Surprise Candidate for a Shaky Political Landscape

SWITCHEROO? According to informed sources, state Assemblywoman Barbara Friedman (D-Van Nuys) is expected to announce soon that she will not run for state Sen. David Roberti’s seat.

Instead, these sources say, the surprise choice of U.S. Reps. Howard Berman (D-Panorama City) and Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) to succeed Roberti may be 75-year-old state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal, who, like Friedman, is a veteran member of the Berman-Waxman organization.

Rosenthal, who now represents the 22nd Senate District, an area that includes Hollywood and large chunks of the heavily Latino East Side, has been a politician at loose ends since reapportionment stripped him of his old Westside-based seat and dropped him unceremoniously on the east side of the city.

Smelling oblivion if he ran for reelection in 1994 on the turf dealt him by reapportionment, Rosenthal in 1992 ran for the newly created 23rd Senate District. That put him at odds with the ambitions of state Assemblyman Tom Hayden, a fellow Democrat. In that bitter matchup, Hayden won. Since then, Rosenthal has remained in the Senate, finishing out his term representing the 22nd District.

If Friedman shelves her Senate ambitions, it will be a big blow to a number of wanna-bes who have been circling around her Assembly seat. These include most notably Los Angeles school board member Julie Korenstein, Deputy City Atty. Gary Geuss and Francine Oschin, one of Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson’s deputies. All were planning to run for Friedman’s seat--if she did not seek reelection.

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THE STING: Lost in the crush of earthquake events was a rare vignette of Los Angeles’ quirky multimillionaire businessman-cum-mayor, Richard Riordan, rolling up his shirt-sleeves to play crime-stopper and people’s advocate.

On the Tuesday after the earthquake, the 64-year-old Riordan ended a five-hour tour of the Valley in Canoga Park surrounded by a nervous LAPD security detail and a large number of low-income Latinos rendered homeless by the quake and encamped at the city’s Lanark Park.

Among the concerns Riordan heard as he wandered amid the smoky campfires of the refugees was that local merchants were hiking their prices for essentials, including bottled water. So what did Riordan do? Instead of being content to pass these price-gouging allegations on to a City Hall bureaucrat, Riordan set up an ad hoc sting operation to test the honesty of a few local convenience stores.

While the mayor, his security staff, a handful of aides and a few motorcycle officers tried to remain inconspicuous, Riordan press deputy Annette Castro (too well-dressed to make the ruse work) posed as customer at two stores that had been the target of complaints but failed to come up with any evidence of wrongdoing.

Can anyone picture ex-mayor Tom Bradley getting involved in such a endearingly goofy adventure?

Footnote: Later in the week, Southland Corp., the parent company for 7-Eleven Stores, announced that it was terminating the franchises of eight of its store operators in the Valley after its own undercover teams found they were overcharging quake victims. Both the stores Riordan tried to sting were 7-Elevens.

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THE VISIBLE ZEV: To political pulse-takers, one recurring media image from the Jan. 17 earthquake was that of a glum, mustachioed Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky standing near Mayor Richard Riordan whenever the TV cameras rolled. “I’m still trying to figure out why the mayor is letting Zev get so much publicity,” said one City Hall political consultant.

To his credit, not only did the enterprising Yaroslavsky position himself to be picked up in most camera shots, but also he managed to maintain a fixed look of proper grimness throughout long-winded mayoral dissertations on the earthquake tragedy.

Yaroslavsky, it should be recalled, is running for the board seat that retiring Supervisor Ed Edelman will relinquish later this year.

Edelman represents a sizable portion of the San Fernando Valley. But not all of it, as Yaroslavsky has yet to learn.

Traveling with Riordan on a quake-damage inspection tour that took in the Northridge Fashion Center, Yaroslavsky asked if the giant mall was south of Devonshire and was told that it was.

“That would put it in my district,” Yaroslavsky said in a remark both wrong and presumptuous.

For the record: the Northridge Fashion Center is located miles from Yaroslavsky’s council district and just a hair outside Edelman’s (it’s actually in Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s).

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RECALL REDUX: Roberti’s success in portraying his recall opponents as “gun extremists” is starting to produce novel dividends and political bedfellows.

The Van Nuys Democrat’s stand on abortion (he’s anti-abortion) coupled with his advocacy of stricter gun controls and liberal social record has created a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in the women’s movement. “We’ve had a love-hate relationship with David,” said Judith Hirshberg, president of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Now, with Roberti being attacked by Second Amendment enthusiasts in a recall movement (which qualified for the April 12 ballot this week), Hirshberg reports that many of her NWPC members are ready to overlook Roberti’s anti-abortion position and join the fight to save him from the recall. “I expect most of our members to become very active in the keep-Roberti campaign,” Hirshberg said this week.

Although an endorsement by NWPC will elude Roberti (the group only endorses women), Roberti can expect the organization to issue a supportive statement and urge members to individually work for the senator, Hirshberg said.