The Remaking of Candidates in Heat of Election

Monday night, I saw why Los Angeles County Supervisor Deane Dana is having such a tough race against Gordana Swanson, the mayor of Rolling Hills.

Swanson, two of her campaign aides and I were heading toward Downey, where she was to speak. The aides were in the front seat. I was in back with Swanson, interviewing her.

Lost and confused by Southeast L.A. County’s mystifying tangle of freeways and streets, the driver speeded through a boulevard stop sign. I looked up from my notepad and saw a white car heading toward us. Everyone else saw the car too. But Swanson just kept on talking. Not wanting to be seen as a wimp, I continued taking notes.

The white car missed us. Swanson talked on, as if the near collision had never happened. This is single-minded woman, I thought. You can see it in her intense expression, her face icy pale in contrast to her dark hair, sort of like Morticia of the Addams Family.

She’ll need all her single-mindedness to beat Dana. For he is a miracle worker, blessed with the ability to miraculously transform himself from one person to another, depending on the circumstances.

When I met Dana in 1980, he was a mid-level telephone company executive running for supervisor as a Reagan conservative. His opponent was Yvonne Brathwaite Burke. Like Reagan, then on his way to the presidency, Dana promised to gut the wasteful county bureaucracy.

Dana is an amiable sort. To return to the Addams Family analogy, if Swanson is Morticia, Dana is the harmless Uncle Fester.

But he can be mean on the campaign trail. Burke is African-American, inspiring Dana during the 1980 campaign to plaster the predominantly white district with her pictures. He also put out advertisements implying that she favored mandatory school busing. It was enough to beat Burke, who is now running for supervisor in another district.

After Dana’s election, I watched his first miraculous transformation. The Reaganite turned into the bureaucrat. At heart, Dana was a child of the phone company, and of its notoriously slow-moving and top-heavy bureaucracy. Quickly sensing he was one of them, the county bureaucrats figured out what buttons to push and made Dana their servant.

The bureaucrats ran wild, and Dana was among their supervisorial protectors. An example was County Administrator Richard Dixon’s decision to redecorate his office.

County government’s finest crafts people installed marble floors, expensive tables and thick carpets. Gawkers marveled as work proceeded. Reporters wrote stories. But only when the remodeling became a full-fledged scandal--and after it was completed--did Dana criticize the work.

“Weren’t you slow in finding out?” I asked him when we talked in his office Wednesday. “The building is only eight floors tall. Everything that happens here becomes the subject of gossip.”

“Well, it doesn’t get up here, I’ll tell you,” replied Dana.

Then there was the $265-million pension hike that top bureaucrats voted themselves and the supervisors. Dana supported that scheme and will benefit from it.

Public anger over the pension giveaway, the remodeling and other outrages set the stage for the miracle of Dana’s second transformation.

This was the greatest miracle.

All of a sudden, he was attacking the pension giveaway as “obscene” and is telling the voters that he is “leading the fight to reverse it.” Tuesday, however, he voted against a motion to kill the plan immediately.

And all of a sudden, he’s become Supervisor Gloria Molina’s great supporter. He used to look disgusted when Molina attacked Dixon, his top bureaucratic aides and the other supervisors. When Dana speaks now, you’d think that Dana and Molina were partners in reform.

Dana is even claiming credit for forcing Dixon to offer his resignation. Et tu, Brute, as Caeser said when his friend stabbed him.

Swanson is waving the reform banner, herself.

That’s also a switch. I covered Swanson when she was a member of the Rapid Transit District board. The RTD was run by bureaucrats whose main goal was to keep their failures out of the newspapers. Swanson was squarely on the RTD’s side.

Dana is making that point in a campaign that is much better financed than Swanson’s. A Dana poll taken by political consultant Arnie Steinberg Oct. 7-10 showed Dana leading 48% to 29% with 23% undecided.

But Swanson has a chance. In the primary, Dana didn’t carry a single community in the district. The 48% could represent Dana’s peak if Swanson accumulates enough money for a strong finish.

If that happens, Dana would need another miracle, perhaps another of his miraculous transformations.