A Match Not Made for New L.A.

In notoriously uncentered Los Angeles, the April 10 primary will confront voters with an almost insurmountable challenge. The problem isn’t mainly political, although choosing the right leaders from among the nearly 80 candidates for 17 city and school district offices is hard enough. Rather, it is choosing the right metaphors to find meaning in this election.

It would be satisfying to the working poor and not-quite-middle-class millions of the city if the election were about finding leaders to match their longings. But it is more likely, in a race notable, so far, for its blandness, that termed-out politicians seeking remaining open seats is all the meaning the city is going to get.

Los Angeles needs more. The city is poised uncomfortably between contradictory images of itself: a place exceptional for the unaccountability of its leadership and the Los Angeles the voters intended by approving a new city charter in 1998. The politics of the newly chartered city, if only in outline now, will be as different from the liberal coalition Tom Bradley led in 1973 as his Los Angeles was different from Sam Yorty’s conservative city dominated by corporate CEOs in 1961 or the corrupt and segregationist city that Mayor Frank Shaw fronted before his recall in 1938. Even Mayor Richard Riordan’s recent example of leadership through political hardball and the persuasion of billionaire friends isn’t much of a model, judging by his modest influence over the selection of his successor.

Experienced--that is, term-limited--politicians say experience counts. But in this case, not as much as they or voters might hope. From their resumes, it is hard for an outsider to see how the candidates for the city’s top offices can imaginatively project themselves into L.A.’s new political community, a place not fully realized but where they, presumably, intend to lead the city’s residents. L.A.’s new leaders will have to master an unfamiliar city charter and endure the further winnowing effects of term limits. They will have to accommodate the last erasure of the city’s old industrial economy (along with the example of its business leadership) and overcome the indifference of the city’s new-media economy (and most of its leaders). They will have to confront the disenfranchisement that motivates breakaway movements, school-district deconstruction and L.A.’s pervasive identity politics.

From the deplorable sequence of Mayors George Cryer, John Clinton Porter and Shaw in the 1920s and ‘30s, through the consummate municipal technicians Fletcher Bowron and Norris Poul- son in the ‘40s and ‘50s, to feisty Yorty, shrewd and silent Bradley and arm-twisting Riordan--L.A. mayors were more often led than leader in a political system that dispersed authority as much as it sprawled neighborhoods. The old city charter, heavily influenced by the Progressive Era notion that civic life ought to be run like a benevolent corporation, gave Los Angeles a figurehead mayor, a City Council with blurred legislative and executive powers, an unruly thicket of independent “boards of commissioners” and a permanent corps of department heads. They were intended to be the system’s dispassionate managers, safely beyond even L.A.’s neutered politics.

One of the greater ironies of this unworkable system, which valued expertise over leadership, is that it has recently worked so well. It is the city’s Department of Water and Power and its professional management--having inherited another Progressive Era notion: municipal ownership of utilities--that are keeping the lights on in L.A. during California’s cold, dark winter of energy scarcity.

The DWP’s success in making the old L.A. work is the wrong lesson in leadership, however, if this spring’s candidates are willing to learn. The new charter under which the winners will govern is unlike anything this city has ever seen. It ends the independence of city department heads, costs the City Council its managerial role and fundamentally changes the politics of land use in Los Angeles. It is supposed to take the city’s formerly scattered lines of political influence and concentrate them upward to the mayor’s office, at the top of the newly refurbished City Hall, and outward to seven area planning commissions and more than 100 advisory neighborhood councils. It seeks a hard-to-imagine equilibrium between greater authority in the mayor’s office and greater power in neighborhoods to cure voters’ confusion about who’s in charge and their itch for secession. In combination with term limits, the new charter means wholesale change in the city’s political apparatus and new faces in nearly every municipal office by 2003.

If only the qualities of the candidates’ leadership were as fresh as the city’s charter. All that voters can be assured of, however, is that they’ve seen most of these faces before, just in a different context. The principal candidates for mayor and City Council collectively represent more than 125 years of political tenure: Xavier Becerra has been a congressman since 1992. Kathleen Connell was twice elected state controller. City Atty. James K. Hahn was five times elected to city office. Antonio Villaraigosa is the former Assembly speaker. Joel Wachs has spent 30 years on the City Council. Among the council candidates are former state Sen. Tom Hayden, ex-Assemblyman Scott Wildman, Assemblyman Carl Washington and a long list of familiar operatives from City Hall.

The exception is Riordan’s chosen successor, real estate broker Steve Soboroff (who was president of the city’s Recreation and Parks Commission).

In preparation, the candidates for mayor have been trying on a gallery of images in the interminable round of “debates” leading up to the April primary. Hahn projects himself as the confident technician of the system he has worked in for 20 years as city controller and city attorney. His L.A. is mostly OK, as if the old L.A. of the Bradley era was still intact. Connell sees “a city in crisis.” She would be the disciplinarian of an L.A. out of control. Becerra would be the “neighborhood mayor,” an image that has worked in the candidates’ forums, where the promise of a single traffic signal has meant more than a common vision for the city. Wachs wants to be the fiscally conservative watchdog who might one day countenance the breakup of the city. Soboroff wants to be the city’s boss and the scourge of the Los Angeles Unified School District (but those are the old jobs Riordan held). Villaraigosa presents himself as the expansive maker of a new, inclusive consensus, although some of his supporters have begun calling him, more narrowly, the “union mayor.”

These images of leadership don’t have much utility beyond signaling the candidates’ eagerness to embrace just enough of L.A.’s fractured constituencies to make it to June and the expected runoff without alienating any of the liberal, ethnic or suburban “high propensity voters” who are the candidates’ base. How that relates to actually leading an emerging L.A. is hardly the question the candidates’ handlers are asking.

Oddly, no one is asking if the example of Rudolph W. Giuliani should provide L.A. with an image of leadership. Giuliani is arguably the nation’s most effective mayor, and not because he cleaned up Times Square, but because he may actually have redefined what it means to be the mayor of New York.

Meanwhile, modest and flexible forms of local leadership are making competitors nearby more successful than L.A. in attracting jobs and capital-producing entrepreneurs. Glendale, Burbank and Culver City, though far smaller, aren’t much different from Los Angeles demographically. Forty-five percent of Glendale’s is foreign-born. Burbank and blue-collar Culver City took proportionately harder hits than Los Angeles in the collapse of the aerospace economy. All three suffered more per capita than Los Angeles from the state’s takeaways of local revenue during the recession in the early ‘90s. In those cities, however, elected officials are adjusting city policies and bureaucratic habits to cut both the organizational and dollar costs of doing business. Now, those cities are doing better than L.A.

They’re succeeding without the billionaires who rescued L.A.’s troubled big-ticket projects in the late 1990s. They’ve turned, for the most part, to a middle tier of business and community leaders whose civic provincialism is a positive force, as it has been in the booming research-triangle communities of North Carolina and the Salt Lake City region. The special problem of leading L.A. from the middle, however, is the bewildering ethnic complexity of the city’s new economy. Categories like “Asian” and “Latino” are too coarse to identify the networks of regional ethnic affinities that increasingly define this city, but leading Los Angeles successfully will require assembling “a network of networks” from among them if the city is not to devolve into a mere confederacy of neighborhoods.

It will also require recognizing and sustaining the partnerships that are beginning to cross the city’s rigid ethnic and racial lines. African Americans and Latinos in Watts and South L.A. have joined forces to take on city housing and school district bureaucracies. Asians and Latinos are working for reforms in the garment industry that relies on their sweatshop labor. Latino and Jewish leaders are talking, if only tentatively, of ways to widen the mutual experience of both communities.

The future is happening here, as political, social and economic change reinvents Los Angeles in exactly the way its mythology always claimed. But the image of the future is still unfinished. In this election season, the city’s would-be leaders haven’t offered much beyond past electability to stir our imaginations and give this election a meaning.