For Appearances’ Sake : Mayor Riordan Forsakes Low Profile as Campaign Begins

Time was when public appearances by Los Angeles’ top elected official were sparse. A common message to reporters was that “Mayor Richard Riordan has no public events scheduled for today.”

That began to change a little last summer, after a Los Angeles Times poll taken halfway through the entrepreneur-attorney’s first term showed his once solid popularity slipping. Faced with poll data indicating that many residents had only a vague sense of what the mayor was doing, Riordan’s advisors began adding news conference announcements to a media menu consisting largely of community bike rides, Police Academy graduations and “good cause” appearances with children.

But in the last week or so, with the official kickoff of his April 1997 bid for reelection to a second and final term, suddenly Riordan is everywhere.

Take a look at his public schedule so far this week. It began Sunday with the traditional Riordan-led bike tour just before the start of the Los Angeles Marathon.

On Monday, the mayor decided at the last minute to join demonstrations against the series of terrorist bombings in Israel, arriving at the Museum of Tolerance on the Westside in time for most reporters to catch his brief remarks.

He began Tuesday by hosting breakfast at a downtown hotel to launch a countywide network to combat AIDS, then signed autographs on aprons and caps at a textile firm that supplies uniforms to restaurants. With the help of an interpreter, he made a brief speech and fielded questions from pink- or aqua-jacketed employees, many of whom speak only Spanish.

Today, Riordan is scheduled to go to the Pacific Stock Exchange to deliver what his press office is billing as a major economic address.

Are we seeing Dick run?

Not exactly, according to Riordan, who says he has regularly visited private firms and talked with workers and executives alike as part of his efforts to improve the city’s business climate by keeping current companies from leaving town while wooing others to set up shop within city limits.

“I’ve always had a full schedule . . . you just don’t usually hear about it,” Riordan told a reporter as he was leaving the American Textile Maintenance Co.’s Republic Uniform Sales division on West Washington Boulevard.

“There are two theories [about holding political office]; you can go about doing your business or you can keep a high profile,” Riordan added. People had been telling him that he wasn’t visible enough, he conceded.

So now he’s decided to raise his profile?

“I don’t make those decisions. . . . I leave that to my advisors. If I stop to think about those things, I drive myself crazy,” said Riordan, whose full schedule remains closely held, even among his own staff.

High profile or not, the often awkward-spoken candidate, whose advisors’ careful control over his public appearances moved into the mayor’s office with him, seems to relish being in the public, if not the media, eye.

At the uniform sales and service plant, he tried out his halting Spanish on his baffled audience, then laughed at himself--to the apparent relief of his hosts--and translated his greeting back into English: “That means ‘I am the mayor of Los Angeles.’ ”

Riordan’s assistant deputy mayor for economic development, Rocky Delgadillo, said the mayor decided to add American Textile to his list of businesses to visit after its longtime owners turned to the mayor’s office about six months ago for help on an unspecified problem that they were having with City Hall.

“Moving out of the city was definitely an option,” said Bradley Shanes, whose grandfather bought the 500-employee company in 1932.

Campaigning already or not, the mayor clearly has his antennae tuned to the political horizon.

At the AIDS breakfast earlier in the day, community leader Phill Wilson thanked the mayor for his strong support throughout his term--but Wilson began with a sheepish confession that he had voted for Riordan’s opponent, then-Councilman Mike Woo, in 1993.

“Who are you supporting this time?” came the mayor’s response, a joke, of course. But he had made his point.