Analysis : One-Sided Race for Mayor Leaves a Void on Issues

In the first weeks of the mayoral competition, the major questions facing Los Angeles have not been reflected in the one-sided campaign.

The big-picture issues--citywide growth, a gangs policy, economic disparity between affluent and poor--are discussed in community meetings centered on neighborhood problems. And when candidates take a citywide view, the only people who hear them are those civic-minded few who attend the neighborhood forums.

In addition, the lack of television news coverage and of TV commercials--those roundly condemned communications devices--seems to have left a void. The campaign seems more like an election for City Council than for chief executive of the nation’s second-most populous city.

Simplistic and slanted as they can be, the commercials have the effect of dramatizing the issues to the electorate and presenting them in a citywide context.

Thus the scenes of the election do not fit the city, this self-proclaimed Pacific Rim center, home of the entertainment business, working place of the most sophisticated mass communications experts, cutting edge capital of trend.

With not a television camera in sight, for example, Mayor Tom Bradley opened his Crenshaw campaign headquarters in a storefront, packed with many of the same, loyal supporters who have been with him since he was a city councilman in the 1960s.

It was a revealing episode, but witnessed by only about 200. Bradley was not the stiff, formal character of most of his public appearances. Rather, he was relaxed, enjoying the comfortable surroundings, thoroughly a part of the middle-class black neighborhood where he had raised his family.

Magnificent Montague, a famed black disc jockey, was master of ceremonies. The mayor recalled Montague’s famous phrase, “Burn, Baby, Burn.”

“This was the hottest DJ in L.A.,” the mayor said, standing on a small platform in a crowded room. “But after his slogan ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’ seared across the city and somehow had been associated with the Watts uprising . . . Montague decided he’d better move on.”

Here, where many of Bradley’s generation refer to Watts, 1965, as the uprising rather than the riots, the mayor, with no high-powered electronic press corps recording him, spoke as if he shared their view of that historic event.

Earlier that Saturday, in a small church hall in South-Central Los Angeles, the Equal Rights Congress, a community action group, held a forum for mayoral candidates for an audience of about 50.

Bradley was not there. But some of the others were. Chevron oil worker Joel Britton, the Socialist Worker Party candidate, spoke. Perennial candidate Eileen Anderson sang “Danny Boy.”

So was former Los Angeles County Supervisor Baxter Ward, running without funds, who spends much of his time sitting at a typewriter in his San Fernando Valley home writing letters to council members and reporters with his campaign thoughts. He roundly condemned the major candidates for accepting campaign contributions.

City Councilman Nate Holden drove up to the hall alone.

“We need a change,” he said, after joining the others on stage. “We need it now. We all did support Tom Bradley, but 16 years is enough.”

The scene outside the church told of two big-picture problems, dwindling low-cost housing and the need for more schools for a growing immigrant population with many children.

Signs on old Los Angeles bungalows, occupied by families who could lose their homes to construction of a badly needed elementary school, read: “Home Not For Sale.”

Gerry Silver of the Equal Rights Congress said the lack of a citywide debate on such issues is not good. “I think it is disappointing,” she said of what, so far, seems to be an election without close competition.

The city had been braced for a more competitive campaign, but Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, the best-funded contender, dropped out after months of organizing and of voicing strong criticism of the Bradley Administration.

After Yaroslavsky’s withdrawal, Bradley, as he opened the campaign, indicated that the absence of intense competition could improve the quality of political debate.

“Freed from narrow political concerns, we are free to see more clearly and to set directions that can take us far beyond the dead ends of political trench warfare,” he said.

He listed the issues he would discuss: gangs and drugs, day care, affordable housing, easing traffic congestion, and improving education. So far, he has not gone much beyond that speech.

In his defense, Bradley aides said he has already announced a detailed traffic improvement program, begun shuttling city funds to day care and has proposed a program to use money from downtown development to build more housing that low-income people can afford.

Bradley is strongly in favor of encouraging foreign investment in the city and has said those who express fear of too much Japanese investment are guilty of racism against Asians.

Holden is a nationalist, reflecting the fears of some of his poorer black constituents that immigration and foreign investment is costing them jobs.

Holden criticizes the Police Department’s handling of gang violence and drugs. “If we had better support from the Police Department, the gangs would not be out of control,” he told the community forum at the church.

Bradley says it differently: “Los Angeles is ready--to drive the gangs, their violence and drugs out of our community,” he said in his campaign opener. “And together we will deploy a police force large enough to do the job.”

Holden, although short of money, is making plans to take his message citywide. He has opened headquarters on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley.

Bradley is expected to intensify his efforts. But he is also pursuing the traditional tactic of the heavily favored incumbent--ignore the opposition.

As a result, this is a campaign that may never leave the church halls and storefronts.