Council Candidate : ‘Jack Attack’ Irks Political Friends

Jack McGrath, write-in candidate for the City Council, is a restless man.

He is forever pacing, puffing cigarettes and fidgeting with the frames on his wire-rimmed glasses as he plots political strategy for his campaign against his former boss and pal, Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky.

Write-in candidates rarely garner more than a small fraction of the vote, but McGrath has some big ideas. First he dropped his last name and recast himself as “Jack,” though the city attorney ruled Thursday that he has to use his full name or none on the April 11 ballot.

Then he took to the streets with the message that “people power” is back. “I love people in the streets,” he said.

He found one such street person, a Catholic priest living in a park who asked him for a few bucks, and appointed him his North Hollywood coordinator.

Campaign Theme

And he set out in search of a campaign theme and found it on the side of a grocery bag. “The Ralphs bags say change is for the better,” McGrath said. “I bought 200 of them. The power of that message is very strong.”

What happens next is anyone’s guess. But the “Jack for City Council” campaign is sure to be anything but dull with a candidate such as McGrath, a veteran campaign consultant who possesses an Irish street fighter’s flair for political showmanship.

The paunchy but boyishly handsome McGrath has already delivered a case of Russian vodka and some pine saplings to the Bel-Air home of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, two of the 5th District’s newest arrivals. McGrath also invited the former First Couple to call if they have any problems, such as potholes.

More recently he stood outside Yaroslavsky’s City Hall office and brazenly accused the councilman of financial shenanigans. McGrath holds Yaroslavsky responsible for traffic congestion, intense commercial growth, the parking shortage and just about everything else that’s wrong with Los Angeles.

Yaroslavsky has deftly deflected the charges leveled by his former chief deputy so far but professes to be genuinely mystified by McGrath’s sudden emergence as a political foe. “I don’t have much to say about it because I have no idea why he’s running,” Yaroslavsky said recently.

Others who are close to both men also question what’s motivating McGrath.

‘Disastrous Move’

“It’s a disastrous move,” said one confidant, who asked to remain anonymous. “There’s no rational basis for what Jack is doing here.”

“People are worried about him,” said another, who also spoke anonymously. “A lot of his friends don’t want to have anything to do with him anymore.”

McGrath, 43, who decided to run as a write-in candidate after he failed to collect the 500 signatures needed to formally qualify for the ballot, said he’s aware of his friends’ concerns. But in dismissing those concerns he is fond of invoking the name of one of his heroes, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“I’m reaching for the promised land,” McGrath said recently. “And I’m not afraid to die politically. If I die politically, my life still goes on. But if I don’t die, that means that I get to serve my constituency.”

People who have worked with him over the years say such hyperbole is typical of McGrath, who was once described as the merry prankster of municipal politics. The North Hollywood resident is credited with adding spark to the campaigns of clients such as Yaroslavsky and state Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Tarzana) in the 1970s. And in November he helped mount a highly successful reelection bid on behalf of Santa Monica City Councilman Herb Katz.

But he also has a reputation for recklessness.

Resigned Over Commercial

In 1981, while serving as campaign manager for city attorney candidate Bob Ronka, McGrath was involved in the making of a television commercial linking Ronka’s opponent, Ira Reiner, to convicted murderer Charles Manson. McGrath resigned under pressure after the spot was roundly denounced.

McGrath also got into hot water with Yaroslavsky about that time for using the councilman’s name to promote a real estate venture. People who have worked with McGrath say he often has a hard time distinguishing right from wrong.

“If you don’t help Jack he will get into trouble,” said one political consultant, who asked not to be named. “He has a tendency to step into it.”

“He has always been one of the most creative people around,” another said. “He just pops with ideas. But he often loses his judgment.”

Many see McGrath’s decision to run as an illustration of that point. At the outset of the campaign season, when Yaroslavsky was expecting to run for mayor and others started lining up to succeed him on the council, McGrath signed on as an aide to Steve Saltzman, a veteran political activist from Century City.

It was only after Yaroslavsky changed his mind and filed for reelection that McGrath suddenly emerged as a candidate himself.

“One night we had dinner with a possible contributor,” Saltzman said. “On the following morning, unbeknown to me, Jack filed to run for the seat. . . . It seemed ludicrous. He had no funds, no campaign management and no support.”

The move also surprised Yaroslavsky since McGrath had just attended his yearly Christmas party and given $500 to his mayoral campaign.

“He was patting me on the back at my party,” Yaroslavsky said. “He had his arm around me. . . . It was very friendly and chatty. I guess in the first week of January he decided that my performance had diminished considerably.”

The story soon made the rounds that McGrath had also neglected to reveal his plans to his wife, Maria. McGrath conceded that she was “pissed off” about the decision and that even now she “is not emotionally committed to this.”

At the same time, McGrath defends the move. “Sometimes you have to make your own decisions,” he said. “We’re not fighting over it now, though we did initially. She said, ‘Why you?’ And I said, ‘Why not me?’ ”

McGrath says he first became disenchanted with Yaroslavsky while working for Saltzman. Everywhere he went, he said, people complained about development, traffic tie-ups and other problems. “I thought, ‘Jeez, what happened?’ ” he said.

McGrath might have kept his reservations to himself if Yaroslavsky had followed through on his plans to run for mayor. But when Yaroslavsky filed for reelection in early January, causing speculation that Saltzman would drop out, which he later did, McGrath said he had to act.

“I spent two days considering my options,” he said. “I drove around past places where things had happened in my life. Then I decided to go for it.”

Many wish he hadn’t. People who travel in the same political circles as McGrath and Yaroslavsky say McGrath has nothing to gain and everything to lose.

“I feel it is not a productive act on his part, but I don’t know how to talk to him about it,” said Jackie Brainard, a friend of both men. “I guess he really believes he can do a better job, and that’s why he’s running.”

Added Richard Lichtenstein of Marathon Communications, who hired McGrath to help out with Santa Monica City Councilman Katz’s reelection campaign: “I told Jack that everybody’s entitled to run. But I also reminded him to campaign in a manner that’s not going to do him irreparable harm.”

As he sat in his tidy ranchstyle house recently, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and thumbing through a scrapbook that still contains several pictures of himself and Yaroslavsky, McGrath questions what all the fuss is about.

After all, he’s just one of three people challenging Yaroslavsky, the others being Westwood activist Laura M. Lake and traffic consultant Ryan Snyder. And he’s the only challenger who possesses City Hall experience.

McGrath said San Fernando Valley voters, who account for about one-third of the 5th District’s registered voters, have been waiting for one of their own to assume power. In one of his strongest campaign pitches, McGrath has pledged to protect his neighbors from the kind of growth that has occurred on the Westside.

“As councilman I would only approve good development,” McGrath said. “And when I say good, I mean damn good. If not, let ‘em build it in Cudahy.”

McGrath, the son of two professional dance teachers who worked at the Arthur Murray studios, grew up in the Valley and has lived there most of his life. In addition to serving as Yaroslavsky’s campaign manager and deputy, he has been a lobbyist, a bus-shelter firm executive and a state Assembly candidate.

Most recently he was employed as a commercial real estate broker. McGrath said he is not concerned that his real estate dealings may cost him credibility within the slow-growth community. “All we do is the buildings that Zev has already OKd,” McGrath said.

What people on both sides of Mulholland Drive are most interested in is finding someone who understands and shares their frustrations, he said, adding that solving problems is easy once you understand how the bureaucracy works.

On a quick ride through his neighborhood McGrath points to a health club that suffers from a parking shortage and a weeded area that people could be using as a dog run, then claims he could instantly rectify both problems once he got into City Hall.

He expounds on that theme in a cable television commercial that highlights problems plaguing the district. The commercial ends, inexplicably, with a lingering shot of McGrath talking to a man bundled up like an Eskimo.

McGrath knows that he suffers some credibility problems because of his past political mistakes and his recent failure to qualify for the ballot. But he also revels in the role of underdog and political provocateur.

People who have known him for a long time say he is only happy when he’s in the thick of things.

“I know I’m a long shot,” McGrath said. “But my whole life has been a long shot. People said I was crazy in 1975 when I first supported Zev for the City Council, and they’re saying I’m crazy now. But these people are going to be surprised. They’re going to see the best street operation ever run.”