(FORTUNE Magazine) – We have no way of knowing whether Tom Hayden is a FORTUNE subscriber but intuit that he would have answered the question on last fortnight's cover -- ''Is Your Career on Track?'' -- with a gleeful affirmative. Now a Democratic assemblyman from dirigiste Santa Monica, Tom is already a committee ; chairman and heavy hitter in the California legislature. Beyond that, he is considered a leading contender for State Environmental Advocate, a job that would arguably make him the most powerful bureaucrat in America, which is possibly unsurprising in that Hayden personally authored much of the legislative language creating this monster. His political operations have always been well financed by Hollywood's glitterati, beginning with helpmate Jane Fonda. And while it is true that Tom and Jane are now matrimonially unhinged and that she is dating Ted Turner, he (Tom, not Ted) has a handsome settlement from the lady to help defray campaign expenses. All of which is precisely what you would have expected from the author of the 1962 Port Huron Statement (obviously not Ted), the defining document of what used to be called the New Left but now seems substantially coterminous with the Jacobin wing of the Democratic Party. Tom's career has always been basic bad news for America. In the Sixties he helped found the Students for a Democratic Society, loudly supported the North Vietnamese cause, called the Black Panthers ''our Viet Cong,'' and generated a lot of the rhetoric (about ''participatory democracy,'' for example) used to justify anarchy on the campuses. The current environmental campaign in California could be his proudest moment. The so-called Big Green package, which is being offered to voters in a November referendum, is environmentalism at its looniest. The package includes proposals taking the lovable side on a broad range of environmental issues -- saving the redwoods, restricting toxic-waste dumping, reducing the greenhouse effect -- but the centerpiece is a rule about pesticides in farm products. The rule would bar any use in pesticides of chemicals identified as carcinogenic at any level. Note that the rule is somewhat akin to the infamous Delaney clause, passed by Congress in 1958. The clause bars the use in food of any chemicals causing cancer risks in laboratory animals, even when it takes immense doses to get trivial risk increases. Congresspersons of every stripe now agree that Delaney must be repealed -- even Ted Kennedy has an alternative -- since most folks now accept that life cannot be riskless, and it sometimes makes sense to accept small additional health risks in order to get substantial economic gains. Exactly the same considerations apply to the Green Monster, which on some calculations would trigger farm-produce price increases in the 50% range. & The farmers are hysterical, and not only because Tom could end up as the state ''advocate'' who enforces it all. While Hayden's career is on track, an interesting question is whether it could possibly be derailed by revelations in the recently published Citizen Jane: the Turbulent Life of Jane Fonda, by Christopher Andersen. To grasp the import of these revelations, you need to go back to certain themes of the Port Huron Statement (which Andersen does not). In calling for a new politics, based on a new and higher ethic, the statement took off after the militarism and materialism of the older generation. It assailed ''the idolatrous worship of things'' and complained that ''Money ((capitalized)), instead of dignity of character, remains a pivotal American value.''

The Andersen book tells us that the author of those noble words -- now a successful 50-year-old politician -- recently rejected a divorce settlement of $1 million and $1,000 a month for life, and ended up apparently extracting $10 million from Jane. One wonders whether Californians will hold it against Tom. Or, alternatively, vote for him on the ground that he finally seems to be growing up.