The Presidential Race Finally Turns Serious

All that Los Angeles wants to hear from the presidential candidates are their solutions to the city’s economic and social troubles.

In other words, how are they going to prevent future riots?

I could see that three days of violence against authority had heightened political interest as I watched the audiences at Bill Clinton’s speech at East Los Angeles College and Jerry Brown’s noontime rally on the steps of City Hall on Thursday. The spectators, having lived through unprecedented trauma, seemed to regard the candidates with a lot more intensity than usual.

So what did these intent Angelenos find out from the two candidates in the June 2 California presidential primary?

Clinton’s riot-prevention plan amounts to indirect federal help in providing jobs, better housing and education. The economic development would come from Washington, stimulating private investment to create job-producing enterprises in poorer areas.

The education portion was the theme of Clinton’s speech to students, faculty and members of the Latino community at the East L.A. College auditorium.

Attend one of these speeches, by the way, and you see that the audience and the auditorium are merely sets for a TV production. The campaign beams the speech to a satellite, where it can be taken for broadcast by television stations all over the country--or the world.

Shelves, filled with books, had been placed on the stage in back of Clinton. From the audience it looked like one of those bars with literary pretensions, where the walls are lined with books bought by the yard. But on TV, it was supposed to appear as though Clinton was speaking from a library, where he had just finished heavy research for his speech.

Clinton told how he had visited a school in South-Central Los Angeles a few years ago. He wondered what became of the children.

“I’ve often wondered how many of them wound up in gangs,” he said. “How many of them looted? How many of them are still alive?” Then, he paused and added: “They’re all our children.”

Most of the audience knew what Clinton was talking about. Many generations of poor and working-class East L.A. graduates have balanced jobs, families and classes as they moved up through life. That was the theme of Clinton’s speech: poor kids advancing through education.

He proposed that the present system of federal loans, with their income limits, be replaced by loans available to everybody. Repayment would be by ability to pay. A high-income doctor would have bigger payments than a public school teacher. Loans could also be repaid by working in a public school for a few years after graduation from college--as a teacher, a police officer, a drug counselor.

For the public schools, Clinton said he would increase federal financing of Head Start for small children, and send more money from Washington to renovate deteriorating urban schools and help states, including California, faced with the job of educating large numbers of immigrant children.

Brown wasn’t as specific. In fact, you would have to have access to Prodigy or some other computer information service to know what he would do.

He said that he supported the recent proposals by leading big city mayors, but he didn’t go into detail as to what they were. I had to go back to the newspaper, where we’re provided with many information sources, and look up the mayors’ proposals.

The mayors have long wanted a return to the big urban and social programs of the ‘60s and ‘70s, ended when Ronald Reagan took office in 1980. This week, they called for more federal spending for programs to rebuild old urban facilities and to stimulate economic development in poor parts of cities. All this would be financed by shifting military spending to national social programs.

Although he didn’t give many details, Brown provided plenty of rhetoric, the fiery rhetoric of Democratic urban liberals who regard L.A.’s three days of killing, fire and looting as a rebellion, rather than a riot.

“When our second-largest city explodes in riots and insurrection not seen since Civil War days, something is wrong,” Brown said to a noontime crowd, standing in front of the City Hall steps. “The suffering and injustice have gone too far.”

At day’s end, the differences were clear, and not too surprising. Brown is speaking to--and for--the Democratic party’s liberal wing, while Clinton is appealing to the more numerous center.

More important, this campaign isn’t being fought on the gutter level of the earlier primaries, with their obsessive interest in private lives. The riot ended that foolishness. The election is now as serious as life and death.