Woo, Riordan Define Race’s Polar Opposites

As the primary campaign for mayor of Los Angeles enters its final month, two voices proclaiming competing visions of the city are emerging from the clamor of an overcrowded field.

On the one side is millionaire investor/lawyer Richard Riordan and his evocation of a secure and civil city, a graffiti-free environment with safe streets, good schools and an unshakable bond rating. On the other is City Councilman Michael Woo, candidate of the multiethnic metropolis where government’s first obligation is to ensure that people of all kinds have access to public services and private capital.

“It’s a tale of two cities,” said Steven Erie, a UC San Diego political science professor who has written extensively about Los Angeles politics. “With Riordan, it’s the Valley, middle-class, corporate L.A. concerned with crime, taxes and government red tape, while Woo speaks for a hipper, poorer L.A. that expects government to solve a lot of its problems.”

It is premature to label Woo and Riordan as front-runners, but they have become the magnetic poles in a field that has not yet generated a lot of electricity. As such, they are the most popular targets of criticism in the race. Woo is portrayed as a panderer who makes extravagant promises to every minority group in town while Riordan is depicted as a plutocrat who is trying to buy the election.

But in a field of 24 candidates, where veteran politicians must struggle against anonymity, even negative publicity can be a help.

Struggling for a share of the limelight, the other 22 candidates are engaged in a daily free-for-all, attacking their high-profile adversaries while often espousing the same ideas. And most of all, they are frantically raising the money they will need to stay competitive with the well-financed campaigns of Woo and Riordan.

Their closest competitors in raising money are Assemblyman Richard Katz, who relied on the labor movement for a late surge, and Councilman Joel Wachs, who remains competitive despite an official ruling that could jeopardize his use of donated art to raise money.

Like Riordan, Katz mourns the city’s loss of innocence, talks tough on crime, calls for fiscal austerity at City Hall and does a good job of identifying with the city’s disaffected middle class. “I am running for mayor because I am angry about what has happened to my city,” he said.

But unlike Riordan, who can tailor his message to conservatives, and Woo, who looks mostly to liberals, Katz is a moderate who runs the risk of fuzzing up his identity as he tries to appeal across geographic and cultural lines.

Katz is against raising property taxes to pay for more police officers, a position that should sit well with the more fiscally conservative members of his San Fernando Valley base. But he has alienated some of the same voters by opposing the breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District--a position likely to appeal to liberals and minority voters in other parts of the city.

“Richard’s campaign sends out different messages,” said a political consultant who has known him for several years. “In a way, it’s like Richard himself. He’s the suburban cowboy with the horses out back and the fund-raisers at the Palomino Club, but he’s an expert on urban transportation issues.”

Wachs faces a similar challenge as he tries to assemble a coalition drawn from his suburban Valley council district and from Westside Jews, elderly people and gays who see him as an advocate for the arts, a proponent of rent control and a crusader for laws banning discrimination against people with AIDS.

Like Katz, Wachs has sent out mixed signals. Advocating the breakup of the school district, he caters to the separatist instincts of Valley conservatives. And while calling for the creation of a network of neighborhood councils, he seems to endorse the “empowerment” agenda of populist, inner-city activists.

But there have been no mixed metaphors when it has come to attacking Woo and Riordan.

Katz has cried “pander bear” each time Woo has announced an economic agenda for South Los Angeles, promised Latinos an office of immigrant affairs or told the gay community he would appoint a homosexual to the city’s Police Commission.

Wachs has chipped away at the image Riordan presents of himself as a political outsider untainted by the conflicts and compromises that have weakened City Hall over the last several years. Citing the hundreds of thousands of dollars Riordan has contributed to local candidates and to the millions his law firm has made from contracts with local government agencies, Wachs has done his best to portray Riordan as a politician without portfolio.

Other candidates have piled on, lending credence to the theory that Woo, the early front-runner in opinion polls, has held his lead and that Riordan, after pouring $3 million of his own money into his campaign, is making a strong bid for second place and the only other berth in the June run-off.

A matchup between Woo and Riordan would offer voters a clear choice in both political and personal terms.

“Woo is Silver Lake Bohemian. His house is the product of an up-market, avant-garde architect (Frank Israel). His politics come out of the utopian haze of UC Santa Cruz, where he went to school,” said cultural historian Kevin Starr, who is backing businessman Nick Patsaouras in the race.

“With Dick Riordan, there is the smell of cigar smoke in the air. He cut his teeth in the Los Angeles of Sam Yorty, Cardinal McIntyre and Asa Call,” Starr said. “His Procrustean style recalls the big-shouldered politics of Chicago or Boston.”

The two men could not be more unlike one another. Woo, 41, slight and scholarly looking, applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War, grew up in a comfortable suburban home but says that his values were forged during the protest movements of the 1960s.

Woo speaks out about crime and expresses alarm about middle-class alienation from contemporary Los Angeles, but he is at home amid the hubbub of a big, unruly city. Charging off to ethnic street fairs, championing the causes of immigrant vendors and political refugees, Woo clearly delights in the city’s Third World trappings.

His campaign rhetoric stresses a commitment to making the city a more hospitable place for immigrants, poor people and minorities.

“I have worked to close the gap between the haves and the have-nots. . . . I have led the fight to remove racism from the Los Angeles Police Department. I want to be the mayor who knocks down the invisible walls that divide the Westside from the Eastside. . . . I want to be the mayor who unites the city.”

Riordan, on the other hand, is an ex-college football player and Army artillery officer who served in Korea and is closer in age and politics to Woo’s Republican banker father. As businessmen go, Riordan is something of a maverick. His interest in promoting inner-city education has gained him supporters in some of the poorest parts of town.

But he lives in Brentwood, dines at the California Club, plays golf with ex-Presidents, and as a candidate he approaches the city much as a disapproving parent might approach an unkempt and unruly child, with scissors and paddle at the ready, determined to instill some old-fashioned values.

“We have a city that has homeless roaming in it, that gives the perception to tourists and visiting business people that it is not clean and that it is dangerous,” Riordan tells audiences. “Fear is paralyzing the city and driving out the middle class. . . . This is intolerable. As mayor, I will get tough on crime, drug dealing, gangs and violence.”

Woo campaign officials say they would like nothing better than to meet Riordan in the run-off.

“It would be youth versus age, the past versus the future. From our perspective, you couldn’t ask for a better matchup,” one of Woo’s aides said.

Vicky Rideout, Woo’s campaign manager, said Friday that “our polling shows that this has become a Woo-Riordan race with everybody else stuck far behind.”

Meanwhile, neither Woo nor Riordan is attacking the other at public forums, where much of the campaign has been played out. Aware of the odd synergy that could propel both of them into the runoff, they are clearly content to be the campaign’s yin and yang.

Not that they have reason to relax. Besides the competition offered by Katz and Wachs, several other candidates loom as potential spoilers.

City Councilman Nate Holden, one of two leading African-American candidates in the race, is perhaps the most relentless critic of Woo, continually citing Woo’s failures to rehabilitate Hollywood’s business district.

Three other candidates--former Deputy Mayor Linda Griego; lawyer Stan Sanders, the other politically prominent black candidate; and former Ambassador to Mexico Julian Nava--may not be able to afford the extravagant media campaigns planned by their well-fixed rivals. But they could erode Woo’s support among women and minorities. With Bill Cosby’s celebrity endorsement and the contributions it drew, Sanders may be enjoying the most momentum of any of the longer shots in the race.

While Riordan calls for a hard-nosed response to crime and pragmatic remedies for the economy, two other candidates, Patsaouras and former deputy mayor Tom Houston, have laid out the most elaborate proposals on those subjects.

Patsaouras could take votes away from Woo and Riordan by combining Riordan’s business sense with Woo’s love of urban culture while remaining free of the ideological baggage that burden his two rivals.

Not everyone agrees that Woo and Riordan offer the most clear-cut choices in the mayor’s race.

“I still sense a lot of confusion out there,” said Paul Clarke, a political consultant who has represented several mostly conservative causes and candidates but is sitting out the mayoral election.

“I think the race is still up for grabs.”

MAYORAL CAMPAIGN: Richard J. Riordan contributes $2 million to his campaign. B1