Save for His Seat, the Passion Was Missing : Supervisors: Ed Edelman kept quiet as the conservatives dismantled L.A. County services. Now that they’re trashing his district, he’s speaking out.

From Malibu to East Los Angeles, it seems that everyone I talk to who is even vaguely familiar with the workings of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is either choking with outrage or shaking their heads in bemusement.

Latinos in Lincoln Heights gerrymandered out of their birthright; mental-health and health-care workers downtown and in South-Central turning away the desperate at the door; dwellers deep in the canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains watching their dream of a pristine national park being bulldozed under and replaced by yet more million-dollar housing developments and yet another golf course--all have nothing good to say about the supervisors. Except for Ed Edelman.

Always except for Ed Edelman. About Edelman, the liberal beacon of the board, they’ll say: “Ed, oh, he’s a good guy.” “Ed? He does what he can behind the scenes, but there’s not much, you know, that he can do, being in the board’s minority.” And most frequently: “Ed, well, he always votes right,” meaning, as I understand it, with a little compassion and a bit of social justice.

Perhaps this is why I took particular note last week when, for the first time that most anyone can recall, Ed Edelman--mild-mannered, professionally trained mediator and hater of controversy--got publicly fired up.

The background for Edelman’s anger is the latest chapter in a seemingly arcane but remarkably instructive scenario currently playing itself out. The supervisors were sued by, among others, a Republican U.S. Department of Justice for excluding millions of Latinos from political power when district lines were redrawn in 1981. Having finally been found guilty by U.S. District Judge David Kenyon--also a Republican--of deliberately violating the Voting Rights Act, the supervisors were ordered to come up with a new redistricting plan that would include a district with a majority of Latino voters.

Last week the board claimed to have done so. Or rather the three-man conservative majority on the five-member board claimed to have done so. The plan, conceived by Dean Dana, Pete Schabarum and Mike Antonovich, and presented to the judge over the outraged objections of Edelman and his fellow liberal Kenny Hahn, was one that would have caused a blush to appear even upon the face of Boss Tweed.

First, it placed all those previously disfranchised Latinos squarely in the new, absurdly convoluted district of the conservatives’ ideological enemy, Ed Edelman. (“The idea is maintain our majority,” said Dana; “Mr. Edelman has been a target of mine for years,” said Schabarum).

Next, it refused to make the board at least a bit more representative by expanding it to seven members, when at even nine each supervisor would still represent close to 1 million people.

Like many others following the story, I found the proposal, oblivious as it is to public opinion or the commonweal, not at all surprising. The concept of public service is, after all, one apparently unknown to our conservative supervisors.

What I did find interesting, as well as telling, however, was Edelman’s outrage--interesting in that at last Edelman’s passion was publicly aroused, telling that it was over the issue of his own seat.

It’s unlikely when he rules Thursday that Judge Kenyon will approve the supervisor’s new plan, flying as it does directly into the spirit of his decision.

And it’s more unlikely still that Edelman, no matter what the new plan’s outcome, will lose his seat. Politically astute, well-financed and well-connected, Ed Edelman will survive.

But if he does not, I for one will shed no tears, as I shed none for Michael Dukakis. It’s not that Edelman has been a bad supervisor. Far from it. He has, in fact, been more than adequate, sensitive to the requests of constituents throughout his district and a hard campaigner for the tobacco and gasoline tax initiatives that passed, as well as for the newly proposed alcohol tax--all of which will provide desperately needed revenues to the county for social services and transportation.

Nor has Edelman run away from what he is--a liberal Democrat--as Dukakis so despicably did in 1988 and as the Democratic national leadership continues to do.

But if these are not exactly the times that try men’s souls, it’s fair to say that they are indeed tough times. Times when repression as an answer to all our social ills has become a knee-jerk, undebated reaction and phrases like social justice and long-term solutions the objects of scorn.

Here in Los Angeles, we’ve already become a two-tier society, with the alleys between the sleek high-rises downtown and elsewhere more resembling Calcutta and the slums of Rio than the promise of the Golden Era as the world’s premier region that we thought we were entering.

Edelman, his heart and his vote in the right place, has sat and watched it happen. Rarely if ever has he seized the opportunity, or the public’s attention--as has, say, his ideological opponent Schabarum--to fight passionately for what he believes in and to do what was necessary so that his vision of Los Angeles, and not Schabarum’s, would prevail. While the board’s conservative majority was busy ensuring its vision, Edelman was not out there defining the issues, intelligently appealing to the populist instincts and interests and proudly, unapologetically, defending the Bill of Rights and the constitutional safeguards that liberals have always stood for.

Nor was he noticeably building a liberal coalition that might have unseated a conservative on the board and changed its configuration. In 1988, with Antonovich on the ropes and forced into a run-off, Edelman had the opportunity and political capital to seriously try and unseat him. He chose instead--as his fellow Democrats in Washington have done over the past decade--to risk nothing.

I know it’s not Edelman’s style to jump up and shout, and I know that he is a man of compromise. But we’ve seen no evidence of compromise on the part of Schabarum, Antonovich or Dana, just an overt contempt for all that Edelman and people like me believe in. So there will be no tears on my part if Edelman is forced out of public service, as there is no outrage over his current dilemma. There’s too much at stake for liberals to afford nice guys and good people who, when push comes to shove, won’t go out into the alley and have it out.