Chicken Dinners and Dreams : Life’s a Whirl for Young Minorities With Political Aspirations

One look at Geoffrey Taylor Gibbs’ engagement calendar seems to prove that he needs a nutritionist. Clearly, there is way too much rubber chicken in his diet.

One recent week, for instance, the 29-year-old lawyer went to Los Angeles fund-raisers for mayoral candidates in Oakland and Washington, D.C., as well as an event for a Los Angeles City Council candidate. He attended a fund-raiser staged by supporters of Proposition B on the Los Angeles city ballot. Then he helped conduct a voter education session on California’s ballot initiatives at Trinity Baptist Church.

On the weekend, he was a judge at a debate tournament that included Jordan High School’s team, which Gibbs and other members of a network of young black and Latino professionals have supported with a fund-raising drive.

This frantic pace--atop a full-time job as an associate at the prominent law firm of O’Melveny & Myers--is fairly routine for Gibbs, a former Rhodes scholar and a 1988 graduate of UC-Berkeley’s Boalt Hall law school.

For Gibbs, this full, after-work schedule is the price of the pursuit of politics, of one day possibly getting a real shot at running for office.

It is, he concedes, a gamble that may never pay off.

And, Gibbs acknowledges that some think it’s a crazy way to live.

“People ask me that all the time--why are you involved in politics?” he says, reflecting the skepticism he encounters.

But Gibbs says he sees politics as honorable and that he is willing to undergo the scrutiny that goes with political ambition.

“When I was a little boy, my mother told me, ‘Never do anything you don’t want to see in the paper,’ ” he recalls. “I don’t think she was talking about (politics) but I guess that still applies.”

Gibbs is not the only one who willingly spends his private hours in pursuit of a possible public life. This political season, while attention focuses on the high-profile candidates and issues, there are plenty of others busy in this largely invisible quest.

Especially for minority candidates, it is a task that requires discretion, patience and bridge-building to a powerful older generation, which knows all too well the limits of political opportunities for people of color in Los Angeles.

Too, while struggling with this realpolitik, the aspiring must look to the future, assembling a group of like-minded peers.

In Los Angeles, at least, this can mean making connections across cultural and ethnic barriers because the city’s future is in diversity.

And at this level, it seems that the coalitions of blacks, Latinos and Asians that may one day control power in the city and state are already being formed.

In August, for example, the informal group that includes Gibbs threw a fund-raiser to support the candidacy of Lon Hatamiya, an Asian-American Democrat from Marysville running for the General Assembly’s 3rd District seat. The event raised more than $3,000 for Hatamiya, Gibbs says, largely through $50 donations.

Tracy Robinson, 30, a black who works as an administrator in the gang enforcement section of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office and who hopes one day to run for office, said he participated in the fund-raiser because “there’s not an Asian American in the state Assembly” now.

Says Gibbs: “Whatever it is that I’ll be doing in the future, the past generation has recognized that what’s going to be unique about L.A. and California is this multicultural, world society living in one place. They recognized that, they’ve predicted it. It’s up to our generation to live it and make that promise come true. . . . And that’s why it was so important, for instance, that a group of largely black and Hispanic folks got together to throw a fund-raiser for Lon Hatamiya. . . .”

Louis E. Caldera, a 34-year-old lawyer, believes that such connections are practical politics: “I think that California is facing tremendous challenges in our multicultural, multiethnic society, and that we have to have everyone participating in the process if we’re going to be able to meet those challenges effectively.”

In a similar vein, Gibbs says that elective office is seen as a catalyst for change and that he is doubly pleased some have already suggested that he has political potential.

“If you know the extent of the problems in the African-American community and the degree to which our community relies on its elected officials to address those, you have to take it as a great honor when anyone suggests that you can play that kind of a role,” he says.

Coping with the uncertainty that Gibbs, Caldera and the others do, few are willing to talk for the record. In fact, like reluctant presidential candidates, few will actually admit, even privately, to elective desires.

“You don’t want to put a big bulls-eye on yourself that says blind ambition,” jokes Caldera, who works at the law firm of Buchalter, Nemer, Fields & Younger.

In the jargon of some aspiring politicians, campaign events and fund-raisers are prime face-time or stroking opportunities, meaning those crucial moments when a young unknown can shake hands and chat with big-time money men and elected officials.

It is a tactic that requires unrelenting repetition if a would-be campaigner is to stand out from the sea of faces, veterans say. One notes that it may take from five to a dozen introductions to the same person before the shell of anonymity cracks. If all goes well, important people acquire a “comfort level” with a potential candidate, as one politician-in-waiting put it.

“As a practical matter, when you run, and you ask people for the kind of money that it takes to run these days, people really feel that they want to know who you are and what you’re about and what you stand for. And that comes only from developing relationships over time,” says Caldera, a graduate of West Point and Harvard University, who last year lost his race for a seat on the Rio Hondo community college board but hopes someday to run for something else.

A corollary to this rule of political etiquette is that the older generation of office holders and behind-the-scenes powerhouses must always be treated with respect. Or the consequences could be dire.

“Any young person who wants to play a role in the African-American community in L.A. has to walk a tightrope between honoring and supporting our longtime leadership and trying to show that this generation has something to contribute,” Gibbs says.

With a laugh, he adds: “If you fall off that tightrope your career will be like a Steven Segal movie, you know, ‘Marked for Death.’ ”

Others in the political game say that this attitude may change dramatically if Propositions 131 or 140 pass Tuesday. The initiatives that impose term limitations for statewide office holders and state legislators are likely to fuel the ambitions of aspirants like Robinson, who says he might possibly seek an Assembly seat if one or both propositions is approved.

Caldera, not a fan of term limitations, says the propositions represent the “frustration of the voters with the status quo.” And he wouldn’t oppose a few changes on the elected political scene.

“I think we have an absence of leadership, and I think that it’s important to have people who really have the public welfare in mind and who are willing sometimes to take the heat, to say what they really think about how you really resolve pressing issues,” he maintains.

But Julio Ramirez, a member of the Gibbs and Caldera circle and a special assistant to the Los Angeles city attorney, says that his generation can’t count on an easy rise to influence.

“It’s like revolutions, you can’t plan them, they just happen,” he says.

Knowing that they may never climb out of the crowd, both Gibbs and Caldera say that it’s important to derive satisfaction from their extracurricular activities now.

“I wouldn’t be happy if all I was doing was practicing law,” says Caldera, who is on the government affairs council of United Way and a trustee of the Mexican-American Bar Assn.

Gibbs’ projects include helping raise money for the Jordan High School debate team and working with a group of lawyers from his firm on behalf of homeowners in the path of the Harbor Freeway expansion. In the latter project, the goal of the pro bono effort has been getting fair market prices for the homeowners.

In fact, Gibbs says that if he hadn’t been on the political circuit, he might not have been approached last November by an aide to Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) to help the homeowners. The only reason the aide came to him, he explains, “is that over that year I had been out at all these events and he knew there was a young attorney at O’Melveny & Myers who seemed interested in community service.”

For the next several months, Gibbs says he expects to continue averaging several hours a day helping wrap up the homeowner matters. The experience, he says, was one that opened his eyes to this city.

“It’s very clear in some of my involvements in the past couple of years that (the system) is not working for everyone in Los Angeles. This really is a tale of two cities,” he says. “I’m not sure what can be done about it, but I think each person has to look within himself or herself and figure out what they can do.

“I’ve been fortunate,” he says, “to be with a group of friends and young people in this city who work across ethnic lines. We’re just trying to do one small step at a time what is within our power to do and so far we’ve found that people have been responsive to that.”

As for the Jordan High School debate project, Gibbs, the son of college professors, says that showing students black and Latino role models was as important as the money raised.

“We probably could have rounded up 200 young Anglo attorneys and investment bankers, but that would not have meant anything to the kids because they know that existed,” he says. “They don’t know that we’re here and they don’t know, frankly, that we care what happens to them.”

Meanwhile, Caldera, the son of immigrants from Mexico, says he is ready for whatever the future brings, including never again seeing his name on a ballot.

“If it doesn’t ever happen, that would be OK,” he says. “In fact, it may be the case that being an elected office holder isn’t the way to accomplish the things that you believe in.”