Hayden’s Future in Doubt After Loss

After four stormy decades on the public stage, embracing roles from fiery student agitator to righteous state legislator, Tom Hayden is taking an unscheduled bow and stepping into the wings.

On Saturday, the city clerk finally tallied the last of the ballots in Hayden’s Los Angeles City Council race, declaring his opponent, Jack Weiss, the winner. A former prosecutor who has never held elected office, Weiss won by just 369 votes.

Hayden, who was out of town, has not yet conceded defeat, his campaign manager, Rocky Rushing, said Saturday. Hayden wants to review the final results before deciding whether to seek a recount, Rushing said.

In the other close council race, Dennis Zine was declared the official winner over Judith Hirshberg in the 3rd Council District race.

Hayden’s stumble in the 5th District comes at a time of fast-forward politics, when term limits guarantee a rapid turnover of seats and a churning supply of people hoping to fill them.

If Hayden wants to run again, something else will surely open up. On the other hand, his political capital is dwindling--this is the third race he’s lost in seven years--and his campaign fund-raising seems to rely chiefly on his personal checkbook.

Hayden loaned himself $170,000, more than two-thirds of the money he collected for the June 5 election, according to campaign finance reports.

At 61, this goateed liberal icon who served 10 years in the state Assembly and eight in the state Senate faces an uncertain political future. His window of opportunity is shrinking as he seeks to define himself as something more than the four words he once said capture his image among California voters: ‘60s radical, Jane Fonda.

“In a sense, he’s become a historical figure rather than a contemporary figure,” said Ross K. Baker, a veteran political scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “His main claim on public attention really are things he did 30 years ago, or more. I think in public life, these kinds of early distinctions tend to extinguish themselves.”

Since 1994, Hayden has run for governor, mayor, and now City Council, lowering his sights to a less commanding office with each losing campaign.

He has admitted that the governor’s office was a long shot. But a council seat? Hayden became the instant front-runner the moment he announced his candidacy.

So what happened? In a series of e-mails to supporters after the election, Hayden blamed low turnout, the inconvenience of shifting polling places, and especially “the editors and owners of the Los Angeles Times.” Weiss was endorsed by The Times.

“It is obviously problematic to run against a newspaper with the power to shape your image in the public mind,” he wrote.

He was clearly angry with the media throughout the campaign, and did not hesitate to say so. At several turning points--most notably, on election nights for both the first round and the runoff--Hayden flatly refused to speak to reporters. He declined to be interviewed for this story.

More than most politicians, Hayden lugs around a veritable carousel of political baggage.

He’s the onetime Michigan student newspaper editor who helped found Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1960s, who later organized poor blacks in Newark, N.J., who led demonstrations against the Vietnam War. As one of the Chicago 8, he was convicted and later acquitted of inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic convention.

Hayden’s 17-year marriage to actress Jane Fonda gave his star status a Hollywood patina. After an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate, Hayden won an Assembly seat in 1982.

“He went from being the consummate outsider to being the consummate insider,” said Richard Katz, a former San Fernando Valley assemblyman who served with Hayden. “Yet he was never comfortable being on the inside. And I don’t think the legislative structure was comfortable with him either.” Hayden’s radical past clung to him even under the Capitol dome. Some of his Republican colleagues were so disgusted by his repeated trips to Hanoi during the Vietnam War that they tried to expel him in 1986, denouncing him as a “traitor to America.”

More a bookish intellectual than a backslapping chum, Hayden cultivated few friendships as an assemblyman. His attendance record was spotty and his bills were often thwarted--only 20% of them became law, compared to 43% of all Assembly bills during the time he served. His standing with the Democratic leadership was so shaky that his district was eliminated during the 1992 redistricting.

Pushing Issues From the Left

Yet Hayden learned to sidestep Sacramento on occasion and take his case directly to the people. He ducked outside the legislative system to help lead a successful grass-roots campaign for Proposition 65, the 1986 antitoxic initiative.

“Most radical student leaders of the ‘60s burned out,” state Librarian Kevin Starr observed. “But Tom Hayden stayed the course. Without Tom Hayden, the entire radical sensibility of the ‘60s would have been forced to go underground in California. With Tom Hayden, it remained an expressive force.”

Even so, he suffered some memorable defeats at the ballot box. In 1990, voters soundly rejected the sweeping “Big Green” initiative he co-sponsored with then-Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, representatives of the Sierra Club and other environmental groups. Oil, chemical and agriculture interests spent $12 million to kill the measure, dubbing it “the Hayden initiative” to exploit public discomfort with the leftist Democrat.

As a state senator, where the aging insurgent seemed to gain the respect that eluded him in the Assembly, he watched most of his bills die. Just 14% became law, far fewer than the 43% of all Senate bills that were approved during the same period. Among Hayden’s successful measures were those ensuring low utility rates for people with AIDS, drinking-water protections, insurance claims for Holocaust survivors, trigger locks for guns, child-labor protections and ethnic studies in the Cal State system.

“I have tried to push important but controversial issues from the margin into the mainstream,” Hayden said in his campaign literature. “This carries a risk of being ineffective, but I have found that persistent advocacy, combined with small legislative steps, eventually creates progress.”

Hayden was nonetheless furious when, after years of waiting for a Democratic governor, Gov. Gray Davis vetoed 21 of his bills during his last session. Termed out and admittedly jaded, he dropped out of an Assembly race and skulked home.

In the end, Hayden may have been most effective in mainstream politics by nudging the center toward the left.

“If you try to measure Tom on the basis of authorship of bills, he’s not going to pass muster,” said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles. “But he was the left-wing conscience of the Legislature. He earned his stripes by the end of his political career by being a man of his word.”

When he jumped into the crowded council race in the fall, opponents quickly ganged up to deride him as a “serial office seeker,” old, worn and out of touch.

Some observers wondered aloud whether Hayden was genuinely interested in local issues (even as he pledged to double the budget for pothole plugging). A Midwestern Catholic, Hayden also faced a subtle challenge in a district known for electing Jewish community activists as leaders.

Questions about his legal residency didn’t help. Hayden shares a Brentwood ranch home with his wife and toddler son--just outside the district he sought to represent. To qualify for the race, he moved into his campaign coordinator’s guest house in Westwood.

Opponents quickly branded him a carpetbagger. A neighbor objected that renting the backyard abode violated city zoning laws.

By March, the man who once confronted racist police in Mississippi was reduced to playing an embarrassing cat-and-mouse game with city building inspectors, who pawed through the guest house searching for clothes in closets or other telltale signs of residency. No violations were found; Hayden had already moved his bed into the main house on the same property.

Focusing on Gang Members

Now, out of a job and with a young child at home, Hayden may turn his considerable energies toward working with gang members and perhaps writing a book about them, said Michael Dieden, a Los Angeles real estate developer and longtime Hayden supporter who ran his first campaign. Hayden is a prolific author who has written or co-written 10 books.

He’s also worked behind the scenes to promote peace among gangs, Dieden said, inviting feuding factions to his home and even traveling to El Salvador to try to staunch the bloodshed among Salvadoran gangs. Last year, Hayden secured $300,000 in state funds to start a gang-intervention program.

“It’s fair to say, when there’s an injustice or a bad war or violence being perpetrated, I think you’ll see Tom Hayden in the middle of the mix,” Dieden said.

Or, as Hayden himself wrote at the end of “Reunion,” his 1988 memoir: “I want desperately to be more than Sisyphus, who was condemned by his prideful defiance to push his boulder up the mountain only to see it roll back. I live to learn and learn to live. And to pursue a better life, and justice.”