Send Out a Search Party--Our Mayor Is Missing

Someone should file a missing persons report on Mayor Tom Bradley.

I know. He’s not really missing. He and six other city officials are off on a $250,000, two-week junket to London, Milan, Frankfurt and Paris. Three of them are lame-duck political cronies Bradley appointed to the airport commission.

The cost in public funds figures out to be $35,714 each. A pretty nice trip.

It allows the mayor to sip top-of-the-line wine or mineral water in some fine hotel or restaurant far from L.A.’s grubby streets. If you really want to find him, ask the maitre d’ to direct you to his table.

It’s not just that he’s missing from the city, but he’s absent from the political event of the year: the election to pick his successor.

I never hear his name mentioned by any of the candidates. It’s strange. Politicians usually love to invoke the glorious past. Democrats are always promising to live up to the legacy of FDR, John Kennedy and Truman. Republicans still shout themselves hoarse for Reagan.

Bradley has been mayor longer than Franklin Roosevelt was President. Yet none of his prospective successors are promising to carry on Bradley’s legacy.

It’s as if there never was a Tom Bradley. He and his name have been eradicated, like they used to do when Stalin ran the Kremlin.

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This was never more glaring than at the opening of Councilman Michael Woo’s South-Central campaign headquarters last Sunday, in the heart of an African-American and Latino neighborhood.

Of all the mayoral candidates, the one most likely to invoke the Bradley legacy would be Woo.

Although the mayor has not endorsed a successor, Woo is aiming to be the designated heir to the multiethnic liberal coalition that was the bulwark of Bradley’s political constituency. Much of Woo’s time has been spent recruiting African-Americans, Anglo liberals, Asian-Americans and Latinos--the people who put Bradley in office in 1973 and pretty much stuck with him. “Our city is like a family with many members,” Woo said in a February speech that spelled out his view on race relations.

Woo’s storefront office on Vermont Avenue looked like something from an early Bradley campaign. It was packed with African-American political activists, ministers and elected officials, some of them old Bradleyites.

The big moment was when Woo was endorsed by the African-American councilman who represents the area, Mark Ridley-Thomas. “We want to see a new mayor in the city of Los Angeles, and we want that person to be Michael Woo,” the councilman said. And then, echoing Woo’s theme of an ethnic coalition, Ridley-Thomas said: “We will push hard for a new majority politics.”

But the closest Ridley-Thomas came to speaking the name of the mayor who brought a multiethnic political majority to Los Angeles was when he said: “Mike has the best chance to continue what has happened in Los Angeles the last 20 years.”

I’ve been to several mayoral candidate forums and other events where Bradley’s name was among the missing. I checked with colleagues who had attended forums that I’d missed. They had the same experience.

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I asked Ridley-Thomas why.

“No one wants to use this time either defending or attacking Tom Bradley and his legacy,” Ridley-Thomas said. And, he said, he wanted to avoid implying that “Woo is Bradley. Woo is Woo.”

Obviously, there’s more to the story.

Bradley’s popularity has declined after two decades in office, his 1989 conflict-of-interest troubles and the riots. A Times poll last month reported that only 39% approved of the way he is doing his job. African-Americans gave him a 58% approval rating, far below the huge majorities that Bradley, who is L.A.’s first black mayor, received in the neighborhoods where he was raised. Approval in other neighborhoods was lower.

I can sympathize with those polled. It’s hard to approve of a mayor who flies off to Europe in the midst of some of his city’s worst troubles.

L.A. will have its election without you, mayor. Relax and have a good time. It’s on us.