Popularity Transcends Problems : ‘Teflon Mayor’ Bradley: The Blame Doesn’t Stick

There he was, 71-year-old Mayor Tom Bradley, walking up the aisles at a Fedco store last Saturday, glad-handing startled shoppers. Across town, his staff grappled with twin headaches--news reports that he was paid generous consulting fees by a bank involved in city dealings, and the abrupt resignation a day earlier of his embattled Housing Authority director.

But Bradley was ignoring all of that.

Indeed, after promising in January to tackle the hard issues in this era of escalating gang and drug wars, decaying neighborhoods and dizzying growth, Bradley has campaigned for Tuesday’s primary election largely by visiting the zoo, popping like a jack-in-the-box from an underground tube for waiting photographers, posing with bulldozers at a recycling center and burying time capsules.

As he heads into what looks like certain reelection, the four-term mayor has refused to debate his chief opponent, fiery underdog City Councilman Nate Holden, and has offered up election-time programs that received little press.

But residents of Los Angeles have not exactly risen up to complain about Bradley’s style.

In fact, recent polls show that while increasing numbers of the city’s residents believe that the quality of life has gotten worse here--63%, compared to 53% just two years ago--they do not link the problems to the popular man who has presided over the city’s unprecedented growth for 16 years. According to a Los Angeles Times Poll in February and recent private polls, Angelenos are increasingly upset by the worsening pollution, violent crime, poverty and traffic that have come with the growth embraced by Bradley. But the same residents gave Bradley a strong job approval rating, including 67% in the Times poll.

That irony has earned Bradley the nickname of the Teflon Mayor, a phrase coined by area political consultants a few months ago, and a variation of a label given to former President Ronald Reagan.

Soothing Appeal

Why don’t Angelenos hold their mayor accountable for the city’s big problems? Political analysts, including pollsters, professional campaign managers and political scientists, cite two basic factors:

They say Bradley is a black politician who has cultivated a soothing, enduring appeal in a city with a potentially explosive, multi-ethnic mix and a white majority electorate. He is a “nice guy” who people can feel good about, a phenomenon aided by the city’s long period of growth and prosperity. At the same time, he has insulated himself from criticism by avoiding the press, by sidestepping controversial stands on most issues and by emphasizing the ceremonial aspects of his job.

“If you don’t do a whole lot, you don’t make a lot of enemies,” said Arnold Steinberg, a San Fernando Valley-based Republican pollster. “People will argue he is building a world-class city and so forth, but this is the person who, at the height of the busing controversy in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s that nearly tore this city in two, stayed neutral.

“People do not see him making decisions that are traceable to him, they don’t see him exercising his executive power, they don’t see him taking defeats,” Steinberg said.

Joseph Cerrell, a veteran Democratic campaign consultant and Bradley ally, said people “are comfortable with Tom Bradley; he doesn’t scare them or Mau-Mau them, and there’s no panic around him.”

No ‘Black Agenda’

Noting that Bradley does not have a “black agenda,” as do such other black leaders like Jesse Jackson, Cerrell said: “Sometimes black politicians have a tendency to scare (white voters). . . . But Los Angeles can be the murder capital, the crime capital, the drug capital, and people don’t think it’s his fault, and I bless his heart for being able to get away with it.”

Bradley’s low-profile style has worked well for him, enabling him to build bridges with voters of varying views. A man who does not like to roil the waters too often, he very carefully picks the issues that he takes a visible role in.

“This is a strategy dating back to the beginning,” said David Garth, a former Bradley campaign consultant working for New York Mayor Ed Koch’s reelection bid. “His caution is almost legendary. He plays it very, very, very, very close to the vest. . . . I’ve never seen anyone like him in all my years in this business.”

The caution tends to limit Bradley’s exposure to controversy, which could threaten his multi-ethnic political base.

Among black mayors in big-city America--a large group including Andrew Young in Atlanta and Wilson Goode in Philadelphia--Bradley alone was put into office by whites, including a large Jewish voting bloc, and to a far lesser degree by blacks, who generally account for 15% to 18% of the votes cast. As such, Bradley is one of only two or three black big-city mayors who has never pursued a black agenda.

“Very early on for Bradley, back in the ‘50s, the dictum was to listen to the white boys or others, and they would tell you how to succeed,” said Mervin Field, director of the California Poll. “Bradley listened and learned, and when he moved into politics, it was from that background, not from black politics.”

Thus, when Los Angeles was racially split by a bitter school busing controversy, fueling widespread middle-class flight from public classrooms to private schools, Bradley the coalition builder refused to enter the fray, even at the private urging of the judge on the case, Paul Egly. Bradley said his involvement would be counterproductive.

Said Field: “I don’t mean it in a pejorative way, but Bradley is sort of a white black--he’s never been threatening to whites. I don’t have a full measure of how blacks (in Los Angeles) feel about him, but he’s not a Jesse Jackson or a Harold Washington or even a Eugene Sawyer or other visibly black person that might make whites nervous. He’s embraced by whites.”

Voter attitudes toward Bradley will not waver, several political experts said, unless Bradley becomes the focal point of a sustained, organized attack on his age, leadership, growth policies and strong financial support and other ties to the city’s business elite.

Steinberg, whose recent polls found people unhappy with Los Angeles by more than a 2-1 margin, said he would expect its incumbent mayor to be in serious trouble. Yet his respondents gave Bradley an approval rating “very close” to the 67% found by the Times poll, he said.

Friend to All

The contrast, political observers said, can be explained in large part by Bradley’s carefully honed image: That of a friend to all kinds of people, a benign, almost fatherly figure who constantly appears at weddings, cocktail parties and tributes but tends to shun the public spotlight when it comes to potentially eruptive city issues.

Last year, using the California Public Records Act, The Times obtained Bradley’s daily calendar for 1987. It showed that Bradley spends much of his week--10 to 20 hours--at festivities, pancake breakfasts, receptions and other social engagements. In that non-election year, he attended 512 such events--10 times the number of social appearances made that year by New York’s Mayor Koch.

“He’s at every conceivable ribbon-cutting,” Steinberg said. “Bradley lets people see him in the good times, and he can be counted upon to go to rallies where there is already wide consensus: He’ll oppose South Africa or appear at Jewish rallies for Jews fighting Soviet oppression. These are not great demonstrations of courage, but it is very satisfying to many people.”

On the other hand, Bradley does not attend City Council meetings, where critical issues of the day often are vigorously discussed.

“I think he’s tried to avoid controversy most of his life,” Cerrell said. “It isn’t that he lacks enthusiasm, but he won’t say or do things that permanently alienate people.”

For example, while Los Angeles has one of the worst housing affordability problems in the country--rents have jumped more than 110% since 1980 and overcrowding has skyrocketed to include 22% of all households--Bradley is only now weighing new programs to create low-cost housing.

Such programs were adopted years ago in San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, New York and Chicago, but are considered politically sensitive in developer-minded Los Angeles because they would require large developers to pay into a housing fund, and would give nonprofit housing builders a significant new standing in the city.

Deputy Mayor Mike Gage said Bradley “works out the kinks behind the scenes with the various groups involved before he announces that he is going after that issue--as he did with his plan for stopping truck deliveries during peak hours downtown.”

His placid style of rule can be maddening to those who would like to draw him out on a point of disagreement, in hopes of changing his mind.

Alice Callahan, director of Las Familias del Pueblo, which assists homeless children and families on Skid Row, has met several times with Bradley, unsuccessfully trying to persuade him to stop the police sweeps that throw the destitute out of Skid Row.

Chiseled in Stone?

“You look at him and you wonder if he has been chiseled in stone,” Callahan said. “He has dreams; no one knows them. He has opinions; no one knows them. Sixteen years. There’s a life-span to that kind of governing.”

But Los Angeles voters seem content. In the Times poll, those who said they were glad Bradley was running again cited his experience or said he has done “a good job.”

“You could make the case, as you could with any chief executive . . . that it is within the mayor’s power to reduce crime, the drug abuse rate, killings in L.A.,” Cerrell said. “But Bradley is a nice guy--even his detractors like him. . . . So people don’t go after him personally. They don’t get vicious. They don’t get down and dirty. They don’t get down in the trenches and mix it up with him.”

Pollster Steinberg said this quality is especially appealing to women, who make up about half of the city’s voters.

“In our polls, women again and again support Bradley (more than) men,” he said. “Men simply do not cite niceness as a reason why they would vote for anybody, but women do.”

Clinton Reilly, a Democratic campaign consultant in San Francisco, said Bradley’s image “sort of transcends the urban problems that people experience on a daily basis. In some ways he has that kind of magic as a leader that Ronald Reagan does. . . . He is able to escape responsibility for problems of the moment because of the qualities people see in him as a leader.”

Avoids Press

Bradley has achieved much of his pleasant ambiguity among voters by tightly controlling press access to him, many of the consultants said.

Of mayors in the 20 largest cities in the United States, a recent Times survey has found, Bradley is near the bottom in making himself available to the press, and thus, to the public.

Bradley routinely avoids interviews sought by reporters on major issues ranging from the city’s growing housing affordability crisis to the economic demise of South-Central Los Angeles. In contrast to most mayors, Bradley rarely returns phone calls to reporters working on fast-breaking stories; aides speak for him. Rare “sit-down” interviews typically must be arranged far in advance.

(Bradley could not be reached for comment on this article, despite repeated attempts. An aide said he was “too busy campaigning.”)

“His strategy has always been: Avoid the interviews, let the handlers take care of you . . . ,” pollster Field said. “Now he just does it instinctively. When you look at big-city mayors, look just how different he is: You can get to New York City Mayor Ed Koch in three minutes for some provocative, controversial quotes. You can’t get that from Bradley.”

Partly as a result of eluding the press, Bradley is known to many Los Angeles residents only in the broadest of terms.

People know, for instance, that he worked his way up from a police officer to councilman to mayor. And he is still widely praised for helping bring a successful Olympic Games to the city five years ago.

No Tough Criticism

But beyond that, the Los Angeles Times Poll in February showed, residents are hard-pressed to say whether his programs are making inroads into gang violence, crime or homelessness.

I. A. Lewis, director of the Times poll, said the mayor also has benefited from a lack of tough, consistent criticism from interest groups and from other politicians.

“Frankly, there’s been no (sustained) criticism” from such groups, Lewis said. “There could be--the man has certainly made mistakes--but nobody has slung mud. . . . If you did criticize him in any meaningful way, you’d find it would stick.”

Field said he believes Bradley “is still the horse to beat” in 1993, but added, “A challenge could come at any time from some young councilman who is politically motivated, possibly a woman, who could be a new voice. But so far, nobody has been trying and trying and trying.”

Only recently has a political attack been mounted, by Holden, who entered the mayoral race late and under-financed. Holden has made some headlines but has not been able to generate the kind of interest and action that a better-financed, better-prepared challenger could have.

Today, Bradley presides over an economically polarized city whose neighborhoods are among the most racially segregated in America--not as bad as Chicago or New York, but worse than Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta or Miami, according to a study by the University of Chicago. The study placed Los Angeles 11th among the 60 major metropolitan areas in the country. It found that the worst cities, including Los Angeles, all had problems of housing discrimination.

Nevertheless, Los Angeles during Bradley’s reign has not suffered the racial strife of Boston or Miami. That may be in part because of a perception that blacks are better off with Bradley in the mayor’s job.

Byran O. Jackson, a black professor at Cal State Los Angeles who has studied black attitudes toward Bradley, said blacks today are far less unhappy over the lack of services and jobs in South-Central Los Angeles--compared to the rage they expressed under white Mayor Sam Yorty--even though South-Central has fared poorly under Bradley.

“Bradley is a symbol of access to power, although he does not necessarily provide any more power,” Jackson said.

Agreed pollster Steinberg, “It is difficult for people to believe that a black mayor would put a bigger priority on funneling money into a yuppie entertainment center like the L.A. Theater Center and downtown amenities, instead of putting money into the tremendous problems of poverty here. People . . . could easily believe it of a white politician.”

Said state Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica): “Voting for him makes people feel good; it confirms their feeling that Los Angeles is open to all kinds of people.”

Despite such complex levels of support for Bradley, many close observers of city politics see problems ahead, as groups who feel left out by his downtown-oriented growth machine increasingly demand attention, and voters begin yearning for new blood in City Hall.

Field said that many voters are proud of Bradley’s successful efforts to rebuild the city’s once-dying downtown, and agree with his dream to make Los Angeles a booming gateway to the Pacific Rim. But sooner or later, he said, when a politician has had as long as Bradley to make a mark on a city, discontent will set in.

“It’s inescapable that criticism of Bradley will grow,” Field said. “They are unhappy with the quality of life in Los Angeles, and more and more of them will find a way to blame him for it.”

Lewis said that two Los Angeles Times polls, one from February and one from 1987, “show some cracks appearing in the Bradley armor.”

Poll Results

For instance, in February the number of people who said they would like a change in City Hall equaled those who said they were looking forward to four more years of Bradley.

In addition, residents were split equally in 1987 over whether Bradley was the best person to solve problems of crime, pollution and traffic, and that same division showed up in the February Times poll, indicating there are “two minds of thought” on his effectiveness, Lewis said.

Whether Bradley’s popularity remains at its current high level will hinge in part on how well he comes to grips with pressing urban problems and the growing interest groups who are unhappy with his approach, analysts said.

One voice among the many demanding a different vision from Bradley is Dorothy Green, president of Heal the Bay and past president of the League of Conservation Voters. Both groups are part of a growing local environmental movement that looks askance at unchecked growth.

“Tom Bradley’s only vision is this international, Pacific Rim, great, big, enormous city which just means more growth, growth, growth, and there is no quality in that growth,” Green says. “He’s going to run into a fight every step of the way from people trying to raise families, environmental groups like ours, and all kinds of people being hurt.”