Where Was Clinton When We Really Needed Him?

I have covered royal visits. I know a royal visit when I see one. And believe me, this was a royal visit:

The eager crowds straining at the barricades for a glimpse of The Visiting Personage, the smile-and-wave walkabout illuminated by stop-motion camera flashes, the seamless and strategic backdrop with just the right supporting players. . . .

All in place and at the ready for Thursday’s royal visit to Watts by President Clinton--an appearance so airlessly devoid of a sense of place that he practically could have phoned it in.

Beyond the props and circumstance lay one distinction that set this royal visit apart from those of no-term-limits sovereigns: When those royals depart, they leave behind warm and fuzzy feelings, nothing more. Constitutionally, they can’t promise anything--not one penny, not one vote.

But Clinton can make promises, and this week he did, like a Bourbon monarch scattering coins from the coach:

An $8-million, corporate-funded, nationwide school-to-career computer and engineering program, and a billion-dollar national project to keep students on track for the new economy.

This is terrific news for teenagers, but Clinton skipped their older siblings’ generation when he had the chance, a half-dozen years ago, after riots blighted the city landscape and psyche.

Parts of Watts, like South-Central Los Angeles, are brighter and busier nowadays. This years-long economic tide that lifts all manner of boats has raised up the luxury liner of the Westside and South-

Central’s dinghy too. Left to its own devices, South-Central has pulled valiantly at its own oar and looked askance at the big liners that pass by with great fuss and prop wash.

With the weariness of one who has seen the political circus come and go and leave peanut shells, not even peanuts, in its wake, Watts’ Gregory Jones told The Times earlier this week, “It ain’t going to help us that Clinton is coming down here. He’ll just suggest some things and leave.”

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Among the royal entourage was Magic Johnson, who has put his money where others have only put their mouths. To the nation’s CEOs, he exhorted, “The suburbs are all built out now. It’s overbuilt. The only place you can go is the urban community, and it’s good business.”

Back in 1993, when Magic Johnson was just a retired basketball player, Clinton was president of the United States. Here’s what he might have done:

* In 1994, two years after the riots, when we really needed the hundreds of millions in tax breaks to jump-start the ravaged economy, Clinton could have designated L.A. as one of six federal urban empowerment zones. Instead, his administration rejected L.A.’s application as “too vague,” like some professor’s comment scribbled across a term paper, and bestowed the goods elsewhere.

* He could have been more restrained in his bear-hug embrace of NAFTA. On top of the hammering L.A. took when aerospace jobs vaporized like an exploding missile, NAFTA blew away most hopes that manufacturing could hold its own here against bargain-basement foreign labor.

* After his obligatory post-riot, preelection “something must be done” visit to South-Central, he could have used his bully pulpit to lean on some of the corporations that talked big about rebuilding L.A. but stepped out of the pew when the collection plate came around. Some companies did well--Chief Auto Parts, Taco Bell, Smart and Final grocers--but man does not live by transmission fluid, tacos and 20-packs of paper towels alone. In other parts of town than this, there’s a shorter distance from one Starbucks to the next than there is between markets and Laundromats and banks in South-Central.

* He could have pressed his buddies at DreamWorks to dream their movie-studio dream a few miles to the east, in urban L.A. Apart from the publicity and tax breaks, it would have been as significant a shift of Los Angeles’ business axis as Copernicus displacing the Earth from the center of the solar system.

What the heck. If those people have any gumption at all, they can make a quick killing selling T-shirts:

“Clinton Legacy Tour, July 1999: Appalachia, Mississippi Delta, East St. Louis, Pine Ridge Reservation, South Phoenix, Watts.”

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On Saturday, in Pasadena’s Rose Bowl, a couple of bus and Blue Line rides from Watts, the U.S. will be going for the goals in the finals of women’s World Cup soccer.

The First Family plans to be there--Chelsea, her lame-duck father, her maybe-senator mother--amid thousands of fans whose presence can’t help but remind them that it is soccer moms, not welfare moms, who win elections.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com