Fun With Our Favorite Squalling Brood

Are we there yet?

The journey to election day is winding down into something like a family vacation that’s gone on way too long.

With the end in sight--next Tuesday’s the election--the candidates for mayor of Los Angeles are like exhausted 6-year-olds crammed in the back of the family van, testy and worn out.

That van turned the last corner toward home Wednesday night at one final debate, this one at UCLA. The six big contenders--big in name and purse compared to the other nine on the ballot--were hollering one minute and then hugging the next, if only for the gaze of the cameras, which, parent-like, seemed to expect them to make up and make nice, at least while someone was looking.

Six-year-olds have ways of commanding a parent’s attention. They yell. They play the nice kid. They stay on message, the message usually being: I want I want I want.

Some of the same techniques work in politics, and they worked Wednesday night.

Reporters and campaign regulars who have trekked this path for months know the slogans and applause lines so well that they can lip-sync along with the candidates. You could see them doing it again here; the front rows of Royce Hall looked like a catechism class.

But this last, televised debate, after some 75 encounters (some with only two candidates showing up), is the first time, maybe the only time that some voters will bother to notice. And the Big Six, anxious to win the sound-bite sweepstakes and register on voters’ retinas and memories, tried to get in last tag with just about every technique at the command of public servants and children.

By luck of the draw, the three top-tier candidates--commercial real estate broker Steve Soboroff, City Atty. James K. Hahn and former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa--sat side by side by side onstage, avoiding eye contact as assiduously as men standing at a urinal.

State Controller Kathleen Connell opened up by laying down a line of fire about “negative attack ads and despicable campaigning” by supporters of Villaraigosa and Soboroff, and she looked straight at Soboroff when she said, “I tell you, Steve, you need to condemn this.”

Soboroff, whose mantra has been “a problem-solver, not a politician,” colored a warm pink. When he got up to speak, he ignored her challenge, and asked the audience to do something that religious congregations sometimes do: turn to someone you don’t know and introduce yourself. Connell stood up and shook hands with a startled TV cameraman.

All of them invoked being parents or having them: Soboroff’s son just accepted to college, Rep. Xavier Becerra walking his children to school, Villaraigosa’s four, Connell’s “two boys.”

Councilman Joel Wachs repeated his evergreen line about what his parents wished for him after his first City Council campaign: “We want he should be a good boy.”

And not 30 seconds into his opening statement--and never, in any speech, later than a minute, people have pointed out--Hahn mentioned “my dad,” the late Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, who may still be a bigger vote-getter dead than some candidates are alive.

The three front-runners got the brunt of it, just as favorite children do. Soboroff laid into Hahn about Rampart. Hahn, whose neckties are usually livelier than he is, had spent part of the evening staring mesmerized into some middle distance as the others talked. But now he snapped back, “Steve, you have no credibility on police reform issues.” The out-of-turn salvo left Soboroff appealing to the moderator, “Attorneys are supposed to follow the rules.”

It was like “Survivor,” except they all wore more clothes. Next Tuesday, all but two of them get voted off the island.

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It’s the little flourishes that sometimes stay with people. Connell pronounces “Ballona wetlands” like “bologna,” the lunch meat, but because the other candidates didn’t mention it at all, she got the environmental cheers. (None of them could pronounce “Chemerinsky,” either--Erwin Chemerinsky, the USC professor who has become an authority on things Rampart.)

Only Wachs, with decades of campaigns under his belt, starting with a run for UCLA student body president from this very stage, seemed to enjoy himself. He twitted Soboroff’s vivid notion that developers of affordable housing merit red-carpet treatment, even to getting their cars washed as they’re applying for building permits. “Steve,” he said, “I think the last thing the city has to do is wash cars for developers.” And before the debate and after, Wachs distributed hugs to his competition. “A good run,” he repeated to one and all. “A very good run.”

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