A Showdown Between 2 Similar Worldviews

With Richard Riordan nearing the end of his eight-year run as the city’s leading un-politician, Los Angeles voters are preparing Tuesday to elect as the next mayor a liberal Democrat--one with strong ties to labor unions and minorities and an abiding belief in the conventions of government.

Both James K. Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa fit that description. They promise to work comfortably within a City Hall structure that Riordan often disdained. And they claim their most dependable bases of support in Los Angeles’ ethnic neighborhoods, rather than Riordan’s whiter bastions on the Westside and in the west San Fernando Valley.

The striking ideological similarities between Villaraigosa and Hahn have propelled their eight-week-long showdown into other arenas. Increasingly, the result has been a narrower referendum on experience, character and, in the view of some commentators, race.

Villaraigosa and Hahn’s fractious final hours of campaigning have pushed the candidates and their staffs to new levels of anxiety. Indeed, the parameters of the campaign were largely cemented on the night of the April 10 election, when Villaraigosa and Hahn pushed past four other major contenders and nine longshots to land their places in the campaign’s second round.

That night, Villaraigosa, the former speaker of the state Assembly, looked out over a throng of union members, liberal activists and others crowding Union Station and predicted: “When we’re finished with this coalition, this place isn’t going to be big enough.”

In the aftermath of his showing, Hahn was buoyant too about winning a spot in the runoff. But he made it clear that the election would not just be about his plans for the city.

“I think character is always an issue,” the city attorney told reporters, referring to Villaraigosa, “because people want to be able to trust the person in a leadership position.”

As the race has drawn to a close, Hahn has often succeeded in centering the discussion on Villaraigosa, his character and legislative record, and the question of public safety.

Villaraigosa, in contrast, has positioned himself as the master coalition builder. While willing to criticize Hahn for allegedly “threatening public safety” with a modified police work schedule, the former legislator has spent most of his time emphasizing his broad array of support--from Democratic Gov. Gray Davis to the Republican Riordan and from the city’s janitors union to some of its richest men, billionaires Eli Broad and Ron Burkle.

“Jim Hahn says, ‘If you want safe streets, I am the guy,’ ” said political consultant John Shallman. “The message for Antonio Villaraigosa is: ‘If you want to pull the city together, then I’m your guy.’ ”

The race wasn’t supposed to unfold this way.

The city’s political pundits had been saying for a year or more that only Hahn and City Councilman Joel Wachs, a 30-year City Hall veteran, were popular and recognizable enough to be considered front-runners. If they faltered, businessman Steve Soboroff seemed poised to make a serious run, banking on Riordan’s Republican base and the mayor’s active support and endorsement.

It seemed obvious to many that the two Latinos in the race--Villaraigosa and Rep. Xavier Becerra--would split their community’s vote and eliminate each other from contention. Other Latino leaders were so concerned that they tried to persuade one or the other to drop out of the race.

Instead, Villaraigosa’s years of relentless preparation and alliance-building began to pay off. A stream of endorsements--from the local chapter of the National Organization for Women, the Sierra Club, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and the state Democratic Party to, finally, Davis--created a sense of excitement and momentum around his campaign and in the national media. The support of the county Federation of Labor and the party’s funding produced volunteers, mailers and phone banks that could not be matched by the competition.

If Hahn lacked the media sizzle, he may have possessed the preferable political steak: the nearly unshakable support and admiration of African Americans coupled with a long record as a city prosecutor. Blacks would vote overwhelmingly for the city attorney in April, providing him with the most cohesive bloc vote from any ethnic or ideological group.

With that solid base to build from--and with challengers on both left and right--Hahn stayed a centrist course, hoping to emerge from the election’s first round well-positioned to navigate a runoff no matter who the challenger.

The other contenders, meanwhile, never caught on. Wachs’ anti-government message fell flat. State Controller Kathleen Connell’s late entry into the race made it hard for her to catch on. Becerra had trouble expanding his appeal beyond a modest slice of the Latino electorate. And Soboroff, though he mounted a charge near the end of the campaign, fell about 19,000 votes short of the runoff.

With Soboroff out, the final round of the election took on an entirely different cast. Voters could no longer count on the Republican, with the distinct outsider profile, to present a clear ideological choice. That meant Los Angeles would turn away from the Riordan era to a mayor representing the city’s more native Democratic orthodoxy.

But how far down a progressive path will the city swing? Los Angeles’ national image as a multiethnic conglomeration of ascendant labor leaders and progressive politicians remains counterbalanced, to a great degree, by a voting population that is considerably whiter and more moderate than that picture would suggest.

“There is always a feeling that L.A. is new and at the forefront of change,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a Cal State Fullerton political scientist who has written extensively about the city’s politics. “But politics always lags a few years behind society. It’s more cautious and moves more slowly, and it’s more dominated by older voters.”

Although whites now comprise just 34% of the city’s voting-age population, they are expected to approach 60% of the electorate Tuesday. And although fewer than half of registered voters are older than 45, the older set votes more routinely. They will probably cast well over 60% of the ballots.

A Times poll last week showed the crucial distinction between who lives in Los Angeles and who votes here. Hahn led Villaraigosa 47% to 40% among likely voters. But among the younger and more Latino universe of all voters, the two men were in a virtual dead heat, the poll found.

That means that Villaraigosa’s best hope Tuesday is for a large turnout, particularly among young people, Latinos and liberals--all groups that clearly favor him. Saturday’s massive labor rally in the Mid-City area was intended to energize the union precinct walkers who will attempt to drive those voters to the polls.

Hahn has scored better, however, among the moderate suburban voters who go to the polls more routinely. The city attorney has essentially appealed to that group through one issue: public safety.

Beginning two weeks after the April vote, he opened a persistent attack on Villaraigosa’s legislative votes on crime bills. Villaraigosa’s public safety record is “abysmal,” favoring the rights of criminals over victims, Hahn has said. Although the Hahn campaign overshot the mark on specifics, misstating and distorting some of Villaraigosa’s record, the essence of the charges was accurate and survived: that the former legislator and onetime American Civil Liberties Union board president often took the liberal side on criminal justice issues.

The Hahn campaign pounded that message home most aggressively in the last week, with a television ad that reminds voters about the letter Villaraigosa wrote on behalf of drug trafficker Carlos Vignali, whose father was a Villaraigosa contributor and who received an eleventh-hour commutation from President Bill Clinton. A razor blade cutting cocaine, a smoking crack pipe and a grainy picture of Villaraigosa tied the candidate to the drug financier in no uncertain terms.

Hahn and his campaign defended the ad as a fair and accurate critique of what was a case of admittedly bad judgment by Villaraigosa. But Villaraigosa suggested that the charged imagery of the ads was intended to stir up fears about his candidacy. While not specifically accusing Hahn of racism, Villaraigosa compared his opponent to the local politician best known in recent times for race baiting, the late Mayor Sam Yorty.

By Saturday, Villaraigosa had raised the stakes even further, suggesting that Hahn’s tactics were reminiscent of the late Sen. Joe McCarthy’s.

Regardless of whether either candidate intended to bring the issue of race into the campaign, the volatile topic percolated just below the surface--as it often does in Los Angeles politics.

On talk radio and on a Web site operated by one fringe group, there were suggestions that the onetime Chicano activist would be “controlled by Mexico City.” A determined few even suggested that he might revive an old radical Chicano rights proposal to restore Mexican sovereignty over California and the rest of the Southwest.

Such views stand clearly outside the mainstream and were derisively dismissed by the Villaraigosa camp and even some people close to Hahn. But some analysts said they were a reminder that Villaraigosa still carries a greater “burden of proof” with average voters to convince them that he is willing to represent all Angelenos equally. It’s a task that many politicians trying to break through a racial or religious barrier have faced in the past, noted Sonenshein.

Villaraigosa has tried to thread a needle both in an ethnic and ideological sense. The onetime legislator relies on an energized Latino base, although he has assiduously avoided appealing directly to Latino pride. He has challenged a City Hall incumbent and, thus, the civic status quo, but has done so while striving not to appear too threatening.

“Villaraigosa has the same challenge that [former Mayor] Tom Bradley had coming up, which is: How can you be for change but not be a threat for people who may worry about the power of a new group coming up?” said Sonenshein, comparing Villaraigosa’s task to that of the city’s first African American mayor. “You have to do a lot of things to reassure people, and it’s hard to do that and still be the person who is for change.”

That means Villaraigosa has criticized Hahn for his handling of Rampart police scandal cases and suggested that the city attorney has allowed liability costs to balloon out of control. Villaraigosa has called for progressive programs, such as pooling small employers’ resources to provide health care for the working poor or levying developer fees to pay for low-income housing. But he has not launched an all-out assault on the bureaucracy at City Hall.

The candidate, instead, has taken great pains to lure endorsements from the city establishment--most notably Riordan. The onetime union activist and the mayor-venture capitalist have sustained a prolonged, if unlikely, public embrace. That has only reinforced Villaraigosa’s strategy not to attack City Hall, which would at least implicitly include an attack on Riordan.

A Broad Array of Endorsements

Villaraigosa’s strength was his ability to win endorsements across a broad spectrum--including the Republican mayor, Democratic governor, local and national Democratic parties, billionaires, janitors, teachers and other workers. But those supporters did not seem, as of the Times poll last week, to have changed many minds among the moderates who may decide the election.

And Villaraigosa’s embrace by the city’s rich and powerful seems to have had another, unexpected consequence: As the campaign has neared the finish line, longtime City Hall insider Hahn has struck an increasingly populist tone. The sometimes phlegmatic candidate--son of one of Los Angeles’ longest-serving and most admired public officials--was suddenly telling audiences, with some passion, that he was the candidate not of the political establishment but rather of the common people.

“This campaign is about whether or not we’re going to let the party bosses and the billionaires control City Hall,” he said a week ago.

Hahn has routinely denounced as unfair the injection of $500,000 or more into the campaign by the California Democratic Party on behalf of Villaraigosa--because the party had greatly expanded its treasury with donations from unions and Villaraigosa’s billionaire supporters. Villaraigosa, meanwhile, has attacked the seemingly incongruous financial involvement of several Indian tribes on behalf of Hahn.

The baroque financing of the campaign has sometimes overshadowed other issues and threatened to make a mockery of the city and state’s elaborate finance rules.

If Hahn has had a triumph even before election day, it is that he has framed much of the debate around the public safety issue and, by extension, around the charged question of Villaraigosa’s trustworthiness.

On the issues that the new mayor will confront, the differences between Hahn and Villaraigosa are much smaller and much less contentious. Both men tend to argue for the same results, though Hahn generally sounds a call for more incremental progress, while Villaraigosa is more inclined to argue for big change.

Although both would expand the Metropolitan Transportation Authority system, Villaraigosa says he can find a way to pay for more buses and lower fares. Both speak about the need for affordable housing, but only Villaraigosa would insist that developers pay fees to help build the units. To bolster health care for the poor, Hahn would mainly use the bully pulpit to cajole businesses to insure their workers, while Villaraigosa wants to create a fund from the tobacco settlement to help subsidize an insurance pool.

Those differences don’t fit easily into 30-second commercials, so most voters have been left to ponder Villaraigosa’s letter for Vignali or Hahn’s support of the once-obscure “3-12” work schedule for police. Was the city attorney truly prepared to endanger public safety with the abbreviated work schedule just to win a police union endorsement, as Villaraigosa claims? The benefits and drawbacks of the three-day week for police officers are also far too complex for political advertising.

In the end, then, many Angelenos are left to choose between two men who see the world similarly despite different pasts and different records.

Those voters who cast ballots this week will choose between the scion of one of Los Angeles’ leading political families and a resurrected onetime street tough.

And no matter which they elect, they will usher in a dramatic break with Los Angeles’ recent history.

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MORE INSIDE

To the finish: Candidates court key constituencies. B1

Schools: Hahn, Villaraigosa seek to stretch mayor’s authority. B1

Election wrap-up: Profiles and other races in election. B5