Mayoral Candidates Strive to Look Bigger Than the Job : Politics: In an office that lacks direct control over many areas, a strong leadership image becomes crucial.

For the first time in more than 60 years, candidates running for mayor of Los Angeles won’t have an incumbent to kick around.

Instead, the candidates will have to grapple with an entrenched adversary of a different sort--the widespread belief that the office of mayor is not powerful enough to rescue the city from social and economic turmoil.

“It’s not just the idea that the city is becoming ungovernable with all its factions and tension,” said Steven Erie, a political science professor at UC San Diego who writes frequently about Los Angeles, “but the fear that City Hall can’t do what needs to be done.”

The pessimism stems partly from watching Tom Bradley, once regarded as one of the nation’s strongest mayors, in his last year in office as he struggled futilely to hold the city together last spring. Bradley has insisted that he was virtually helpless in the face of forces that led to the rioting. He blamed Proposition 13, Reaganomics, changes in global markets and the recession.

It wasn’t the first time a mayor of Los Angeles pleaded powerlessness as a consequence of a City Charter that diffuses power throughout the city bureaucracy.

After the Watts riots of 1965, members of a Senate panel investigating the disturbance questioned Bradley’s predecessor, Mayor Sam Yorty, about his authority over the city.

“In other words,” Yorty was asked, “you lack the jurisdiction, authority, responsibility for what makes a city move?”

“That’s exactly it,” Yorty replied.

Today, there is a sense that the next mayor will need the finesse and style to range far beyond City Hall, that he or she will have to be a force in Sacramento, in the halls of county government and at the board of education.

Unlike New York City, for example, municipal government in Los Angeles has very little authority to intervene in some of the city’s most critical problem areas--its embattled schools, hospitals and welfare system, which are under other jurisdictions.

City government has control over police, fire, public works and sanitation as well as the international airport, the harbor and the Department of Water and Power. However, the City Charter dilutes the mayor’s authority over these areas, dividing power generously among the members of the City Council and a network of city commissions.

Even so, during forums and talk shows, the candidates are being asked where they stand on a variety of matters over which they would have little or no authority as mayor--what to do about illegal aliens, putting metal detectors in schools and breaking up the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“No one who gets elected can come into this place, snap their fingers and expect things to automatically happen, not here, not in this City Hall,” said Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani, who has worked for Bradley for three years.

For years, scholars have argued that the city will not solve many of its problems unless more authority is vested in the mayor’s office. But voters and politicians alike have balked at such proposals.

As long as the system remains as it is, campaign consultants say, the candidates in the 1993 mayor’s race must make themselves look bigger than the office to which they aspire.

In such a climate, the test of leadership can take on new meaning.

“The Romans called it gravitas , the quality that causes people to get behind a leader,” Erie said. “A mayor that can’t invoke constitutional powers to get his way must have a mandate from the public. And to have that he must be perceived as a leader.”

In a recent interview, one of the mayoral candidates, lawyer Richard Riordan, talked about the leadership qualities that voters will be looking for in this election:

“What this election is all about is the decline of L.A., the alienation of its citizens and its total mismanagement. And what the candidates have to do is get out the message who has the economic vision, the courage and the will to stop the decline, to make it safe, to create jobs and to restore L.A. to its great status.”

The candidates have been working in a variety of ways to project images of leadership.

All of them, including those who have spent their careers in government, are campaigning as outsiders who will bring a spirit of energy and reform to City Hall. Several take pains to identify with urban dwellers’ feelings of victimization. Lawyer and candidate Stan Sanders begins a pitch for tougher law enforcement by talking about break-ins at his house. City Councilman Michael Woo, as he outlines his plan to hire more police officers, talks about being a robbery victim.

Several candidates describe their experiences as immigrant children or as ghetto youngsters when questioned about their qualifications for governing a city beset by ethnic tensions.

Their message to inner-city residents is much the same, whether it is expressed by candidate Julian Nava, the son of poor Mexican immigrants who made his way back to Mexico as the U.S. ambassador under President Jimmy Carter, or Sanders, who went from Watts to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.

In so many words, they are saying, “I know what your lives are like and I know how to make things better.”

The candidates are aware of the limitations on mayoral authority, and many of them say they will use moral suasion to accomplish what they can’t simply decree.

Woo said in a recent speech: “It is true that the mayor of Los Angeles does not have a political machine to enforce his will. But the mayor of Los Angeles, as the single most dominant figure in Southern California, does have a position of moral leadership. . . . He has the bully pulpit.”

The pulpit, of course, is nothing without the bully. And what this race may boil down to is which candidate is a model of strength.

Woo, who has often struggled to get his way during his eight years on the council, hopes to plant an image of courage and decisiveness in the minds of voters. He has been doing it primarily by repeatedly reminding them that he was the first City Council member to call for the resignation of former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates after the police beating of Rodney G. King.

Candidate Tom Houston, a lawyer, lobbyist and former Bradley top deputy, has been fueling his campaign with hard-nosed rhetoric about deporting illegal immigrants who are gang members.

Riordan, a multimillionaire lawyer and investor, does not discourage comparisons with Ross Perot as he depicts himself as the candidate who would release the city from the grip of crime and bureaucratic inertia. He recently coined a campaign slogan, “Tough Enough to Turn L.A. Around.”

Deputy Mayor Fabiani said he is leery of tough talk on the campaign trail. The mayor’s job is not suited to a cowboy or a loner, he said. According to Fabiani, the next mayor’s success will hinge on the ability to gain people’s cooperation.

“The two key words are command respect ,” Fabiani said.

“It’s the quality that allows the mayor to reach out to a Warren Christopher in a crisis,” Fabiani said, “because it’s woe to the mayor who does battle with a Daryl Gates and can’t get a Warren Christopher to return his phone call.”

Fabiani was referring to Bradley’s ability to tap an eminent statesman to head an investigation of the Police Department, which was a key step in the process that led to Gates’ resignation. Without the legal authority to dismiss Gates, Bradley needed someone of Christopher’s stature to build a case against Gates that the chief could not withstand.

History has not been on the side of a strong mayoralty in Los Angeles.

The original 1889 City Charter set up a power-sharing system for running the city. While subsequent reforms gave the mayor’s office more authority, the charter, reflecting the reformers’ distrust of politicians, continued to deprive the mayor of prerogatives that other mayors have enjoyed.

As a bulwark against nepotism and other forms of political corruption, a layer of city commissions was placed between the mayor and city department heads. The commissions, along with a Civil Service system, prevent an unscrupulous mayor from hiring cronies to run the city. But the system also makes it difficult for a conscientious mayor to shake up a department or fire an recalcitrant department head.

The shortcomings of the system are casting a shadow over the current campaign.

One of the main themes of this election is that City Hall is helping drive jobs out of the city because of bureaucratic indifference, incompetence and hostility to business interests. Several of the leading candidates have expressed ideas for streamlining city departments. But getting the job done may not be easy for a mayor-elect who lacks the authority to fire a department head.

The candidates have three months before the primary to distinguish themselves as potential leaders. They will have to make some hard choices about how to do it.

They can focus on trying to build the citywide mandate they will need to govern. Or, they can play it safe by tailoring their messages to a much narrower constituency and concentrate on amassing just enough support, somewhere between 15% and 25% of the votes, to make it past the April primary. The two top vote-getters in the primary will advance to a June runoff.

Voters make it difficult to avoid the more parochial of the strategies. In the San Fernando Valley an important test of support is whether a candidate favors the widely popular proposal to break up the school district.

On the city’s Westside, candidates are being asked to take a stand on a proposal by 20th Century Fox Studios to expand its sound stages on property next to a residential neighborhood.

For now, the candidates are divided over what to do about the school district, with Nava and City Council members Joel Wachs and Nate Holden making the strongest pitch for breaking up the district.

And at a Westside candidates’ forum Monday that was full of people bitterly opposed to the Fox expansion, Woo, Wachs and Riordan all bucked local sentiment and argued that too many jobs were at stake to come out against the expansion. Holden was the only candidate present who said he would veto the Fox project.

“The central dilemma of this campaign,” said Bill Knapp, a Woo campaign consultant, “is whether you spend your time picking up the votes you need to get into the runoff or concentrate on an overarching message that you need to win citywide.”

Then again, it may be possible for certain candidates to build their campaigns around reputations for solving local problems. Richard Katz, a three-term state assemblyman from the Valley, is an example. His imprint shows up frequently on legislation that affects individual communities--from ground water protection to liquor law enforcement, from school bus safety to graffiti eradication.

“Katz is a nuts and bolts politician, not terribly exciting, but he could make it work to his advantage citywide,” a rival candidate’s consultant said.

Besides competing with one another between now and April, the 50-plus candidates will have to vie for attention with a series of important events--a looming teachers strike and two volatile criminal cases, the federal prosecution of the police officers accused of beating Rodney G. King and the trial of the young men who were videotaped assaulting a truck driver during the riots.

“It will be a trying time,” Fabiani said. “People will be holding their breath, wondering if there will be more violence. They will be looking for someone to grab control of the city. The issue of leadership will be very much on people’s minds.”