Partying, With Politics on Sideline

In laying down the rules for the mayoral candidates attending his Super Bowl party Sunday, Dr. Gary Gitnick was as fierce and unyielding as the toughest referee.

Despite rooms bursting with politicos -- including former Gov. Gray Davis, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and Los Angeles City Councilmen Eric Garcetti and Dennis Zine -- electioneering was forbidden.

Ditto fundraising -- even with the tempting presence of so many wealthy guests sitting in Gitnick’s palatial Encino home, munching snacks and watching football.

And, most difficult of all, Councilmen Antonio Villaraigosa and Bernard C. Parks, state Sen. Richard Alarcon and former Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg were ordered by their genial host to “please forget that you are running for mayor.” (The election is March 8.)

As that last edict was delivered, in a display that shocked some of the guests, Parks (an Eagles fan), Hertzberg (Eagles) and Villaraigosa (Patriots) put their arms around each other, and, led by Hertzberg, swayed back and forth like folk singers from the 1970s and began singing “Kumbaya.”

It was just another halftime at gastroenterologist-to-the-stars Gitnick’s house. For the last 19 years, Gitnick, chief of the Division of Digestive Diseases at UCLA’s School of Medicine, and his wife, Cherna, neither of them football fans, have hosted a legendary Super Bowl party.

They’ve invited politicians and movers and shakers in Los Angeles and from around California, not to mention enough doctors to service a small hospital.

And at halftime, instead of watching the extravaganzas and perhaps hoping for another “wardrobe malfunction,” they turned off the televisions to talk about how to improve education.

The subject is mandated by the Gitnicks, who 28 years ago founded the Fulfillment Fund, a nonprofit mentoring and scholarship program.

Last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Senate leader John Burton, Maria Shriver, Mayor James K. Hahn and Police Chief William J. Bratton showed up. Roy Romer, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, comes most years but skipped this one.

This year, Gitnick invited the mayor and his four leading challengers to talk about how to improve education in Los Angeles. All of the candidates attended except Hahn.

“We live in a community where only 53% of children graduated from high school last year,” Gitnick said.

He turned to the candidates standing beside him in his living room and said: “The superintendent of schools does not report to the mayor. How can the mayor make a difference in the educational problems facing our community?”

In a race in which voters have identified education as their No. 1 concern, ranking even above public safety, according to The Times Poll conducted last week, each of the candidates came prepared.

Alarcon, who stressed that he used to be a teacher, said he would use the mayor’s office as a bully pulpit to pressure policymakers to improve education. He also laid out several things city officials could do, including helping schools cut through zoning red tape and having public libraries collaborate closely with schools.

Villaraigosa, a former organizer for the city’s teachers union whose wife, Corina, teaches in the Montebello Unified School District, noted that he “wakes up to a teacher every morning.”

He called for more money in the state’s public schools, adding that he does not think it’s “rocket science” to conclude there is a correlation between California’s dismal nationwide rankings and the fact that its per-pupil spending is less than that in most of the other states.

Parks called for creating more charter schools and said he would like to learn about the education systems in Chicago and New York City, where the mayor has more direct control over them.

Hertzberg, who has been saying for weeks that he wants to break up the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District, was the bluntest of all. “Change the rules,” he said. “The mayor should be directly involved in the process.”

As the televisions flickered back on and the guests fell upon the desserts, Gitnick smiled. He told the guests that the city should feel “blessed that we have so many excellent candidates.”

Then he and the candidates put their arms around each other again, to pose for photographs.