, saying, 'Tell Mrs. Reagan we'll take care of it. I owe it to her for all the [expletive] I gave her husband.' I relayed the message without John's colorful language." Reagan admirers got their vanity plates, and Brulte's admiration of his opponent increased. "There may never have been an issue on which he and Ronald Reagan agreed, but he understood the appropriateness of the honor. He did the right thing," Brulte says. "It's one of the reasons that whenever John passes, they'll have to have his funeral at that new ballpark in San Francisco. There'll be so many people from every part of the political spectrum who want to be there and to pay tribute. Many of us will be there without having found a single issue we agree on."

Brulte, 45, is 23 years younger than Burton. The two served together in the Assembly for three terms. "We were elected to the Senate the same day in 1996," Brulte says, "and we'll be term-limited out in 2004." Brulte is taller and substantially heavier than Burton, who retains his athletic slimness. Burton lives in Potrero Hill in San Francisco, a funky, multicultural neighborhood 400 miles north of Rancho Cucamonga, Brulte's white-bread suburban base in Southern California. Like most California Republicans, Brulte regards the city and county of San Francisco as a funnel into which the other 57 counties deposit pork and patronage. Yet Brulte and Burton get along. "When you're in the minority, you don't expect the leader of the majority to agree with you philosophically. So what you want is a leader who is honest, who tells how things are, and keeps his word," Brulte says. "John is as honest as the day is long. He lets you know exactly where you stand. John is a 1960s liberal. Some people say that to be critical. John wears it as a badge of honor. He is a true, passionate liberal who believes it in his heart. But he respects the views of those who are not liberal. He is respectful enough that he can articulate our philosophy. And beyond that, he never allows politics to get personal."

Lou Cannon, who wrote a biography of Ronald Reagan, says: "John and Willie Brown invited Reagan to be honored in Sacramento after he left the presidency. I know that Reagan appreciated it. Another way John resembles Reagan is that he's fun to be with. Reagan would see legislators who might be running him down, but he'd come into a room, tell stories, and they liked him. He lit up the room." As Burton strolls through a Sacramento restaurant, Republican legislators and lobbyists at the bar smile in anticipation. He offers a quip, an opinion, an anecdote, and they slap him on the back like a lodge brother. At dinner, Burton muses about bipartisanship: "My theory on life is that I don't want people voting against Burton's bill. I want people voting against Assembly Bill 15. I especially like the wacky, right-wing Republicans, because they believe in what they're doing. They may like me for the same reason."

Cultural affinity also bridges the ideological gap, according to Willie Brown: "He can sing all that hillbilly music with the Republicans. He eats like they eat. He dresses like they dress. He tells just as many filthy jokes as they do. And he's got a steel-trap mind for trivia. He can recall what Newt Gingrich said in a debate with Henry Hyde that most people have forgotten. He uses that recall to stick it to a guy in a debate. That impresses everyone on both sides. Does he take care of Republicans? Yes. He's a ward heeler when it comes to the membership. They love Burton, because they know he will never cut a corner or ever humiliate them. Guys who've been around in Sacramento more than five minutes become John Burton fans."

Burton attributes these skills to biography. "I'm an old bartender, OK? I shined shoes in the Tenderloin. When I was in what we now call the service crafts, you learned to get along. But I sure don't understand getting credit for keeping your word. When I grew up, that was a basic and still should be basic." Another Burton basic is the Democratic Party. Asked what it should stand for, he replies: "It should stand for working people, for those who need government to improve the quality of their lives, whether economically or environmentally, whatever. Republicans by and large are still laissez faire when it comes to economics. I was brought up to think Democrats were the party of people and Republicans were the party of privilege. That's overstating it, but that division is still there."

He is no "new Democrat" and does not want to be. "The 'new Democrats,' the 'business Democrats,' and all those guys are more related to campaign contributions than to ideology," he says. He dislikes any Democrat who shuns the poor: "I've got a great environmental record, I've gotten awards, but I didn't get into politics to save the environment. I got into politics to help ordinary people, poor people." Burton cites the Constitution's command to "provide for the common defense, to promote the general welfare," and he says, "That's government's role, isn't it?" His consistent focus on the party's mission evokes two other prominent Democrats, both from New York. One is another former bartender, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The other is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, as far as we know, was not a bartender.

No one in Sacramento is in doubt of Burton's views. "They know that's what drives my engine," he says. Burton was elected Senate honcho in December 1998, a month after Gray Davis, also a Democrat, was elected governor as a self-described "raging moderate." Before his selection, Burton says, he "told the caucus that if it means I don't get elected, so be it, but as long as I'm here, nobody's going to [expletive] poor people."

In part because of a $12 billion surplus, no one has, so far. In 1999, Burton deferred to the Davis agenda on educational testing. In 2000, with the surplus bulging, Burton sponsored 80 bills, some with the acquiescence of Davis and some without. Most passed. The biggest expanded the Cal Grant program, which gives low-income high school seniors full tuition to state universities and up to $9,700 in tuition assistance to private ones. Burton also pushed bills helping the homeless, nursing home residents, people in the state's mental health system, and criminal defendants seeking DNA tests. He won $121 million for an antiviolence program for juveniles and expanded protection for battered women.

These accomplishments assuage the bitter memory of Burton's black-humor moment in 1994. At the end of a contentious session with Republican Governor Pete Wilson, then-Assemblyman Burton introduced a bill to amend the penal code to "make it a felony to intentionally and maliciously have a yearly income below the poverty level." But when Burton moved from backbencher to Senate leader, he forgot his animosity and remembered the motto Reagan had on his desk in Sacramento and at the White House: "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit."

Wilson, like most Republicans, had campaigned against welfare, but when the 1998 session ended, the California legislature passed - and Wilson signed - a bill that restored cost-of-living adjustments to the oft-criticized Aid to Families With Dependent Children program. "It was my first year in this job," Burton recalls in his office. "Pete was cool. He knew what I wanted. This was the first restoration of the COLA to AFDC for the first time in God knows how long. We also got the COLA back for the aged, blind, and disabled. A welfare lawyer wrote to say he thought he'd never see the day when they would be restored. That was fun and satisfying."

Burton called Wilson "the little Marine" and other unflattering names during the governor's two terms. "I was all over" Wilson, he admits. "When I got to be leader, it was different. We knew each other well enough, and we could work together." (The two had served together in the Assembly in the 1960s.) The AFDC signing received little publicity, which may have been part of the deal. I asked Wilson about it in 1998 before he left office. His response sounded like that of a welfare lawyer: "There are some people who can't work. They can't. And for those who can, we're trying to move them from welfare to work." Did Burton insist? "There's no question about it," Wilson replied. Wilson, still cherishing his tough-guy image, acknowledged that Burton was also tough, saying, "John is not a policy wonk. ... He wants to get something done." Wilson also noted that Burton budged on a tax cut, saying, "John can be pragmatic, too. ... And he's a good guy."

When Davis succeeded Wilson, Sacramento expected gridlock, because of Burton's disdain for moderates, and because Davis can follow the middle of the road to the vanishing point. One of the governor's aides predicted "a testosterone-enriched relationship between two macho guys." Another called Burton "a liberal dinosaur" but was pleased to discover that "John is good for his word and shows respect." At the end of the session last fall, "he and Gray were both grown-ups. Look at how experienced they both are. The governor knew he'd be tugged to the left, so he appreciated that Burton was upfront and unvarnished. There aren't that many guys like that anymore." Davis called the session "positive and productive," praised both Democratic and Republican legislators, and said, "Here in Sacramento, we have done what seems so elusive in Washington. By putting partnership ahead of partisanship, we have done the public's business."

Davis, relentlessly low-key, calls Al Gore "my charisma adviser." At a Sacramento charity roast, Davis and his staff offered "The Moderate Wing," a videotaped takeoff on the television series about the presidency. In the satire, trying to boost his ratings, Davis consults Tim Busfield of The West Wing, who advises him to become more liberal. The ending brought laughter from the Sacramento panjandrums assembled and proved that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. After his staff urges him to be "like John Burton," the governor dons glasses, bushier hair, a fake mustache, a $2 shirt, and a faded leather jacket for a press conference. "Does anyone have anything intelligent to ask?" Davis demands in a Burton-like growl, adding a racetrack expression: "That question is as dead as Kelsey's nuts!"

Leon Panetta thinks "politics would be a hell of a lot more interesting if there were more John Burtons instead of guys who seem to step out of a test tube." Panetta first thought Burton "would make Gray more uptight." Instead, the old North Beach bartender may have loosened up the governor.

After decades of discord, the sounds from Sacramento echo like a 1950s jazz ensemble. "Life's too [expletive] short. Certain things get to me, like [Davis's] idea that we don't understand big ideas up here," Burton says. The frown recedes, the grin returns. "Actually, I like Gray. We go back to the 1970s. Things could work. It could be a kick."