Mayoral Hopefuls Try Skill at Game of Building Blocs

While the six top contenders for mayor speak expansively about making Los Angeles one city, their political advisors have launched more baldly pragmatic campaigns aimed at melding slivers of the political landscape into a winning combination.

The strategists are scrambling to find 100,000 votes or a few more, probably all it will take in a city of nearly 4 million to become one of two candidates to emerge from the April 10 election to compete in an all-but-certain June 5 runoff.

In doing so, they confront the realities of modern Los Angeles, a city organized along geographic and ethnic lines--where Tom Bradley won by uniting Southside blacks and Westside liberals, and where Richard Riordan redrew the political map by bringing together San Fernando Valley conservatives and many Westside moderates.

All of this year’s candidates contemplate their own models for replicating those victories, either by reconstructing the Riordan or Bradley coalitions or by blazing a new path to unite different segments of divided Los Angeles.

Most readily identifiable, and thus targeted by the campaigns first, are two archetypal Los Angeles voters: “There are the high-propensity voters in the Valley, very concerned about fiscal stewardship, taxes and public safety,” who voted for Riordan, said one strategist. “And there are the more ethnic and liberal voters who want to know how services are delivered and things get done, who once voted for Bradley.”

Simplistic as those categories may be, a majority of consultants in what’s expected to be the most expensive campaign in city history say they are real and must be considered before the candidates can reach beyond their natural constituencies.

That means City Councilman Joel Wachs, commercial real estate broker Steve Soboroff and, to a degree, state Controller Kathleen Connell have been competing fiercely for Riordan voters, while City Atty. James K. Hahn counts heavily on onetime Bradley backers.

Former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa and U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra hope to re-create the liberal alliance, too, but with a twist--linking Westsiders and others to a largely Latino base on the Eastside.

Connell, meanwhile, hopes to transcend those categories. She believes she can appeal to women citywide, while her message of fiscal responsibility in the face of civic breakdowns attempts to reach beyond gender.

No Clear Formulas for Winning

Still, this year’s candidates are caught between the past and what could be the future, with no clear heir to the old political paradigms and new formulas that are yet to prove winning.

The picture is further muddled because the large field--which includes 16 less politically experienced candidates--also split many of the resources it takes to get voters to the polls.

“None of these are people who stand out yet as clearly the next leader or people whose time has clearly come,” said Jim Hayes, owner of Political Data Inc. in Burbank, a firm that tracks Los Angeles voting patterns. “Nothing is out there that anoints one of them as the new leader.”

All of the top contenders enter the final two months of the campaign with reasons to think they can assemble bases and then reach beyond them:

* Wachs, 61, has proved in early polls to be one of the most recognizable politicians in Los Angeles.

He has built a loyal following over decades of public service, mostly around his image as a protector of the public purse; that’s a message sure to resonate in the largely conservative Valley, while Wachs’ support for rent control, the arts and civil rights for AIDS patients may help him on the Westside.

* Villaraigosa, 48, starts with good poll numbers among Latinos and has lashed together the broadest and most diverse set of endorsements in the field.

While single individuals or lone groups historically have not held huge sway in Los Angeles, the former legislator’s supporters can ask: What’s not to like in a candidate who is supported by everyone from the janitors union, environmentalists and women’s groups to a new sort of “billionaire boys club”--wealthy political power brokers Eli Broad, Ron Burkle, A. Jerrold Perenchio and Haim Saban?

* Soboroff, 52, has the most direct claim to Riordan’s legacy. The city Recreation and Parks Commission member is endorsed by the mayor and, like him, plans to spend considerably from his personal fortune to create perhaps the race’s largest media campaign.

Like Riordan, Soboroff’s mission is to “start right and move left,” meaning that he needs to sew up conservatives before reaching out to Los Angeles’ more liberal electorate.

* Hahn, 50, has proven his appeal to the city’s voters five times--with four victories as city attorney and, before that, as city controller.

His A-list campaign advisors depict Hahn as the man to beat, partly because his $2-million campaign treasury leads the pack and partly because he owns “the best political name west of the Mississippi”--courtesy of his father, Kenneth, the 40-year county supervisor who was held in near-reverence among African Americans and whose political base the younger Hahn hopes to inherit.

* Connell, 53, comes home to Los Angeles after twice winning a statewide office that gives her weight both politically and as a financial watchdog.

Unlike the other candidates, whose natural bases are largely geographic, Connell initially aims her appeal at women. That’s potentially fruitful in a city where Democratic women make up the single largest voting bloc.

* Becerra, like Villaraigosa, needs strong support on the Eastside to get rolling. He may manage that; he and his advisors note that the congressman won 77,935 votes in his recent reelection campaign to the House of Representatives.

The bigger challenge for Becerra is building on his base with limited financial resources and few endorsements from the rest of Los Angeles.

Cues May Be Subtle but Effective

Even as the campaigns fight for their home turf, the candidates must relentlessly keep an eye on other voters who they may not need to win a runoff spot in April but whose support would be essential for them to carry the city in June.

Sometimes the cues in that complicated task are subtle.

Soboroff’s appearance in Watts with activist “Sweet” Alice Harris and Bishop E. Lynn Brown of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, for instance, might secure him a few votes far from his Pacific Palisades home.

But even limited support from African Americans could reassure moderate voters throughout the city that the little-known businessman is not the out-of-touch real estate tycoon his opponents are expected to depict him as.

Similarly, Hahn will try to demonstrate that he is more than just heir to a liberal, African American-based political legacy. He is attempting to move beyond that base by targeting Anglo and conservative Valley voters with messages about his work as the city’s prosecutor--fighting domestic violence and gangs.

The candidates’ diverse personal histories and tangled political messages might be easier to sort out if they addressed the city at a more precarious moment.

But the fretful Los Angeles of 1990s recession and riot, which drove Riordan’s suburban base, seems to have receded. The civil rights fervor that launched Bradley waned years ago. In the city that remains, the candidates can’t even agree on what mood predominates.

“People feel pretty good about Los Angeles; they don’t feel the sky is falling,” said Hahn strategist and spokesman Kam Kuwata.

At the other end of the scale, the edgy Connell routinely savages a city government that she sees as woefully mismanaged and “in crisis,” with federal court orders hanging over the operation of the schools, police, sewers and bus system.

The other contenders fall somewhere in between, positioning their campaign messages to coincide with their views of the city.

That has meant that one group of candidates has been less likely to vilify the government, or to call for wholesale change.

The group includes: Hahn, who promises to be the capable and dependable manager who will fix specific problems; Villaraigosa, who evokes Bradley’s “big tent” approach, with programs and participation from all corners of the city; and Becerra, who offers a fresh face and promise to focus on neighborhood concerns.

Ironically, it is the candidates in hottest pursuit of the Riordan vote who vehemently criticize the status quo. Soboroff spends much of his time on the debate circuit slamming the denizens of City Hall for talking about problems, instead of solving them.

Wachs attacks closed-door government meetings, inefficient purchasing and taxpayer subsidies for private developers. And Connell derides a city that she sees as sliding into disrepair.

Those basic distinctions have remained consistently in play as the candidates position themselves, but the issue jockeying has at times been layered with nuance and multiple entendres.

It’s no surprise that lone Republican Soboroff backs the police most heartily. His first television ad, for instance, signals voters that he will be more focused on bolstering the Police Department than attending to an ongoing corruption scandal.

“It’s time to stop fighting cops,” Soboroff says, “and get back to fighting crime.”

Former ACLU leader Villaraigosa has staked out the opposite end of the LAPD-reform continuum by being the first to call for support of federal oversight of the department, a position now adopted by all the major candidates but Soboroff.

But even the most liberal candidates in the race have gone out of their way to show that they want to support the average cop on the beat. Becerra has suggested that officers should get low- or no-interest loans for up to 10 years to encourage them to live in the city, closer to the people they police.

All six support a modified work schedule that officers have pleaded for over the objections of Police Chief Bernard C. Parks. If adopted, it would allow officers to work just four days a week--with longer hours--instead of five.

Wachs and Connell have gone a step further in appealing to the LAPD rank and file, sharply criticizing the failure of “top management” in the Police Department.

Though they don’t mention Parks by name, those comments have pleased critics inside the department, who hope the next mayor will not grant Parks a second five-year term in 2002. (It’s no coincidence that the coveted endorsement of the Police Protective League, the notoriously anti-Parks police union, remains up for grabs.)

2 Stand Separate on School District

On public schools, another question preeminent in the minds of voters--especially those who make up the core of the more conservative candidates’ bases--Wachs and Soboroff are most clearly distinguished from the pack because they want to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District’s massive central administration.

The stand for local control should win votes in the San Fernando Valley, their natural base. It also signals the candidates’ empathy with those in the Valley who want to form their own city, without actually condoning the breakup of Los Angeles--a sort of “secession lite.”

Wachs has gone even further, saying secession might one day be justified if City Hall doesn’t respond to the Valley’s concerns but that, for now: “You can’t run for mayor of Los Angeles and be for breaking up the city.”

And yet, while those stands help identify their proponents with a key slice of the electorate, they have hardly galvanized the public, or clearly set the candidates apart, as issues have in city elections past.

Riordan showed he would look at the city in a new way in 1993 when he proposed selling Los Angeles International Airport to pay for more police. Although he never followed through on selling LAX as mayor, the idea marked Riordan as a creative thinker ready to break up an ossified city operation.

Councilman Michael Woo made it into a runoff with Riordan, in large part because he established a profile as the earliest and most vocal opponent of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Dispassionate Discussions

The relative stability of the city this year may be contributing to the candidates’ tendency to think, or at least speak, less audaciously.

The airport, in fact, has seldom been mentioned, despite the ongoing consideration of a plan to refurbish LAX and accommodate as many as 24 million additional passengers a year.

The contenders talk dispassionately about the need to send flights to other airports and to cut noise and pollution. But they say little about the economic importance of LAX, a critical port for trade and tourism.

That may not help voters better appreciate the issue or offer much in the way of a vision for the city’s future. But it makes perfect sense in terms of coalition building.

“You are not going to win any votes in this city by saying we have to expand LAX,” said Harvey Englander, a campaign consultant who is not working for any of the mayoral hopefuls. “If you talk about it, someone under the flight path in Westchester may vote against you, so most candidates are going to ignore it.”

The relative silence on the airport is emblematic of a larger pattern in the campaign: a preoccupation with the small and obtainable over the grand and daring. Bigger ideas might engage voters, but they also hold their proponents up to scrutiny and possible ridicule.

So Becerra talks about making sure every school child has a library card, Soboroff says he would put traffic cops in the 20 worst intersections, and Connell says she would work two days a week in the San Fernando Valley.

But the city’s chronic lack of housing, particularly affordable homes, gets treated mostly with asides. (Villaraigosa has made the biggest housing proposal, saying the city’s spending on low-income housing should be expanded by 20 times, to $100 million, though he does not talk about it often.)

The focus on the local is something of a given in a far-flung and diverse place like Los Angeles. The candidates have debated more than two dozen times throughout the city and they get dragged, endlessly, into neighborhood issues.

Before just 75 potential voters in San Pedro, the mayoral hopefuls had to respond to a myriad of disputes between neighbors and the Port of Los Angeles. In Hollywood three candidates expressed the desire to help a Filipino voters group pressing for a traffic light near an elementary school.

And a North Hollywood group is pressing hard for commitments from the six about their stand on construction of a busway down the median of a busy thoroughfare.

Becerra epitomized disdain for the big picture when he told an audience at a recent Hollywood forum: “Before I worry about the Port of Los Angeles or the airport as mayor, I will know and acknowledge that neighborhoods come first.”

Those approaches, emphasizing the little over the big--and targeting political bases as opposed to grand visions--may hit home. But Los Angeles’ history so far suggests that victory in the mayor’s race goes to the candidate who can appeal to larger chunks of the electorate.

So far, no candidate in this race has proven that he or she can do that. There are 64 days to go until election day.

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Road to City Hall

The road to victory in the Los Angeles mayor’s race has run through strikingly different neighborhoods for the last two occupants of the office. The civil rights fervor of the 1970s helped elect Tom Bradley by uniting African Americans in South Los Angeles with liberals on the Westside. Twenty years later, Richard Riordan won the office by combining support in the San Fernando Valley with backing on the Westside.

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Note: Some figures do not total 100% because of rounding

Source: Los Angeles City Elections Division

Compiled by MALOY MOORE / Los Angeles Times