Barbara Yaroslavsky Assailed on Forums

Barbara Yaroslavsky, a top candidate for the 5th District City Council seat, has missed 10 scheduled candidate forums in the past month, prompting accusations Wednesday from her challengers that she is trying to win the election on her money and name recognition alone.

“I think she is showing total disdain for the public,” said candidate and former school board member Roberta Weintraub, who says she has attended all of the events.

“She is expecting her money to buy her the election and I don’t approve of that.”

A first-time candidate, Yaroslavsky is considered a front-runner because she has surpassed the others in fund-raising with more than $307,000 and has name recognition that her husband, Zev, developed over the 19 years he held the post before being elected to the county Board of Supervisors.

Weintraub complains that by skipping the forums, Yaroslavsky is depriving voters of the opportunity to question her about her positions.

Candidates Jeff Brain, a Sherman Oaks businessman, and Mike Feuer, the former head of a legal services clinic, also questioned Yaroslavsky’s absence at candidate debates.

For her part, Yaroslavsky’s campaign rejects charges that she is running a “stealth campaign,” saying she has simply missed the forums due to scheduling conflicts with other political events. For example, she missed a forum Tuesday by a women’s action group in Downtown Los Angeles to meet voters at a supermarket in West Los Angeles, said Yaroslavsky’s campaign manager, Laurie Saffian.

“This is not a strategy,” she said. “These are legitimate conflicts with meetings we’ve had previously scheduled.”

Saffian added that Yaroslavsky attended many of the forums in February and plans to attend a few more before the April 11 primary.

“She likes to go to them,” she said. “But Barbara is out meeting people, she is walking door to door, she is talking to voters on the phone.”

Some of her challengers and critics say they suspect that Yaroslavsky has stopped attending the forums because she realizes that public speaking is not her strong suit and she is better off reaching voters through campaign literature.

“I think the reason Barbara is not going is that she is not good at forums,” Brain said. “We have joked that the best thing Barbara can do is to go on vacation until April.”

In fact, some community activists who have witnessed her performances at such forums say Yaroslavsky tends to offer vague answers when faced with tough questions.

On Tuesday, a tenants-rights organization that issued a report card to the candidates based on their answers on a questionnaire, gave Yaroslavsky a “C” due to her “weak and vague answers to her questionnaire,” said Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival.

Feuer got an “A,” Weintraub got a “B+,” and Brain got an “F” due mostly because he opposed expanding and strengthening the city’s rent-control ordinance.

Whatever Yaroslavsky’s reasons for missing the debates, political consultants say the “stealth candidate” strategy is a legitimate tactic for candidates who perform poorly at public functions.

“It’s an absolutely legitimate strategy but no one would ever admit to it,” said political consultant Richard Lichtenstein.

As an example, he said he used that same strategy in 1992 when he worked on a campaign for a ballot measure to implement police reform measures proposed by Warren Christopher, now secretary of state.

Lichtenstein said Christopher did not participate in very many debates because he did not feel comfortable at such public forums and the campaign managers felt there was enough public support that the exposure was not needed. The amendment passed by a greater than 2-1 margin.

“It’s a campaign’s strategy to accentuate the positive and minimize the deficiencies,” he said.

Political consultant Rick Taylor agreed and said that participating in candidate forums is not as important as many believe because most of the voters who attend the events have already decided who they will support. “So, I would advise her to do the exact same thing,” he said.