Ethnicity, Incumbency a Potent Political Mix

An Eastside election contest is shaping up as a modest counterpoint to the widespread belief that ethnicity is everything in Los Angeles politics.

A Jewish politician who represents a heavily Latino school board district extending from the east San Fernando Valley through East Los Angeles has racked up reelection endorsements from a bevy of influential Latino officeholders.

David Tokofsky, a former high school teacher, has been endorsed by state Senate Majority Leader Richard Polanco, who heads the California Latino Caucus, Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa and Assemblyman Gilbert Cedillo, all Los Angeles Democrats. Tokofsky said he also has been promised an endorsement by City Councilman Richard Alatorre, although the lawmaker’s office said that while the councilman respects Tokofsky he has not yet made up his mind.

Alatorre’s indecision aside, Tokofsky’s endorsements are a reminder that ethnicity, while always a factor in Los Angeles politics, is not always the determining one.

It can be trumped, for example, by incumbency. “Incumbency in general changes the balance of endorsements almost everywhere,” said political scientist Raphael Sonenshein, author of “Politics in Black and White,” a study of black-Jewish coalition-building in Los Angeles. “In incumbency, you just expand.”

Well-known examples include the repeated triumphs of former Mayor Tom Bradley, an African American who survived early, racially polarizing elections to serve five terms in a city in which African Americans are a minority, and of the late County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, a white politician who built his power base in the black community.

Tokofsky’s experience also illustrates the opposite point--that ethnicity can loom, in the view of some, inappropriately large.

When he first showed interest in winning his seat on the Los Angeles Unified School District board in 1995, Tokofsky said, a prominent Latino politician tried to persuade him to bow out.

He said that U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) urged him to seek an Assembly seat representing Pasadena to make way for parent activist Lucia Rivera to win election to the school board.

“ ‘The Riveras of this country have had it harder than the Tokofskys,’ ” he said Becerra observed. “ ‘It is better if you go back where you came from.’ ”

Becerra, who has since assumed chairmanship of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, denied such an exchange occurred. “I never said that,” he said by telephone from Washington. “I never urged David not to run.”

Unexpected Backing From Latinos

Tokofsky, who was raised on the Westside but lives in Eagle Rock, said he never expected to be endorsed by all Latino elected officials in a district that had been represented by a Latino for a decade.

But he said it is ironic that a “middle left” politician, like himself draws endorsements from “the more Machiavellian . . . pragmatists” such as Polanco and Alatorre, but is opposed by some in “the progressive wing of the Latino community,” including Becerra and Supervisor Gloria Molina.

Tokofsky said he expects both of them to endorse his opponent for the $24,000-a-year Los Angeles Unified School District post in the April 1999 election, Yolie Flores Aguilar, a child development expert who is a Molina appointee to the county Board of Education.

Aguilar said she is running because she believes she can do a better job representing children’s interests. She characterized Tokofsky as a better critic than a doer.

“I think it’s an asset to me that I am of the culture and ethnic background of this community,” she said, “but I’m not interested in making that the issue.”

A fluent Spanish speaker and a former social studies teacher who once coached the Marshall High School academic decathlon team to a national championship, Tokofsky said he is drawing endorsements because his hard work and dedication to children have made it easy for elected officials to associate with him.

He is also benefiting from a tangle of common union ties, alliances and feuds. Consider just this one thread: As a former teacher, Tokofsky is closely associated with the teachers union. He is also an adversary on the school board of Victoria Castro, who ran unsuccessfully last year against Cedillo for the Assembly. Cedillo is a close friend of Speaker Villaraigosa. And Villaraigosa is a former organizer for the teachers union.

Threat of Losing Latino Seat on Council

The fact that Tokofsky could probably be easily tossed out of office if Latino elected officials coordinated a campaign against him may also work in his favor. As Tokofsky puts it, in describing his role in the 70% Latino district that slices from Sylmar to Boyle Heights and Monterey Park, “I’m a progressive labor ally in geography that’s not in dispute.”

The only time it was perceived to have been in dispute, Tokofsky was soundly beaten back.

That happened last year, when he ran unsuccessfully for a post on the elected commission to revise the Los Angeles City Charter. In that race, he sought to represent the heavily Latino Alatorre council district, which is within the boundaries of his much larger school board district. He was soundly defeated by a Becerra political ally, Deputy Dist. Atty. Nick Pacheco.

One Latino political activist who spoke on condition of anonymity said that Tokofsky was trounced in that race because he stepped too far out of line. “It is one thing for David to say he is the best qualified when it comes to education,” the activist said. “But it is arguable that others are better qualified to be a broad civic leader. . . . There was some concern that he was setting up for a City Council race. We fought long and hard for better representation on the City Council. To lose one of those seats was a big threat.”

Tokofsky’s own ethnicity offers another possible explanation for some of his school board reelection campaign endorsements. He acknowledges that being Jewish “can’t hurt” at this juncture, as some Latino and Jewish leaders seek to patch relations damaged by a nasty mail campaign between former Assemblyman Richard Katz and Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon.

During the campaign, Katz sent out a political hit piece in a state Senate Democratic primary he narrowly lost, featuring a photograph of a man’s dirty hands, with a headline that asserted: “It’s more than Alarcon’s hands that are dirty.”

Some Latinos took offense at the photograph of the dirty hands. The mailer went on to compare Alarcon to Alatorre, whose financial dealings are under federal investigation, and assert, via a crude “report card,” that Alarcon flunked subjects ranging from conflicts of interest to double dipping.

“What does that imply to you?” Polanco asked a correspondent at the time. “Is Katz saying Latinos are dirty people?”

Seeking to Calm Tensions From Race

In his capacity as chairman of the California Latino Caucus, Polanco signed a letter to thousands of newly registered Latino voters in which he implied that Katz had sought to keep Latinos from the polls. The letter falsely suggested that Katz had joined with Republicans in Orange County in 1988 to post armed guards around polling places, carrying signs saying that only U.S. citizens could vote. Katz, in fact, had condemned the Republican action as an attempt at intimidation.

Although Polanco’s letter contained no hint of anti-Semitism, its use of the big lie on an ethnic issue was incendiary enough to rile some Jewish leaders, who became particularly upset when they could not persuade any Latino leaders to publicly condemn it.

“Leadership of various religious, racial and ethnic communities have to think seriously about how they conduct campaigns,” said David Lehrer, who protested on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. “What may seem the most pragmatic and effective device to mobilize your base and to get out the vote may not be worth it in the long run . . . because ultimately each community will lose its allies . . . and nothing’s going to get done in Southern California without allies.”

Villaraigosa, who is being talked about as a possible candidate for mayor in 2001, would probably benefit from a Latino-Jewish coalition.

But he said his endorsement of Tokofsky had only to do with the school board and nothing to do with an effort to build bridges in the wake of Katz-Alarcon.

“Yolie’s a great lady,” the speaker said. “But he’s an incumbent.”