Larry Who? : Former Irvine Mayor Has Set His Sights on the White House

Larry Agran is sitting at a horseshoe-shaped table with his habitual steadiness, awaiting the start of the cable network talk show “Week in Review.”

Around the table are Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis’ former presidential campaign manager, and pollster Patrick Caddell, a leading consultant to Jimmy Carter’s 1976 White House bid.

Above the pre-showtime burble, program host Bill Rosendahl turns to his guest and asks his name, repeating it loudly--”AY-gran”--as if practicing the pronunciation of a foreign word.

As the cameras begin to turn, Rosendahl, framed in a congenial closeup, addresses the television audience: “Joining me is an announced Democratic candidate for President of the United States. . . .”

Then, in a studied gesture, Rosendahl offers the candidate a handshake, pausing for effect: “Larry . . . What’s your name?”

In the weeks after his Aug. 22 announcement that he would run for the Democratic nomination for President, Larry Agran, the 46-year-old former mayor of Irvine, has been getting accustomed to being referred to as “Larry Who?”

In fact, he acknowledges, “I wouldn’t expect anything else.”

The day this soft-spoken, slightly built man stood up at a gathering at UC Irvine, formally declaring his intention to run for the highest elective office in the land, he cast himself as a political Don Quixote and risked that most stinging reproof: ridicule.

Not even New York’s John V. Lindsay, former mayor of the big-time Big Apple, had figured out in 1972 how to make that seven-league leap--and, Irvine, well. . . .

Agran’s candidacy has other problems as well. He’s no longer holding office. He has not contributed weighty editorials to prestigious publications to enhance his reputation. Indeed, his candidacy has not been endorsed by a single nationally recognized Democrat. Even the Orange County Democratic Party chairman opposes his running.

“Any normal, level-headed person in Larry’s position would say, ‘There’s no way I could run a serious presidential campaign right now,’ ” says his friend and former political co-worker, Michael Schuman.

But Agran, like Martin Luther King Jr., whom he often quotes, believes in the practical impact of improbable dreaming. Taking to heart Tip O’Neill’s dictum that “all politics is local,” the mayor of small, spotless, suburban Irvine has gotten it into his head to become the voice of cities and towns across America.

His program, labeled the New American Security, calls for cutting military spending by half, or $150 billion, including withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Europe and Japan by 1995.

Funds would be redirected to revitalize domestic programs, with allocations to cities and towns, school districts, health and housing and environmental protection, plus $50 billion to reduce the annual federal budget deficit.

Now, the questions being asked by politicians and colleagues alike are, will Agran be taken seriously? And why is Larry Agran running for President of the United States in the first place?

Agran admits his populist bid is a very long shot. A graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School, he jokes that someone suggested he adopt the motto, “I am not a kook.”

Certainly his announcement did not send shock waves through the national media. The Times ran the story of his candidacy on the obituary page, provoking Agran’s father, Reuben, a retired accountant living in Studio City, to telephone the newspaper demanding, “Are you trying to kill him off already?”

Reaction from everyone from his parents to his mentor, 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, was shock.

“It’s the top position,” says his mother, Selma, still a little incredulously. She and her husband learned of their son’s intentions while listening to conservative KFI-AM radio commentator Hugh Hewitt. Nor did Agran consult Howard Adler, chairman of the Orange County Democratic Party, who encouraged him to run instead for Congress against conservative incumbent Robert K. Dornan.

“There were a number of people who would have said, ‘Don’t do it,’ ” says Christopher Mears, a civil rights lawyer and Agran’s fund-raising chairman. “That wasn’t going to help him make up his mind.”

At first, Agran does indeed seem like the sort of fellow who might have difficulty making decisions. He is amiable and unopinionated about such mundane matters as choosing a restaurant, and he pelts a new acquaintance with questions on topics ranging from foreign affairs to local homelessness.

Described by friends as an ordinary, down-to-earth person, he watches television sitcoms to relax and enjoys books like Bill Cosby’s “Fatherhood.” He wears a variety of apparatchik neckties and at lunch accompanies a salad of smoked salmon and asparagus with a cup of coffee.

He does not read fiction or find foreign films to be of high quality (he likes “City Slickers”) and, although he has traveled to Mexico, Vietnam and Japan, he has not been to Europe.

“He’s a milk-and-cookies kind of guy,” says Schuman. “He’s a man with no vices. He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t stay out late. He’s faithful as a husband and father. He doesn’t lie.”

Still, beneath the surface there is a sense of the tougher stuff that underpins the committed idealist. “He is truly one of the few men of conscience I’ve met in public life,” states Adler. “He’s not a guy who wimps out on how he feels.”

Recently, he has broken into the national Democratic forum, appearing on the MacNeil/Lehrer show, making a week’s junket through New Hampshire and speaking earlier this month at a three-state party fund-raising dinner in Iowa along with former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts; Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, who announced his candidacy Sunday, and Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas.

“He handled himself well,” observes McGovern, who was the keynote speaker and who had called on Agran to head his own exploratory committee for a possible candidacy, abandoned last May. “It’s going to be interesting to see how he’s received, because he does make sense when he speaks. He’s articulate, and his ideas are sound.”

At the Democratic National Committee, however, Agran’s distinction in a list of newcomers to the presidential race is still dubious. “A mayor may not even be well-known statewide. These things take time,” cautions the director of political programs, Alice Travis, a former national committeewoman from California.

Estrich is more incisive: “There’s nothing much fun about running for President, in truth. It’s a demeaning, demanding, sometimes depressing process. . . . That raises the most interesting question about him: Why would someone who has no chance of being elected President of the United States, no chance of being the nominee and almost no chance of being taken seriously in the process decide to subject himself to this?”

Certainly there was little evidence of the presidential candidate in Agran’s early years. His parents, who raised him in a politically liberal Jewish household, describe him as a compassionate boy, “sweet but tough,” and the middle of three brothers.

Once, when his parents worried aloud about Larry’s small size as a junior high school student, they remember his reply: “When they see what I can do, it’s no problem.”

“He’s always been an uphill fighter,” adds his mother.

After serving as student body president of North Hollywood High School, Agran attended Berkeley, where in the 1960s he participated in anti-war and civil rights marches and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, with majors in economics and history. He met his wife, Phyllis, a pediatric gastroenterologist, during a fair-housing campaign in Los Angeles after their sophomore year, and they now have a 21-year-old son, Ken, a senior at Dartmouth College.

After graduation from Harvard, Agran worked as legal counsel to the California state Senate Committee on Health and Welfare and wrote a book, “The Cancer Connection,” criticizing the U.S. government’s environmental policies.

But it was as mayor of Irvine that Agran made his mark as a liberal Democrat. Appointed to a two-year term in 1982 and again in 1986, he became the first elected mayor in 1988, plus serving six years on the City Council--all in a GOP stronghold where Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 2 to 1.

Agran put the town of 100,000 on the map with an ordinance prohibiting the use of chlorofluorocarbons. He also established a curbside recycling program, requisite green spaces in city development and city-funded child care centers.

Support of a human rights ordinance banning discrimination in housing and employment based on sexual orientation piqued fundamentalist conservatives and caused his narrow defeat in June, 1990.

Looking back, Agran quips that his principal achievement probably was just surviving as a Democrat in Orange County.

Still, like his conservative counterparts, Agran is content with the peace and quiet of the planned community: “I like the fact that it is orderly, that it is safe. There are not a lot of surprises. The flip side of that, of course, is that it can be dull.”

This sense of order, as well as a leadership style based on responsiveness to the citizenry, won over Republicans as well as Democrats.

“He really believes government can make a difference in people’s lives,” says Cameron Cosgrove, a Republican city councilman under Agran.

On a recent afternoon, looking out over the men with bedrolls drifting along Santa Monica’s promenade, Agran expresses the same sort of concern for the American people in earnest, almost mournful tones:

“All this needless, truly needless, human suffering in this country. . . . It’s almost beyond belief that we tolerate as much as we do--the homelessness, the hunger, the lost souls everywhere. We’re really victims of a kind of economic violence. . . .”

Later, driving along Irvine’s broad, quiet streets, Agran speaks of his decision to run for election when he could find no candidate to stand in McGovern’s place. “I was startled and surprised that he was willing to do it,” McGovern recalls--and the three-time presidential hopeful warned Agran about the possibility of ridicule.

“I feel the tug of that,” Agran allows. “On one hand, it gives me pause. On the other, it makes me angry. Why should this be ridiculous? It may be a long shot. It may be that there’s little opportunity to succeed. But why should it be ridiculous?”

He has leap-frogged over campaigns for more attainable posts as California governor or U.S. senator, he says, because of the $1 million-plus required in start-up costs and because he wanted a national forum for his ideas--ideas that he hopes will help prepare the Democratic Party to govern again, either in 1992 or 1996.

“I want to be clear about this,” he adds. “I want to be part of that new government”--if not as President, then as a Cabinet member in 1996. “I’d love to be secretary of housing and urban development and really do a decent job.”

For the time being, however, he is under fire to explain just how he is qualified to be President.

On “Week in Review,” Rosendahl excuses his introduction as not intentionally facetious, then turns his guest over to his own Democratic meat-eaters. Estrich, with a bemused smirk, inquires “with all due respect, Mr. Mayor,” why there are so few Democrats of stature in the race.

“What I hear you saying,” snipes Caddell, who’s been cradling his head in his palm with exaggerated disconsolation, “is, let’s take the money and dump it in the same rat hole. . . .”

It is mentioned, in passing, that Agran has no foreign policy experience, then Estrich declares that the American people do not want the kinds of military cuts he proposes.

“Let me suggest that you stop reading the polls and start dealing with your heart and with your head,” Agran retorts.

Later, in his blue Volvo, he snaps: “These were all people who have experience in losing elections.”

Wearied by the campaign rhetoric, Agran’s son, Ken, relinquishes his job as his father’s driver for the day. And as Ken moves over to nap in the passenger’s seat, the man who would be President takes the wheel and begins to negotiate the evening rush-hour traffic on the San Diego Freeway.