The Ideas and Values That Make Riordan, Woo Tick : Campaign: Behind the ugly rhetoric and nasty ads are two men animated by serious--and contrasting--intellectual traditions.

During the past month, a chorus of criticism regarding the L.A. mayoral campaign has arisen: It’s too negative; it lacks ideas. This latter complaint--that neither Richard Riordan nor Michael Woo is arguing his case at a sufficiently high level--is especially prevalent in academic circles.

Yet, each of the candidates embodies a philosophy of life and politics, though, admittedly, neither has spent much time formally explicating them. For better or worse, U.S. political campaigns do not work that way.

To the careful observer, however, Riordan and Woo exemplify contrasting ideas, contrasting philosophies of government, contrasting orientations based on background, education, differing life choices and experiences. For a moment, let’s remove ourselves from the noisy and confused rhetoric of the campaign and seek to discern what might be the ideas, the intellectual dispositions, of the candidates before Tuesday’s vote.

Woo attended UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley at a white-hot moment of liberal ascendancy. The experience has marked him for life. He has remained fiercely committed to the liberal dream he absorbed at these institutions: Well-intentioned public servants shepherding society forward through government programs inspired by visions of secular benevolence, of redemption in this world. At its core is a powerful distrust of business and the private sector.

To be sure, Woo’s Chinese heritage has cautioned him against a total embrace of the public solution. His family, especially on his mother’s side, believed in the private sector. Politically speaking, they believed in Chiang Kai-shek, not Mao Tse-tung.

The Jesuit-educated Riordan transferred from Santa Clara University to Princeton, so he tells us, to study under the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who died in 1973. Maritain was a social democrat, a believer in the necessity of proper public action and the just order established through government. At the core of Maritain’s critique was a powerful sense of limits in public and private activity alike. He urged government and the private sector to seek balance and accommodation, for both of them, being human, were imperfect.

Maritain, Riordan claims, has acted as a brake on his free-enterprise career: Wealth is not an end in itself; capitalism remains legitimate only if it protects the weak and the poor. He cites his record of philanthropy and public service as proof of his conviction.

Riordan also epitomizes the Roman Catholic wing of the L.A. oligarchy. In the church, Riordan, like so many upwardly mobile Irish Catholics in America, found corroboration and authentication for his rise in the world. Raised to a Knighthood of Malta, the highest honor that can be accorded a Catholic layman, Riordan became the financial and legal confidant of monsignors, bishops, cardinals, part of the inner circle of lay advisers to the Los Angeles hierarchy. He has a close, working relationship with Cardinal Roger M. Mahony.

More secular in his upbringing, shaped by the Confucian ethos, Woo has expressed and corroborated his worth and success in life through politics and art. The esthetic dimension in Woo is strong. He collects art and moves easily in avant- garde gallery circles. He is a student of architecture. His personal style exhibits a high regard for designer values: the Westside hairstyling, the designer eyeglasses, the impeccable tailoring, with just a touch of the dandy in the selection of shirts and bright ties. Riordan, by contrast, looks like a harried salesman, even on his better days--looks like a thousand other freckle-faced guys in rumpled suits at the 40th reunion of a Jesuit high school.

Riordan revels in upper-middle class ethnicity--the church, the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the cardinal’s inner circle. Woo, by contrast, keeps himself at a slight distance from the Chinese-American community. His cutting-edge liberalism, in fact, has somewhat alienated him from mainstream Chinese-American support. Chinese-Americans, by and large, are more centrist than Woo in their political identification. Yet, Woo is fully capable of flying up to San Francisco for a quick $30,000 fix from the Chinese-American community, as he did last week.

Riordan says that he is running for mayor because he wants to save Los Angeles. He also wishes to fill a void in his soul: a personal void, a sense of emptiness to which the Irish are especially susceptible, born of tragedy--the death of two children and a brother--and failure in personal life--two failed marriages--and a lifelong will to power, touched by ethnic resentment, that has never slaked itself, never found adequate expression. Only the reformation and redemption of a vast and troubled world-city offers a cause sufficient for Riordan to act out an inner drama of self-assertion against the void, against a brooding sense of failure.

Riordan has had to learn to smile. Yet, his smile remains more of an affectation than a natural response. Riordan’s laugh--and we Americans expect our politicians to smile and laugh constantly--can disconcertingly dip into a mirthless cackle, coming from a man who, for the past 30 years, has not had to smile for anyone, except perhaps the cardinal.

If there is a Woo noir--if there is doubt, ambiguity, resentment, anger in his nature, as there so obviously is in Riordan’s--it remains contained behind a yuppie-Confucian surface, although the minute one says this, one realizes that one is risking the stereotype of depicting Asians as inscrutable. Still: Woo has a certain opacity behind his smiling surface. Like so many of his generation, Woo can be considered contained to the point of coldness. He is notorious for being reluctant to say thanks for financial support. After eight years on the City Council, only four of his colleagues endorsed him for mayor. Are the other 11 merely jealous, or is Woo too aloof?

Riordan has the makings of a tyrant. Stories are legend around Los Angeles regarding the control-freak role he has played on public and private boards. Raised in the school of compromise, of political give-and-take, empowered by scattered constituencies, Woo is in danger of seeking to become too many things to too many people. If Riordan is in danger of buying his office, Woo is in danger of selling it: not for money, obviously, but piecing himself out to so many constituencies--a little here, a little there--so that soon, little is left.

L.A. is a bitter, divided city, and its voters apparently have chosen to act out this division at the deepest possible level of politics, which is at once a dramatic clash of values and symbols as well as of money and power. Is this election, with its pitting of opposites, a sign of an emergent LA Retro--in the Woo camp, a move backward to ethnic tribalism, in the Riordan camp, to the Valley resentment that created Sam Yorty?

More centrist candidates might have obscured this division, true. But the Riordan-Woo face-off has the virtue of affording Los Angeles what Aristotle described as a catharsis: a moment of painful choice, in which a shattered protagonist embraces destiny, accepts the inevitable and moves on--to either destruction or the future.