Yaroslavsky Must Shed Anonymity to Defeat Bradley

If the name Zev Yaroslavsky is familiar at every breakfast table in Los Angeles 150 days from today, the city might elect its first new mayor since President Nixon left the White House.

But if many Angelenos still mispronounce it “Yarozelski” or even “Zevalosky,” as Lakers broadcaster Chick Hearn did this year, the five-month campaign for mayor of Los Angeles that starts now will have been a wasted and costly exercise.

Tom Bradley is favored to win his fifth term as mayor of Los Angeles even if most people become comfortable saying Yar-o-slav-sky by election day next April 11. But Yaroslavsky, the mustachioed marathon runner who is chairman of the City Council Finance Committee, is expected to pose the first serious reelection threat Bradley has faced.

Familiarity itself won’t be an issue, but Yaroslavsky advisers realize it could be a factor in a city that loves its stars the way Los Angeles does.

Bradley is the city’s best-known politician and, despite slipping in public opinion polls in recent years, he holds a place of honor on the city’s celebrity register. The first black city official elected in Los Angeles, Bradley has always won reelection by a landslide.

Yaroslavsky has labored on the City Council since 1975. By City Hall standards his name and liberal demeanor are well known, especially in the Westside areas he represents. But he suffers from the anonymity faced by nearly all Los Angeles city officials.

Except for Bradley, the public rarely bothers to notice them. Council meetings are open to the public, but only a few people ever attend. In polls, most Los Angeles residents say they care little about what happens at City Hall, even though it is the level of government that controls the number of police on the beat, the number of cars on the street and even the cleanliness and taste of drinking water.

Yaroslavsky, who lives in the Fairfax area, has been staging his campaign for mayor for several years and is probably seen on TV more than any other member of the City Council. But his name still draws a blank with many people, and for him the mayoral campaign will partly be a battle to give himself an identity.

“Nobody but the press corps and a few elites care anything about the day-to-day workings in city government,” Yaroslavsky was advised last spring in a controversial memo from BAD Campaigns, his prospective campaign consultant at the time.

He also was told to spend less time working in City Hall and advised--in the kind of language that made the memo cause such a furor--that to win he “cannot let Bradley become the chichi, ‘in’ candidate against the pushy Jew.”

Yaroslavsky may have moved a big step toward stealing some of Bradley’s starlight when Proposition O, the measure he co-sponsored to stop oil drilling in Pacific Palisades, won last week despite a $10-million campaign to defeat it by Occidental Petroleum.

Proposition O didn’t win by much--in fact, it lost outside the Westside council districts of Yaroslavsky and Councilman Marvin Braude, the measure’s co-sponsor. But 100,000 more people voted for Proposition O than voted for Bradley in the 1985 mayoral election, and Yaroslavsky can now claim credit for that measure and a successful 1986 initiative, Proposition U, that reduced future high-rise construction in the city.

“He put a lot on the line and he won, and he deserves credit for that,” Councilwoman Joy Picus said. Defeat of Proposition O would have been “an emotional, political bath. People would have been challenging his political judgment and his ability to win.”

The win will no doubt help Yaroslavsky on the Westside and especially in Pacific Palisades, an enclave of wealth and some entertainment stars where Bradley has always been popular.

“I’ll certainly support him,” said Roger Jon Diamond, president of No Oil Inc., the homeowner group that has led opposition to Occidental. “He’ll be a hero.”

Some Bradley supporters predicted, however, that Proposition O will be seen by voters as a cynical effort by Yaroslavsky to use an issue for his own gain.

“Proposition O represented an opportunity for an aspiring mayoral candidate to express himself and be exposed to voters on an almost weekly basis,” said Jim Blancarte, a Bradley fire commissioner who campaigned for Proposition P, a rival measure backed by Occidental. “He saw the opportunity for media exposure. . . .”

Bradley partisans also were cheered by an exit poll by KNBC-TV Channel 4 last Tuesday that asked voters if they preferred Bradley or Yaroslavsky. The mayor was preferred almost 6 to 1, although details of the poll’s reliability were not available.

Although neither side will admit to campaigning this early, the two rivals have tried to batter the other’s reputation throughout the last year.

Reporters have discovered a sure-fire way to elicit an interesting remark from the taciturn, 70-year-old Bradley is to mention Yaroslavsky. When it is his turn, the 36-year-old councilman holds frequent press conferences to attack the mayor.

Hostilities ceased for a time during the presidential campaign. Both showed up on stage at Democratic Party rallies for Michael S. Dukakis, who hired Bradley’s chief speech writer and issues expert, Mark Fabiani, to help run his California campaign.

But neither wasted any time swinging back into the routine of press conferences and political sniping, the telltale signs of a Los Angeles political campaign.

A day after the presidential election Bradley suggested that Yaroslavsky was “weaseling out” of a pledge not to hire BAD Campaigns to run his mayoral race. The pledge was given last summer when the memo written to Yaroslavsky by BAD Campaigns was leaked to the press and reported in ethnically blunt detail.

Bradley based the remark on rumors of a reconciliation between Yaroslavsky and the firm’s chief political consultants, Michael Berman and Carl D’Agostino. Yaroslavsky refused to deny the rumor, adding to speculation that the original plan was back in effect and the pair would shepherd his mayoral race.

Although Yaroslavsky has yet to declare formally that he is a candidate, he began his part of the new political season Friday by going to the scene of the sewage spill that kept Santa Monica Bay beaches closed this weekend and raising questions about the Bradley record.

He complained that the sewers have been neglected, and used the comments to frame an issue that sounded like a usable theme in a campaign for mayor--that Los Angeles used to have the reputation as a city where things worked.

But, the argument goes, traffic now clogs the streets, office buildings and mini-malls are spoiling the neighborhoods and sewage is contaminating the beaches.

Crime, the size of the police force and even Bradley’s foreign travel also may become serious issues in the campaign. But in recent months, Yaroslavsky and Bradley have tussled most often over growth and environmental issues.

Bradley has gone into Yaroslavsky’s district to criticize new buildings and charge that Yaroslavsky didn’t do enough to help neighbors who fought the Ma Maison Sofitel Hotel near the Beverly Center shopping complex.

The mayor has announced a number of programs billed as steps to fight traffic and give residents more control over growth. His latest was a plan unveiled last week to restrict development in Laurel Canyon and improve the narrow streets that wind through the Hollywood Hills.

Yaroslavsky, meanwhile, has blamed Bradley for new growth that swamped the city’s sewer system, forcing emergency water conservation throughout the city and leading to legal conflicts with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.