All Roads Lead to the Left-Turn Lane

The gent being interviewed on the radio sounded perfectly competent, I’ll give him that. I was stuck in traffic in the San Fernando Valley and he was stuck in monotone, but he knew his stuff. Must be a deputy police commissioner, I figured, or maybe a city manager type. A details guy.

Concentrate, I told myself. Thousands of accidents are caused by drivers nodding off at the wheel. Besides, having just moved back to Southern California, I needed to bone up on the local scene.

But I couldn’t figure out who this guy was. He reminded me of a high school history teacher of mine who used to read from the textbook for an hour every day. Finally, somewhere near the confluence of the Hollywood and Ventura freeways, the interviewer identified his guest.

Jim Hahn.

That’s Los Angeles mayoral candidate James Hahn? Don’t get me wrong. Personality in politics is vastly overrated, and given a choice between a drip with great ideas and a charmer with nothing to say, I like the drip. But are you telling me the most distinct, diverse, dynamic, inspired mess of a city in the entire United States has a mayoral runoff candidate who sounds like a policy analyst from Des Moines?

I began reading up on Hahn, whose platform is like the man I heard on the radio. Competent, but not quite soaring on the wings of poetry and passion. A cornerstone of his transportation policy, for instance, is to build more left-turn lanes and synchronize traffic signals.

Now let me confess something. Although I’m a California native and lived here in 1999 and 2000, I’ve spent most of the past 15 years in Philadelphia and New York City, so I won’t pretend to be an expert on Southern California traffic. But I’m here to tell you that when you’ve just won the crown for worst traffic on the continent and hold down second place in the smog sweepstakes, the end is near, my friends, and a hundred thousand left-turn lanes will not get us to the ark in time.

Hahn’s opponent, Antonio Villaraigosa, has a somewhat more ambitious plan that includes 850 additional buses. But I’m looking for the candidate who’s going to yank drivers out of their cars by their ears. Make the buses free if you have to. Equip them with latte, cell phones, scriptwriting seminars. Whatever it takes. Drastic measures are called for.

In perusing Hahn’s campaign literature, I came across what struck me as a telling detail. As a boy, he used to go out with his father, the beloved county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, to look for potholes on weekend drives.

Can you ever recover from a thing like that?

I’m afraid young Jimmy’s personality, along with the potholes, was cemented in those early days. If my dad had come to me on a Saturday morning and said, “Wake up, son, we’re going out to look for potholes,” I’d have said, through one eye, “Are you kiddin’ me?”

But Hahn--timid, polite, steady--went along with Dad, and perhaps it was while riding shotgun with the pothole posse that the seed of that left-turn inspiration was planted.

You’re probably thinking that with these observations about Hahn’s apparent lack of creative energy--and I haven’t even begun questioning why so few people left City Hall in handcuffs while he was city attorney, or whether he’s lost his mind regarding a three-day workweek for police--that I’m shilling for Villaraigosa. Frankly, he worries me, too.

I don’t know Villaraigosa boosters Eli Broad and Ron Burkle personally, and unless they eat at Los Tacos on Santa Monica near Fairfax, we may never break bread. But I know with every fiber that when two billionaire power brokers tiptoe around contribution limits by writing $100,000 checks to the state Democratic Party, rather than directly to a candidate, nothing good can follow.

The question, it seems to me, is who’s getting over on whom? Is Villaraigosa sly enough to take their money, but not their calls? Or is Broad, Dick Riordan’s shadow, trying to buy himself another term as mayor emeritus?

As part of my baptism in local politics, I went to the debate at USC to have a look at the candidates in person, and who should I bump into on the way in but Jim Hahn. He seemed like a likable enough fellow, but I don’t know if I can ever see him without visualizing young Jimmy on pothole patrol.

“I’m ready to lead this city,” he told me, but he came off like Tim Robbins playing a guy who’s not quite comfortable with the smarmy spectacle of running for office.

Villaraigosa is another story. I found him by picking up the energy field from his smile. He was asking an adolescent girl if she’d been following the campaign.

“No,” she said, sounding pretty unimpressed.

Villaraigosa didn’t flinch. He floated left, hand extended, the up-from-nowhere Eastsider with the Holy Card glow and a slight lead in the polls.

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Steve Lopez’s column will appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He can be reached at his e-mail address: steve.lopez@latimes.com.