Riordan’s Conclusion: Being Mayor Is Better

For Mayor Richard Riordan, the decision on whether to seek California’s highest elected office came down to the late hours of the penultimate day.

All week, Riordan had veered from cheerful to somber, enjoying the attention that his ruminations attracted but also soberly facing up to the implications of running a hard campaign and then--even more daunting--the possibility that he might finish the race and find himself governor.

“Be careful,” the mayor said he told himself, “you might get what you’re going after.”

Facing a Wednesday afternoon deadline, Riordan still was undecided late Tuesday night. He returned from a black-tie dinner and went to his room, where he made some phone calls and contemplated his choices. Up until almost midnight, he was juggling airline reservations with the thought that he might return to Los Angeles to file the necessary paperwork and publicly announce his candidacy.

But by Wednesday morning, the mayor had ruled out the idea, and he announced his decision over breakfast with reporters and editors from The Times.

“I’ve decided not to run,” Riordan said simply.

He then described his decision in detail, noting that he had been tempted by the opportunity to overhaul the state’s ailing education system, and adding that he had braced himself for a rough campaign in which he expected to be attacked by the more conservative Dan Lungren, state attorney general, and by multimillionaire businessman Al Checchi, who, like Riordan, would be vying for centrist votes.

Neither money nor the prospect of a rough campaign dissuaded him, Riordan insisted. The mayor, himself a multimillionaire lawyer and venture capitalist, said polls in recent weeks put him on top of the field. What’s more, Riordan said that in the past week he had received pledges of more than $5 million to kick off the campaign.

In fact, Riordan boasted that he had received more pledges in a week than Lungren has raised during his entire campaign--a fact made substantially easier by Riordan’s wealthy circle of supporters and by a recent court decision to lift contribution limits.

“I think we could win,” he said. “We felt very confident that it would play out very well.”

William Wardlaw, the mayor’s best friend and closest advisor, agreed that all the strategic signs pointed to a Riordan victory. “Ultimately, this decision was not about winning and losing,” he said. “He could have been governor if he chose that path.”

In the end, however, Riordan acknowledged that he lacked the “fire in the belly” needed to serve as the state’s top elected official. Riordan said he simply decided he had no ambition to attain higher office, a drive that he said afflicted too many politicians.

“I’m more than satisfied to be mayor of Los Angeles,” he said, adding that he was proud of the staff he had assembled and drawn to the challenge of revamping the city charter. He cited that last issue, charter reform, in interviews throughout the day, emphasizing that it had the potential to cure many of the problems Riordan believes afflict city government.

According to some of those close to him, the process of considering a run also seemed to focus Riordan on the difference between his feelings for Los Angeles and for the state as a whole. Riordan likes California, they said, but his real love is for the city.

Late in the day, Riordan briefly paused between meetings to relax and smoke a cigar. The mayor, who had seemed preoccupied a day before, was buoyant, telling jokes, recalling old comedy routines, musing about the historical role of leadership and reflecting on his decision. He agreed with those who emphasized the difference between his feelings for Los Angeles and for California as a whole.

“I love California,” he said, “but Los Angeles is still my No. 1 love.”

It was the issue of education that caused Riordan to flirt with a gubernatorial campaign, and he continued to sound that theme Wednesday. He argued that he can play a leading role in pushing for education reform from the mayor’s office, and he spelled out in his strongest terms to date his determination to fight for a restructuring of Los Angeles schools.

For months, Riordan has shied away from arguing that a single elected official, such as a mayor, ought to have authority over schools. He has hinted at the notion by praising cities like Chicago, whose mayor has power over schools, but never has directly endorsed the concept for Los Angeles.

To advance such an argument, Riordan has said, would allow opponents of the idea to dismiss it by casting it as a mayoral power-grab.

On Wednesday, however, he said he believed parents and others were becoming so fed up with school failure that the public might be ready to hear his arguments. “I’ll do everything I have to to sell it,” he said.

According to Riordan, many of the problems in public education are the result of a failure of school governance, specifically the administration of local schools by the Los Angeles school board, whose members are elected by district and whom Riordan sharply criticized.

“You have seven members who are elected by district, who are more worried about their own ethnic group, their own districts . . . than they are about children,” Riordan said. “These are wannabe politicians. The minute they’re elected, they’re thinking about running for City Council or what have you. . . . They don’t have the mental equipment, the experience equipment, to run it right.”

On a state level, Riordan said his first act upon returning to Los Angeles today will be to call up the candidates for governor and sound them out on their plans for educational reform.

Two candidates, Checchi and Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, already have tried to persuade Riordan that their approaches would do the job. But Riordan said he remains unconvinced, and he took particular aim at Davis.

“Gray Davis will tell you anything you want to hear,” he said. “I talked to Gray Davis over the weekend, and he said: I’m all for education, mayor. I said, yeah, I know. He said, look, if they haven’t improved their scores in five years, I think we have to have change. I said, Gray, this is a terminal patient. We don’t have five years.”

Asked what educational policies he was looking for in a governor, Riordan said it was more than a platform.

“What will convince me . . . is not just words,” he said. “We must have the commitment that we will fire people who fail our children.”

While Riordan reserved his sharpest criticism for Davis, he also expressed concern that the Republican Party has drifted too far to the right to be palatable to many voters--implicitly a critique of Lungren, whose opposition to abortion, among other things, puts him to the right of Riordan.

“The Republican Party in California is very right-wing,” he said, “and really not that effective.”

Although Riordan’s flirtation with a run for governor overshadowed much of the official business he came to Washington to conduct, he and other top Los Angeles staffers continued their rounds at the Capitol. Among other things, they lobbied for federal support on airport expansion, Metropolitan Transportation Authority funding and money for law enforcement and economic development.

Riordan described the meetings as productive and said he was encouraged by the federal response to the city’s requests.

“We’ve gotten 100% of what we asked for,” he said. “We’ve been realistic about what we’re asking for, but we’re getting lots of good responses.”

Riordan is scheduled to return to Los Angeles today.