Riordan, Wachs Launch Ads

With images ranging from a meat-and-potatoes diner to Barbie and Ken dolls, wealthy attorney-businessman and mayoral candidate Richard J. Riordan on Monday began airing his first TV ad, funded by a $1-million check he wrote to himself. City Councilman and mayoral contender Joel Wachs also started a radio commercial Monday.

THE RIORDAN AD: The 30-second spot, produced by San Francisco campaign strategist Clint Reilly, showcases Riordan’s business ventures, ranging from his purchase of the landmark Original Pantry cafe to his investments in computer companies, health care firms, a dairy and Mattel Inc., maker of Ken and Barbie. “Dick Riordan’s created thousands of jobs--from high-tech to health care to milk,” says the ad, which pictures a shirt-sleeved Riordan hobnobbing with restaurant workers. The commercial also calls attention to Riordan’s sponsorship of a term limits initiative and his contributions to a program to teach children to read and write on computers. The only words Riordan speaks in the ad: “We’ve got to get tough. We must make L.A. safe.”

THE RIORDAN ANALYSIS: Riordan has helped to create jobs and has saved some as well through his business ventures, including helping to restructure Mattel to save the toy maker from insolvency. A venture capitalist whose personal fortune is estimated at more than $100 million, Riordan bought the Pantry for $3.5 million in 1980. Riordan spent more than $200,000 of his own money to collect the 175,450 signatures required to qualify a measure for the April 20 ballot limiting the terms of elected city officials, including the mayor. Over the last decade, Riordan’s private foundation has spent several million dollars setting up computer labs to teach reading in inner-city schools in Los Angeles and around the country.

THE WACHS AD: Produced by Wachs’ New York media consultant Jay Severin, the $100,000 ad campaign features a group of unidentified people speaking about the city and the candidate. Some comments: “He wrote our rent control law.” “Joel Wachs is the one who stopped the malathion spraying.” “Joel Wachs is incredibly honest.” “If there’s one reason alone to vote for Joel Wachs, it’s his fight for the school system’s reorganization.”

THE WACHS ANALYSIS: Along with Councilman Ernani Bernardi, Wachs authored the city’s rent control law. Wachs has called for the breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District into half a dozen or more districts--a move critics say could further Balkanize the city’s ethnic and geographical forces. Wachs was a leading critic of the state’s 1990 spraying of malathion to eradicate the Mediterranean fruit fly, but it was a combination of factors--a large groundswell of public opposition and a reduction in new Medfly finds--that led the state, not the city, to halt spraying.