There was a tinge of pride in Herb Wesson's voice Tuesday afternoon when he announced that a marathon, all-night session of the state Assembly to hammer out a final agreement on the overdue state budget had surpassed the infamous 1963 "lock-up" of Republicans by legendary Speaker Jesse Unruh.

It was a bit odd that Wesson, the current speaker of the Assembly, was so proud of keeping his flock in session longer than Unruh's 26 hours and 28 minutes, because the incident proved to be the latter's political undoing, cementing the image of a dictatorial "Big Daddy" and dooming his ambitions to become governor. "It has been all downhill for me since that night," an Unruh lieutenant, James Mills, later quoted him in a book Mills wrote about the Unruh speakership.

Wesson's in no danger of being branded a tyrant; rather, he saw keeping the Assembly in session from noon on Monday until late afternoon on Tuesday as the key to settling the partisan budget dispute, thus polishing his somewhat tarnished leadership credentials. It illustrates, however, that beyond the billions of dollars in the budget and the months-long partisan squabbling over deficits, loans, taxes and spending, there were some personal and political stakes.

As Wesson was dickering with Republicans over the final details of a budget agreement, he was also looking over his shoulder at potential rivals -- principally San Rafael Democrat Joe Nation -- for the speakership. Getting a budget deal will help Wesson as he seeks to hold the position well into 2004.

Gov. Gray Davis had even more riding on ending the budget stalemate. Public and private polls indicate that voters are very angry over the budget and other matters, and they'll have an opportunity to convert their ire into action on Oct. 7 when Davis faces a first-ever gubernatorial recall election. Getting some kind of budget deal -- even one with gaping financial holes -- is vital to his chances of surviving the recall, and he and his minions were intimately involved in nailing down the final Assembly votes.

The Legislature's Republican leaders, Sen. Jim Brulte and Assemblyman Dave Cox, emerged from the budget dust-up with enhanced stature, earning high marks even from Democratic rivals for maintaining discipline in their ranks and ultimately forcing acceptance of a budget that eschewed the billions of dollars in new taxes Democrats had touted.

Davis and Democrats had bypassed GOP leaders and picked off just enough Republicans to pass deficit-ridden budgets in 2001 and 2002, but found no room for flanking maneuvers this year and were forced, finally, to cave in to Republican insistence that the budget contain no new taxes "that we would vote for." The budget does rely on administrative reinstatement of the $4 billion per year tax on cars and hundreds of millions of dollars in new fees, but contains none of the new sales, income or cigarette taxes that Democrats had wanted.

"It's a Republican budget," Democrats kept harping to reporters during the night after Cox's troops had put up just four initial votes for the deal. "Why don't they vote for it?" It turned out that Republicans wanted a few more items -- spending items, oddly enough -- to satisfy their constituent groups, such as city governments and cops. And when they got some of them, they supplied 11 votes for the budget, enough to put it over the top.

There were, of course, losers. The most-liberal Democrats and the most-conservative Republicans don't like the budget, but neither do the two moderate assemblymen, Republican Keith Richman of Northridge and Democrat Joe Canciamilla of Pittsburg, who worked up their own comprehensive scheme to resolve the state's chronic deficit problem. They received, deservedly, wide praise in the media for their adult, almost apolitical approach, but could garner no political support beyond themselves. Both voted against the final budget deal that, in its short-term, get-out-of-town approach, is the antithesis of what they had attempted.

And then there are the 35 million residents of California. They -- we -- all are losers because the Capitol was once again unable to come to grips with the state's fundamental fiscal crisis, and thus demonstrated anew that California also has a fundamental crisis of governance as well.