Stealth Mayor Avoids the News Media’s Missiles

Finding Mayor Richard Riordan in public is like trying to spot a Stealth warplane on radar.

You can do it, but the conditions have to be right. Don’t look for him with hostile audiences or facing down skeptical reporters at news conferences. The mayor, helped by clever advance people, seems to have a knack for avoiding them, a tendency evident when he was running for mayor in 1993.

Thursday morning was a perfect example.

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As usual, Riordan looked like just another businessman in a blue suit, ambling toward a meeting at Universal CityWalk’s Cineplex Odeon. He was accompanied by his bodyguard and an aide.

The theater lobby was packed with San Fernando Valley business people, the mayor’s core supporters.

He mounted the podium and took his seat with the other dignitaries after a failed attempt to clown around during the picture-taking.

His speech was pure pep talk without much substance. “The one thing we have to fear is pessimism,” he said. “We must approach every problem we encounter with fierce optimism. And that’s what I feel in this room. Fierce, intelligent optimism.”

And guess what? The audience loved it. There was no opportunity for questions, but if there had been, I’m sure they would have all been friendly.

When the event was over, Riordan talked to me and two other reporters. That was the time he chose to answer questions--when the crowd had gone. We talked to him for almost half an hour. He answered all our questions, and provided some details of his negotiations to put a manufacturing and retail complex on the site of the old General Motors plant in Panorama City. He even suggested a book and a couple of articles--one by himself--that would teach us something about economic development.

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When it comes to the press, the mayor likes the home turf advantage and the numbers of reporters fairly small so there’s no chance of free-for-alls, no gangbanging interrogations. He’d rather schmooze than lose.

On Thursday, for example, the same day he was charming his audience at CityWalk, he held a little party for the press in his office.

Rick Orlov, who covers City Hall for the Daily News, usually hosts a gathering in the pressroom on Friday afternoons. But since this Friday was a holiday, the mayor and his staff decided to host the end of the week fest.

Riordan, sipping a Coke, chatted with the reporters in a friendly manner and then led a quick tour of his redecorated office before ducking out to give a speech.

The mayor’s sly game of hide-and-seek with the press is maybe best illustrated by some of his unusual one-on-one sessions. With one journalist, he plays golf. With another, he played chess the other day. Two reporters attend a book discussion group at his home. And when he heard a new reporter in City Hall liked to play pool, he phoned her up with an invitation to shoot a game.

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The trouble with such an approach, seemingly conceived to reduce the odds of embarrassing confrontations, is that Riordan rarely subjects himself to skeptical audiences, to the rough and tumble of politics.

In contrast, Riordan’s predecessors mixed it up with the press and public all the time.

Mayor Sam Yorty, in office from 1961 to 1973, held weekly news conferences at City Hall. The City Hall press corps was bigger in those days. Television and radio stations regularly covered City Hall and there were more print reporters around. The questions were rude and wild, and Yorty, loving it, answered back in kind.

His successor, Tom Bradley, also had frequent and well-attended news conferences, especially in the first decade of his 20-year Administration. Although the rowdy atmosphere of the Yorty years disappeared with the dignified Bradley, the news conferences tended to be long, with the media holding the mayor accountable on a wide variety of issues.

Both men met with many groups around the city at events that were open to all.

Riordan, on the other hand, generally closes the door to outsiders, as he did last Monday when he ventured into less cordial territory. On that day, he met with about 25 people representing block clubs in a wide area south of the Santa Monica Freeway.

Polls show opposition to the mayor in the area’s large African American population and it would have been enlightening to hear the dialogue between him and the residents. But the meeting was, as his staff put it, private.

This is a brilliant mayoral strategy, keeping Riordan off the hot seat. The media, unfortunately, have helped him out, largely because the O.J. Simpson trial has sucked up media attention the past 18 months. Seldom have television cameras ventured into City Hall or tracked Riordan’s travels around town.

But what’s good for the mayor may be bad for L.A. Riordan’s Stealth tactics discourage debate about major problems, and permit him to escape accountability for his Administration’s shortcomings.