Lessons in a Long Campaign

Picture Los Angeles voters scanning their options as a TV viewer might, “channel surfing” with a remote.

Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores? Seen this one before. Click.

Councilwoman Joy Picus? Another rerun. Click.

Jackie Goldberg? She’d be the council’s first openly homosexual member. Could be interesting. Let’s take a look.

Councilman Michael Woo? A player at City Hall for eight years. Now in the role of mayor? Click.

What’s this? Richard Riordan, a pleasant-looking, tough-talking businessman in a new action program. Why not watch this for a while?

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Voters Tuesday were in a candidate-surfing mood, dissatisfied with old choices and impatiently looking for fresh faces and new programs. That is Lesson No. 1 from the Los Angeles election: The quest for change continues unabated from last November’s presidential election.

Most Californians share that attitude, according to recent polls. And regardless of any momentary euphoria Gov. Pete Wilson might have felt because a fellow Republican got elected mayor of Los Angeles, the voters’ contempt for the political status quo does not bode well for his reelection prospects next year.

“On the surface, this election points to good things for Republicans,” said one Wilson adviser. “But I have a nervous feeling that it points to voters being unsettled and unhappy.”

Lesson No. 2 is that change does not come conveniently packaged in neat boxes labeled by generation, race and gender. A 63-year-old white guy represented change in a multicultural city because he never before had held elective office and was offering a clear message of hope.

That brings up Lesson No. 3: Negative campaigning does not sell without a matching message that gives voters a positive rationale to support the attacker. And both messages have to contain enough logic to be credible.

When Riordan repeatedly attacked Woo’s representation of Hollywood--unfairly blaming the councilman for rapes and other violence--it had a semblance of logic to many voters because, indeed, once-proud Hollywood had decayed over the years. These negative ads meshed snugly with Riordan’s main positive message, one of the most effective in modern California politics: “Tough Enough to Turn L.A. Around.”

“Tough Enough” was the creation of Riordan’s wily chief strategist, Clinton Reilly, a Democrat who two years ago also directed Frank Jordan’s successful mayoral campaign in San Francisco. “Tough” helped establish Riordan’s public identity and also was aimed at Woo, whose own early polls found that voters saw him as a wimp. “Turn L.A. Around” was contributed by veteran Los Angeles political writer Joe Scott, Riordan’s self-described “media consigliere. “

Woo’s attempt to portray Riordan as a ruthless capitalist and closet right-winger did not work because such tactics seldom do when the target does not look or sound scary. That is Lesson No. 4. And like many of Tuesday’s lessons, it is not unique to these times, but timeless. Ask the opponents of Ronald Reagan, who tried to paint him as an ultraconservative while he charmed voters with upbeat campaigns running against the Establishment, which he increasingly represented.

But no message works without money. And if Riordan had not spent millions of his own--$6 million, in fact--he would not have been elected mayor. Period. That is Lesson No. 5 and an inescapable, disturbing truth for anybody concerned about equal political opportunity. Relatively few voters were, according to a Times exit poll.

There were other lessons, of course: The power of public safety and job creation as issues--themes that normally would be owned by a Republican governor next year if he were not bedeviled by the worst recession in more than half a century. And there were these time-honored lessons: Run a salable candidate (Woo didn’t fit the bill) and don’t try to draw too many lessons from one election.

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Now Riordan will be forced to violate a cardinal rule of any politician elected to high office in California: Don’t permit speculation about running for even higher office. He cannot avoid this because it is out of his hands and onto the keyboards of people like me.

In 1996, Riordan could be in a position to land the No. 2 spot on a Republican presidential ticket as the GOP mayor who “turned around” the nation’s second largest city. Or he might run for governor in 1998 at age 68.

But he has to ignore such speculation--as flattering as it might seem--and focus on living up to his promo. He has to get those 3,000 additional cops on the street without a tax increase. If not, the Riordan show has a four-year run. Then it’s click.