L.A. Mayoral Hopefuls Getting Political Face Lifts : Image: Anti-incumbent fervor prompts veterans to cast themselves as outsiders, reformers and mavericks.

A wealthy lawyer who wants to run for mayor of Los Angeles as a “populist” quit driving an Infiniti and bought a Ford Explorer. A City Council member eyeing the same job changed his registration from Republican to independent in a city with a liberal voting record. A white San Fernando Valley assemblyman with a no-nonsense record on law and order bought an ad in a black community newspaper supporting reform of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Across the country, it is the year of the political change artist and Los Angeles is no different.

In a time of extraordinary public hostility toward conventional politics and politicians, likely candidates in the 1993 Los Angeles mayor’s race are fashioning voter-friendly images. Candidates who have been in and around local government for decades are preparing to campaign as outsiders, mavericks and reformers.

The comments of Joel Wachs, a 22-year veteran of the City Council, is typical of the populist rhetoric flowing from some of the city’s most entrenched politicians.

“What this city needs is to engage people from the bottom up,” Wachs said when he declared his interest in running for mayor this month. “The people have to be involved in the rebuilding of their city. It’s not something that can come from the top down. It’s not government and business as usual.”

Preparing to run on similar themes are lawyer-businessman Richard Riordan, who bought the Explorer, and Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), who took out the ad in the Los Angeles Sentinel.

Other contenders for the mayor’s job include Councilman Michael Woo, an announced candidate. Four other council members--Nate Holden, Zev Yaroslavsky, Joy Picus and Richard Alatorre--are considering whether to join the race. RTD board member Nikolas Patsaouras, a businessman with close ties to City Hall, may also be a mayoral candidate. County Supervisor Gloria Molina has not ruled it out.

Mayor Tom Bradley has said he will announce next month whether he will seek a sixth term.

For the time being, the idea of term limits for elected officeholders has become the cause celebre of the new anti-politics, with Riordan leading the charge for a law that would restrict elected officials to two consecutive terms.

Bradley quickly followed suit with his own term limits proposal, which would not go into effect in time to stop him from running for a sixth term. Woo has championed Bradley’s term limits proposal in the City Council--where it has gone nowhere--but has refused to say whether he would limit himself to two terms if no law was enacted.

The candidates insist that they are not manipulating their images. Riordan said he bought his Explorer because he wanted to drive an American car. “It’s as simple as that,” he said. Wachs, 52, a lifelong Republican, said he became an independent because he wanted to disassociate himself from the partisan bickering that has made government the object of public scorn. And Katz said his ad in the Sentinel was solicited by the newspaper.

The would-be mayoral hopefuls, all of whom have held elective or appointive office for a decade or longer, are wasting no time taking polls, identifying sources of campaign funds and getting their message out with ads, initiatives and speeches. They have retained some of the best political consultants that money can buy.

As various candidates cast themselves as political reformers, at least two have had to fend off criticism that they are playing fast and loose with the city’s ethics law.

Riordan’s rivals complain that the millionaire entrepreneur is thumbing his nose at voter-enacted spending limits by pouring his wealth into a term limits initiative campaign that implicitly promotes his mayoral ambitions.

Ads and mailers for the initiative prominently feature Riordan’s name and photograph. One recent mailer sent to thousands of residents included four pictures of Riordan and mentioned his name 18 times.

Although the ethics law limits contributions in a mayoral race to $1,000 per donor, there are no restrictions on the size of contributions to an initiative.

“The campaign is clearly about promoting Dick Riordan,” said Vicky Rideout, campaign manager to Woo, who wrote the ethics law. “Otherwise you would not have four pictures of him in the mailing.”

Riordan disputed the criticism, saying his support for term limits is consistent with long-held views.

“I was one of the biggest supporters of Prop. 140,” he said, referring to the 1990 ballot initiative that restricted the terms of elected state officials.

Woo has been criticized for crisscrossing the country to meet with potential donors months before filing the required paperwork to begin raising funds for the mayor’s race. He filed the papers this month.

“When you posture yourself as Mr. Ethics, you ought to obey the ethics rules,” Wachs said.

Woo, 40, said the meetings here and across the country were part of his duties as a councilman and a leader in the Asian-American community. “I was not specifically asking people for support for a mayor’s race,” Woo said. “There is not a problem here.”

Ben Bycel, executive director of the city Ethics Commission, said he has received no documented reports of violations.

Meanwhile, political observers are skeptical about the reception voters will give some of the city’s political warhorses presenting themselves as bold newcomers.

“It’s dishonest and it demeans the electorate,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior associate at the Claremont Graduate School’s Center for Politics and Policy. “I think the electorate is on to the ploy.”

Of all the candidates, Riordan, Woo and Katz have been working hardest to contrast themselves with the political status quo in Los Angeles.

With a personal fortune estimated at $100 million, Riordan has earned the nickname “Junior Perot” from local political consultants. Like the former independent presidential candidate, Riordan, 62, is a philanthropist who wants to run government like a blue-chip corporation.

Riordan is a former Bradley appointee to two city commissions and a longtime confidante of city and county government leaders. He has contributed $134,000 to Bradley’s campaigns since 1985, and $20,000 to 10 of the 15 council members. In the last three years his firm has received nearly $2 million in county contracts.

Riordan said that if he runs his campaign will be directed by Clinton Reilly, a Democratic political consultant who worked for the 1991 election of San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan.

For the time being, Riordan’s political fortunes are closely tied to the progress of his term limits initiative. He has hired a professional signature-gathering firm and spent more than $200,000 of his own money in an effort to meet a Dec. 28 deadline. By then, he must gather the 175,450 signatures--or 15% of the city’s voters--to qualify the initiative for the April ballot.

A two-term council member from Hollywood, Woo has sought to distance himself from politics as usual at the council. Woo was the first council member to call for former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates’ resignation after the Rodney G. King beating.

But Woo is also a product of the system he would change. Politics has been his career. He started as an aide to state Sen. David A. Roberti, ran unsuccessfully for the City Council in 1981 and was first elected four years later.

He has hired political consultant James Squier, who is working for Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton, to run his mayoral campaign. While Woo talks of change, he is also modeling himself after Bradley, hoping to inherit the mayor’s mantle as the great conciliator in a city riven by ethnic factions.

Katz, 42, a six-term Democratic assemblyman from the Valley, is trying to set himself apart from the rest of the pack by portraying himself as a can-do legislator who is “not part of City Hall.” But Katz bears the burden of association with a state Legislature stuck in a marathon budget gridlock. Moreover, he is a close ally of Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), a powerful symbol of Sacramento’s political Establishment.

Katz is hardly a political ingenue.

To run his campaign, Katz has hired Clinton’s chief strategist, James Carville.

Self-made millionaire and local transportation expert Patsaouras, 48, is the dark horse worth watching in the early going.

He is the first candidate to put forward a detailed plan for breaking down the physical barriers that contribute to the city’s social and ethnic fragmentation. The plan calls for using transit corridors as the focus for new neighborhoods that would integrate commercial and residential uses.

A Greek immigrant with a passionate interest in transportation, Patsaouras has forsaken his Mercedes sports car to ride the bus once a week.