Chick, Picus Were Generations Apart : The foundation for the challenger’s win in the 3rd District City Council race may have been set in November, when voters showed they were ready for a new breed of leader.

On Nov. 4, 1992, the day after the general election, I was invited to the home of President Blenda Wilson of Cal State Northridge to do some “instant analysis” of the election results.

Instant analyses do not come naturally to academics. We are more prone to reflection, careful consideration and publication of our analyses long after they would do anyone but other academics any good. Still, I had rustled up a lecture on the strengths and weaknesses of the messages of the presidential candidates. I had finished discussing Bill Clinton and was about to launch into my dissection of George Bush when a woman interrupted me.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Don’t you think the vote just means that the electorate wanted a new generation in the White House?”

Discussion from the floor immediately erupted. We never got back to my speech. You see, the woman with the pragmatic politician’s viewpoint was that most pragmatic of politicians, Joy Picus.

I’ve been thinking of that night in considering why Picus lost to Laura Chick. I wondered how prescient she felt in the Clinton victory about the troubles she would have getting reelected to the City Council from the 3rd District.

Oh, running against a large field of contenders wasn’t a new phenomenon for her. The 3rd is a noisy mishmash of folks with a variety of agendas, and Picus never had the kind of charismatic style nor the fund-raising prowess to discourage challengers. Still, Picus was good at reminding her constituents about what she’d done for them and how many contacts she had down at City Hall, and that was enough to get her reelected.

Then along came Chick.

Chick was different from Picus’ typical opponent. Instead of representing an alternative vision of the way things ought to be in the 3rd, Chick came across as the woman Picus would want to replace her when she retired. She represented the next generation, a former top aide to Picus with similar views, and a hard-driving campaigner.

People like that often run successfully for their bosses’ seats. That’s the way it’s supposed to be done in politics: Get your experience in the field and wait for the boss to retire. Except Joy Picus wasn’t ready to retire.

Any campaign comes down to the image a candidate has with those who actually vote. Part of that image can be controlled by the candidate; part of it can be controlled by how the media cover the campaign, and part of it is controlled by a variety of other factors, including the general mood of the electorate. It was the mood to elect someone from the post-World War II generation that Picus credited with Clinton’s victory.

But the electorate in the 3rd was different from last year’s national electorate. They were the folks who read Sunday’s Peanuts tribute to the Normandy invasion and had those images resonate for them.

And there was another ghost from last year resonating in the 3rd--the ghost of Ross Perot.

Perot’s presence was a resounding one. He was a self-made millionaire who disdained politicians and had direct, businesslike solutions to the country’s problems. This sort of approach went over well with voters in the 3rd, and when Richard Riordan echoed some of those same themes his popularity skyrocketed.

Chick tried to portray herself as an outsider, but Picus reminded the voters how “inside” Chick was. Chick then tried to attack Picus as ineffectual on Warner Ridge and hit Picus for “sleeping” on the job. Picus responded with her old standby, reminding voters of what she’d done for them and her contacts, particularly in the Police Department.

In the end, it didn’t work. It played too much like politics as usual and reminded all those folks who got excited over Perot and sought a change with Clinton why they’d wanted to “throw the bums out” in the first place.

So, Joy, maybe you were right. Maybe the voters’ wanted a new generation in office. But maybe it came down as well to how the old messages played with an audience that had grown tired of them.