A Tale of Three Mayors

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most effective mayor of them all? In seeking an answer, we discover, rather rapidly, that the candidates are at the helms of the nation’s three most representative cities: New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. What might be surprising, however, is the strong possibility that the most effective mayor of the three is Richard Riordan, now entering the penultimate year of his reign.

What, the keepers of conventional wisdom ask, am I smoking? You mean Riordan, the self-styled citizen-mayor who self-financed his first campaign and came into office, by his own admission, in need of a charisma implant? The very same mayor whom Time, in an August 1997 cover article on U.S. mayors, called “Robert” Riordan? The mayor who meddles in school-board affairs, though he lacks any statutory authority to do so? The mayor whose political ineptness and clumsiness has alienated the City Council, handicapping his ability to implement his vision of the city? Truth be told, conventional wisdom says, Riordan’s success owes more to luck than political acumen and bravery.

Yet, such critics of the mayor miss the point. In Los Angeles, no one group, including the City Council, can stand between the mayor and the individual voter when the movie “Los Angeles” is playing. More than any other mayor in any major U.S. city today, Riordan, the former private-sector attorney and venture capitalist, a man so elliptical, so elusive, so intermittently shy and arrogant, has mastered the distinctive politics of the city he governs.

Twice, Riordan won the mayor’s race, the last time overwhelmingly. He has spearheaded reform of the city, from its permitting process to its charter. He helped put the Metropolitan Transportation Authority back on track by bringing in Julian Burke to be its interim CEO. He revitalized the Los Angeles Police Department by campaigning to add to its numbers. He successfully sought to break up a politically divisive and truant L.A. Unified Board of Education by backing a slate of pro-reform candidates. All this from a man whom no one, absolutely no one, would have chosen as the political leader to succeed Tom Bradley.

How did Riordan do this? He was, most basically, the right man, with the right background and temperament, in the right city, at just the time the city--whether it knew it or not--needed him the most.

Let’s, for a moment, go back to the beginning. The three most significant cities in the United States are New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Situated on the East Coast, in the heart of the Midwest and on the Pacific Coast, these three cities, for much of the 20th century, have been playing representative roles.

New York is the capital of Anglo-American civilization. With its deep roots in the colonial past and its continuing relationship to the Hudson Valley-situated Anglo Dutch ascendancy, New York looks to its sister city London across the Atlantic. Even today, despite successive generations of immigrants, the fundamental essence of New York is connected to the 18th-century English-speaking origins of the American republic.

Chicago, by contrast, is the quintessential Midwestern city. Chicago, too, has been profoundly modified by immigration, but it still bespeaks the U.S. heartland and the immigrants--Irish, German, Polish, Slavic, Jewish--who advanced the frontier of the republic.

L.A., like New York, is 18th century in origin, but, in its case, the founders were Mexican. After a long and relatively quiescent 19th-century frontier, it was refounded in the early 20th century as the Chicago of the Pacific Coast.

The political cultures of these three metropolises--meaning, city governance and politics--differ, and in their differences are established the matrices for the success or failure of mayors in each city.

The mayor of New York functions at the apex of a federation of powerful borough governments, each of them a virtual city-state unto itself. To be mayor of New York is to function as presiding officer of a confederacy, or as president of a quasi-foreign country, comparable in scale to many sovereign states holding seats in the United Nations.

Chicago, by contrast, is politically pieced into a three-dimensional checkerboard of wards. Each ward, in turn, is pieced into turf or sectors of influence, almost inevitably along ethnic lines. In Chicago, virtually every building, certainly every block, reflects this pattern of wardship and negotiated settlement.

A mayor of New York governs from the top down; in Chicago, from the bottom up. That’s why New York mayors are vulnerable to sudden changes in public opinion. That’s why Chicago mayors can go on forever, like Richard J. Daley did, no matter what anyone is saying. The mayor of New York can be toppled like a parliamentary prime minister losing a vote of confidence. The mayor of Chicago, by contrast, can be hurt only if someone assembles the wards and counts the votes better.

No one denies that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has done great things for New York in city maintenance, in economic development and in public safety. However, when a New York City policeman pleaded guilty in May to the abuse of a black man, which included sexual abuse, and when four New York cops pumped 19 bullets (out of 41 fired) into an unarmed black street peddler in February, mistaking him, they claimed, for an armed dope dealer, the entire edifice of Giuliani’s mayoralty seemed to go up in smoke. His impatient manner with fellow politicians, his scorn for the press, his pride all came back to haunt him in the backlash over aggressive policing, the cornerstone of his “quality of life” campaign. New York mayors are that way. They rise to dazzling heights, and they fall just as quickly.

No one denies that Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley has compiled an impressive record of achievement. He has launched special initiatives in education, going so far as to assert de facto control over Chicago’s schools. By most accounts, school performance is improving. Crime is down, racial tempers have cooled and the city works. Yet, the minute we cite Daley’s successes, we must also note some shocks and scandals. A friend with a big-city contract is alleged to have ties with bad guys in Florida. Job growth for poor people has been weak. An African American female cop proved trigger happy and there is yet another African American victim, allegedly, of police misbehavior or ineptitude.

On the other hand, none of this can destabilize Daley as comparable events have destabilized Giuliani. The honeycomb of power in Chicago is so dense, composed of so many separate yet interconnected power sources, that no one scandal or embarrassing incident can do a mayor in, unless it be of spectacular magnitude, as when a predecessor, Michael Bilandic, failed to clear the streets after a particularly devastating snowstorm. Still, the distinctive nature and history of mayoral power in Chicago limit the transferability of Daley’s reputation, since it is based upon a political system that can absorb the poison of scandal in one or another of its component parts without destroying the health of the whole.

If New York is a borough and Chicago a ward, Los Angeles is an idea: a vast, abstract idea, governed, until recently, by an oligarchy, a newspaper, a proactive bench, the police, a powerful and generally successful bureaucracy, a City Council and a weak mayor. (The new charter gives the mayor more power.)

In contrast to the boroughs of New York and the wards of Chicago, Los Angeles was organized voter by voter, with no intervening structures like political parties or labor unions standing between the voters and the city as a whole. When voters were aroused, which is to say, when they were concentrating, it became a plebiscitary democracy, with each atomized voter entering momentarily into the political system on a one-to-one basis, then forgetting about it. In nonpolitically intense times, which is to say most of the time, Los Angeles as government, as politics, tends to disappear from voters’ consciousness like a movie no longer being watched. Hence: Los Angeles alternated between rhythms of intense mass participation, through media, and disengagement. Either condition was possessed of a clarity, an abstractness, unknown in the highly contextualized involvements of the other two cities.

In his rise to power, Bradley gave Los Angeles, momentarily, the illusion of coalition politics played out across classic lines of ethnic, economic and religious self-interest. Los Angeles wanted to be a traditional city. It began to construct a subway, modeled on the transportation patterns of New York. But just as the subway would eventually come to a halt, so, too, Bradley in the second half of his 20-year reign left behind his power base in coalitions to establish a direct relationship to each voter. He became Los Angeles’ best idea of itself.

Riordan seems to understand this Los Angeles intuitively. As mayor, he operates through long periods during which the movie “Los Angeles Politics” is not playing in the imagination of voters. During these intervals, Riordan does what he knows best: work deals. To this dimension of his mayoralty, Riordan has brought his considerable skills as a venture capitalist.

But what about when the movie “Los Angeles Government” is playing? At such moments, beginning with the Northridge earthquake in January 1994, Riordan projects himself as an avuncular Everyman, an older and respected family relative called in at time of crisis. Getting into his car the morning of the earthquake, Riordan drove to his downtown office and took charge of the city’s emergency efforts.

The public seems to appreciate and accept the roles Riordan plays. They project Riordan’s most likable side: his sense of humor and irony, which mitigates the considerable force of his ego. Through indirection, Riordan has become popular. His lack of orchidaceous rhetoric suits voters chronically skeptical or indifferent toward city government. His outsider’s stance still resonates with a citizenry that only intermittently participates in municipal government. Riordan seems at times as much a Democrat as he is by temperament and prior profession a Republican. If being a Republican speaks to his venture-capitalist side, being a Democrat speaks to all that he absorbed from the Jesuits and from Jacques Maritain at Princeton, where Riordan studied philosophy: speaks--dare one say?--to the would-be monsignor that lurks within the soul of every good Irish Catholic politician. In such a setting, the very ambiguity of Riordan--Is he an insider? Is he sincere? What deal is he cutting now?--becomes a virtue in a city that hates to be bored.

Of course, Riordan has been helped by the stunning economic recovery in Los Angeles, and in California, and falling crime rates, which may be more related to demographics than law enforcement. Yet, Riordan has done more than simply ride the crest of a wave. He has crafted--and sometimes personally financed--reform and recovery. He has projected an avuncular indirection, linked to efficiency, that at this time is all that Angelenos want their civic leader to project.

Los Angeles, you see, has its fundamental vitality in the private sector: in work, play, religion, eros and family life. L.A. is about minding your own business and getting ahead. It does not want to be overwhelmed, by either a football franchise or a mayor. Let other mayors ride around in shiny black limousines. Riordan likes to drive his own car. Not many Irish Catholic Republican mayors with serious reservations about abortion can get a standing ovation in West Hollywood, as happened recently. The very freedom of Los Angeles, its lack of New York’s political hierarchy or Chicago’s beehive of wards, has allowed Riordan to emerge as the Dwight D. Eisenhower of U.S. mayors: unexpected, improbable, yet, for the times, the perfect choice.*