CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : Politicians Lose, Bureaucracy Gains : We hold politicians accountable for the system, yet--by defeating Prop. 3--we limit their ability to change it.

According to The Times exit poll, those who voted for Richard Riordan want him to turn Los Angeles around. But the voters in Tuesday’s city election made it much harder for him to do so when they also turned down Proposition 3, which would have exempted managers from Civil Service protection.

If any one class took a drubbing, it was the politician. And if any one class came out of the election unscathed, it was, judging by the vote on ballot measure 3, the bureaucracy, which the voters secured from interfering politicians by an almost 2-1 margin. The measure was similar to the accountability provision in last year’s Proposition F, which eliminated that protection from the police chief in general, and Daryl Gates in particular.

There is a certain irony in the fact that we hate our politicians so much that we would protect those they oversee from them. In all likelihood, the only voters who paid serious attention to Proposition 3 were the unions and civil servants, so one could make the argument that the debate was never joined. Certainly not publicly. Still, there is something peculiar in a situation where we blame the people we know--those we elect, those who know that their jobs depend on pleasing us--and we protect those we don’t know--those who make the day-to-day decisions (or fail to make them, as the case often turns out to be) that affect our daily lives.

The business people who were burned out in last year’s riots, those who gave up for other reasons and those who want to start up all complain about the complexity of the city’s decision-making process, which makes it impossible to get on with their work. We would rather blame the known politicians than the unknown individuals who work in city government for the problem, but the real culprit is the system. In Los Angeles, you don’t have to bribe an inspector to get a permit, but you do have to hire a lobbyist who knows how to work his or her way through the maze to get an inspector to the door.

The results of the election suggest that we are holding the politicians accountable for the system on the one hand--disgusted with them, in no small part because of the spitballs theyhave thrown at each other--and, on the other hand, limiting their ability to change it.

Perhaps the first lesson to draw from this is that we need to change the system more than we need to change the players. The failure of the politicians was their failure to restructure the system. And the second lesson is that, if we are going to change the system, we need to do so in a way that does not threaten the Civil Service.

Richard Riordan called for all of us to work together to change Los Angeles. If he and the others elected Tuesday want to serve out their terms with the support of the voters, they need to address themselves to the bigger problems of structure. They need to think beyond their constituencies to the city as a whole. And so do we.