The Way It Should Be, the Way It Could Be

Any other week, what you’d be reading in his space now would probably be the goings-on in Department 62 up at the county courthouse, where the Raiders and Al Davis are suing the NFL for a billion bucks over their broken Los Angeles romance. Who makes better copy than Al Davis, coming into court kitted out in silver and black like a space pirate, throwing out words like “insane” and “ridiculous” on the witness stand?

But we had this election--more entertaining, more frightening and more hopeful than any fourth-down Hail Mary pass the Raiders ever cut loose. A billion-dollar lawsuit compared to the election? A shutout. This is L.A. This is big.

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Here’s the campaign I want between now and June 5.

I want to hear about Valley secession, in plain talk. I want to hear less about running the public schools--that’s not in the mayor’s job description--and more about the city services that help schools do the job better, like libraries with later hours and better computers. I want to hear about rescuing the Ballona Wetlands and rehabbing the city’s parks and the Los Angeles River. I want to hear about encouraging a hesitant city bureaucracy to do the right thing fast. I want to hear--for the last time for a long time, please--about getting the LAPD functional again, and then getting on to some other problem.

I want to hear the quality-of-life stuff, about making sure that what fills potholes isn’t just trash that shouldn’t be in the street in the first place. (By the way, winners and losers both, please take down your campaign placards--they’re blocking my view of all the chain-link fences.)

I want to hear that you’ll spend every civic dime like you fished it out of your own pocket. I want to hear about crowding and zoning and open space. I want to hear about keeping the middle class in L.A. I want to hear about the working class and the homeless, period. I want to know that you’ll say “yes” to developers when it’s good for us, not for them. I want to hear how you’ll get Sacramento in L.A.’s corner. I want you to get excited about downtown L.A., and get the rest of us to feel that way.

I want to hear how you’ll make the libraries and animal shelters and traffic and trees and sidewalks better, because what people wake up to in the morning and go home to at night matters at least as much to the soul of a city as who the police chief is. I want to hear that there’s more to livable neighborhoods than just making them “safe”--it’s not much of a boast if all you can say is, “Well, you won’t get mugged in our part of town.”

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Now, here’s the campaign that I worry we’ll get:

I worry that Valley secession will become a vote-pandering fest. James Hahn, living in distant and disaffected San Pedro, can legitimately say, Clinton-like, “I feel your pain,” but there’s more to it than that.

I worry that the environment will become political road kill. I worry that the campaign will get detoured onto the messy side roads of who’s supporting whom and how much they’re spending, and not on what the campaigns are about. Forget the “no controlling legal authority” defense and damn the contributor-secrecy loopholes; everyone should “out” his or her contributors, then get on with it.

I worry that ethnic enthusiasms for Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa will degenerate into the fatal politics of fear. I worry that coded messages will try to scare black voters about Brown Power, as white voters were once stampeded about Black Power. I worry about both the racist vote and the “white guilt” vote, a phenomenon remarked on 13 years ago in a notorious campaign memo about “racially tolerant people” who liked voting for Mayor Tom Bradley because “they feel less guilty about how little they used to pay their household help.”

I remember the sea of Mexican flags at Proposition 187 protest rallies, and worry that forces beyond the candidates’ control could try to hijack the tone of the election.

I worry that because both mayoral candidates are Democrats, that we’ll end up with a family feud, and family feuds are always a lot more vicious than battles between strangers. It’s funny about nonpartisan elections like Los Angeles’. The first-round “primary” is more like a general election: You hear many voices and a lot of ideologies (think Pat Buchanan across the spectrum to Ralph Nader). And our runoff is more like a primary: We have two Democrats standing on a very small piece of ideological turf, each trying to shove the other guy off. With fewer ideological differences to fight over, the personal stuff becomes political, and the political can get very nasty indeed.

You have less than seven weeks. We’ll all be watching--even, I suspect, Al Davis.

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