Riordan, Woo Begin Plotting June Strategies

By FRANK CLIFFORD

April 22, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Los Angeles last put a Republican in the mayor’s office 36 years ago. But Richard Riordan’s strong first-place finish in Tuesday’s primary election made it clear that as Democratic as the city has become, it is fully capable of surprising itself.

Riordan, the 62-year-old multimillionaire businessman with a vague aura of Ross Perot about him already has weathered attacks that he is a practitioner of the predatory capitalism of the 1980s and is now poised to take his no-nonsense campaign on crime and the economy out of the suburbs and into the inner city.

Riordan is going up against Michael Woo, the second-place finisher in the primary, whose campaign is rooted in South Los Angeles and in white liberal neighborhoods on the city’s Westside.

In his first public appearance since Tuesday’s primary, Woo indicated that he would continue to try to limit Riordan’s appeal by depicting him as a throwback to trickle down economics who collaborated with junk bond titan Michael Milken and made his fortune at the expense of working people.

“The choice of the election couldn’t be more clear,” Woo said Wednesday at a news conference at the Biltmore Hotel. “It’s a choice between reliving the past or moving ahead. It’s a choice between fear and hope, between retreat and reform. It’s a campaign between a candidate who wants to buy voters and a campaign that seeks to inspire and unite them.”

As the Riordan campaign prepared for the June 8 runoff in the officially nonpartisan race, aides made it clear they were not prepared to cede any ground to Woo. In the primary he bested Woo in two, traditionally liberal Westside council districts.

“We are going to be extremely competitive among the constituencies (Woo) considers his,” said political consultant Clint Reilly, who is helping shape the Riordan strategy.

At the same time, Reilly did not underestimate the challenge facing a candidate who has never run for office and must build a citywide coalition of supporters.

“We obviously have to reach out and expand,” Reilly said. “Moderate Democrats will be the battleground of this election.”

In particular, he said, Riordan would look to Jewish and Latino voters, because neither group united behind Woo in the primary.

“Woo has serious problems with Latinos and Jewish voters,” he said.

And as Riordan moves deeper into the city, he believes that the time and money he has devoted to inner city educational and civic projects will give him a double-barreled message: that he can be tough and compassionate.

He began spreading that message Wednesday morning. At a breakfast meeting in South Los Angeles with Ivan Houston, chairman of the black-owned Golden State Mutual Insurance Co. at his side, Riordan acknowledged he is a fiscal conservative but said “I have a social conscience.” Then he proceeded to recite a lengthy list of contributions he has made to inner city causes.

“I have over 350 computer labs that teach 5- and 6-year-olds to read and write. . . . I’ve worked hard with the Golden State Minority Foundation, the Young Black Scholars, Challenger Boys and Girls Club, learning centers at Nickerson Gardens . . . Eastside Boys and Girls Club, on and on. . . . Ten years ago, I spent time in the famine camps in Ethiopia.”

Riordan has talked about those contributions before, but this was the first high-profile campaign event held to highlight the work he has done in poor neighborhoods.

“We’ve seen Dick Riordan, the Tough,” Houston said. “Now voters will hear of Dick Riordan, the Good--a man firmly committed to educating the disadvantaged.”

Woo supporters in the African-American community are divided on the impact they think Riordan will have with voters there.

“He knows a lot about big business and a lot about charity,” lawyer Melanie Lomax said. “But does he have the sensitivity to be the mayor of all L.A.? My concern with his slogan (“Tough enough to turn L.A. around”) is that he would be too tough.”

Record company executive Virgil Roberts disagreed.

“A lot of people don’t understand the impact Dick has had. He didn’t just help us raise $1 million for the Young Black Scholars project. He did it when nobody else was targeting the needs of minority youth,” said Roberts, a Woo supporter, and a member of One Hundred Black Men, a group that raises money for inner city educational and civic projects.

“When it comes time to call in his chits I think he can expect people to respond.”

During the primary, a number of political observers argued that Riordan was painting himself into an ideological corner through his high-profile endorsements by former President Ronald Reagan and other prominent Republicans.

The tenor of his campaign, it was argued, would make it difficult for him to reach beyond a conservative constituency which was believed too small to elect him in June.

In the light of his primary, however, some observers are reassessing his chances.

“I think it’s Riordan’s race to lose,” said Steven Erie, a UC San Diego political science professor who has written extensively about Los Angeles politics. As Erie sees it, Riordan got enough votes to make it clear his appeal extends well beyond the traditionally conservative western San Fernando Valley, where Riordan established his campaign headquarters.

A Los Angeles Times exit survey of 2,816 voters was taken during Tuesday’s mayoral primary. The survey shows Riordan--who received 33% of the vote to Woo’s 24% among primary voters--is the runoff choice of 43% of those who voted Tuesday while Woo is preferred by 37%. Riordan’s lead is slight, though, considering the poll’s three-point error margin.

Riordan’s nine-point edge in the primary reflects another advantage that he may carry with him into the runoff. Traditionally, the older, more conservative voters who make up the base of his support have been more likely to turn out to vote than are Woo’s younger, more liberal core voters.

Such was the case in the primary. In council districts where Riordan received more votes than Woo, the turnout was significantly higher than in those districts where Woo prevailed.

“Woo must mobilize a constituency made up of minorities and young voters who typically don’t turn out to vote in great numbers,” Erie said.

More popular among Anglo voters than Woo, Riordan also benefited from a city whose voters do not reflect the diversity of the general population.

Although fewer than half the adults in Los Angeles are white, and 25% of the electorate register as Republican, 68% of voters were Anglo and 32% were Republican. Moreover, people were as likely to characterize themselves as liberal as conservative; the exit poll showed 29% in each category.

As the candidates set their sights primarily on the middle-of-the road voters who could well decide the outcome of the mayor’s race, both sides will have some adjusting to do.

The Times exit poll indicates that Riordan and Woo are drawing their support from widely disparate elements of the city’s population with Riordan preferred by conservatives, Republicans, Anglos, homeowners and the affluent. Woo, on the other hand, draws his base from Asian-Americans and blacks, gays, liberals, renters and people with lower incomes.

In the runoff, both candidates will be courting voters who backed the half a dozen other candidates who picked up measurable support. As for the losing candidates, most have yet to say who they will support in the runoff.

But there was one outspoken exception: City Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who said he regarded Riordan as the lesser of two evils.

“I call them (Woo and Riordan) the gruesome twosome, but Riordan is probably the least gruesome.

“I’m going to do everything I can to see that Mike Woo is not the mayor of the city. I think it would be a tragedy. Check his record,” Bernardi said. He specifically cited Woo’s proposal several years ago to declare Los Angeles a sanctuary for political refugees, a move that critics said would cause the city to be overrun with illegal immigrants.

The political mathematics of Los Angeles--that votes are disproportionately concentrated in the white, suburban districts of the city--make the runoff battleground fairly clear.

The contest largely will be for the votes that went to City Councilman Joel Wachs and Assemblyman Richard Katz on the Westside and in the Valley.

In these heavily Democratic areas of the city, Katz and Wachs did better than Woo after positioning themselves slightly to the right of him. Katz frequently mentioned the anti-crime legislation he sponsored in the Legislature and Wachs came out in favor of breaking up the Los Angeles Unified School District, an especially popular proposal in the Valley.

Reilly said Riordan has a “very good shot” at taking half of the 20% of Tuesday’s vote that went to Wachs and Katz.

Woo strategists said Riordan’s showing Tuesday merely reflected a Republican’s ability to attract his own natural constituency, and without competition from another major candidate.

“What he’s managed to do was get a hold of his conservative base,” said Bill Knapp, one of Woo’s chief political advisers. “His candidacy beyond that is going to have a real problem.”

While competing for Democratic Wachs and Katz voters, Woo may have a better chance of picking up support from black and Latino areas, where lawyer Stan Sanders and City Councilman Nate Holden ran fairly strong.

But the Sanders and Holden voting bloc is far smaller than that of Katz and Wachs.

Knapp disputed the notion that Riordan had a serious claim to votes cast for such candidates as Wachs, Katz and Linda Griego. Knapp described those voters as “Clinton Democrats” and more likely to back Woo than Riordan.

Woo also will make a strong bid for a constituency that could help him overcome a fund-raising disadvantage to the well-heeled Riordan, who donated $3 million of his own money to the primary campaign.

The political arm of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor is expected to endorse Woo today, uniting forces that in the primary were divided between Woo and Katz. Besides helping Woo financially, labor could provide him a boost at election time, when he will need all the help he can muster getting out the vote.

On Wednesday, Woo repeated his often-heard contention that Riordan is out to buy the election. He issued a challenge to Riordan “to abide by the overall spending limit of $1.6 million for a mayoral runoff election as contained in the city’s ethics law.”

The provision applies to candidates who accept public matching money which Riordan has declined to do.

The Riordan campaign promptly rejected Woo’s proposal to limit campaign spending, stating that Woo has had “eight years of incumbency, spending millions and millions of taxpayer money enhancing his name recognition and candidacy.

“We will spend whatever it takes to communicate our message to the people of Los Angeles,” said Jadine Nielsen, a Riordan campaign official.

Times staff writers Rich Connell, Marc Lacey and Sharon Bernstein contributed to this story.