They Keep Coming Back to Fears

As a California native who defected to the other shore for a while, I was often asked what I thought was the biggest difference between West Coast and East.

It’s simple, I would say. When I wrote a column in California, my mail often said, “Go back to Mexico.”

And when I wrote a column in Pennsylvania, my mail often said, “Go back to Puerto Rico.”

You can’t imagine the identity crisis I suffered over this, particularly since neither I nor anyone in my lineage had ever been to Mexico or Puerto Rico.

My long journey, which essentially is a search for a homeland, brings me now to the international festival that calls itself Los Angeles.

No one has written to recommend deportation so far, which is encouraging. But when I started watching the race for mayor of Los Angeles, I found it curious that Antonio Villaraigosa seemed to be hiding something, not that I was expecting mariachi bands at every appearance.

In one interpretation, Villaraigosa’s goy campaign persona suggests that both he and the city have moved beyond ethnicity. But in the world of politics, it means his handlers knew he’d be sunk if he came off as too much of an Eastside Latino.

And that--in a campaign between two Democrats with nearly identical politics--is the story of this election.

For all the diversity and racial tolerance Los Angeles congratulates itself for, you know in your heart that some folks are eating day-old doughnuts and saying, Wait a minute here, they’re taking over. That Villa-something guy wants to be mayor, and, as the Pete Wilson ad put it, “They keep coming.”

Villaraigosa’s challenge was to avoid scaring the wits out of anyone who might pause over such concerns, and Jim Hahn’s campaign had to appeal to those very fears.

That’s why, if you’ve had the misfortune of being near a television or radio recently, you might have caught two ads in which Villaraigosa is made out to be a friend of sex offenders and a champion of crack cocaine.

Villaraigosa’s bonehead 1996 letter to President Clinton on behalf of an L.A. drug dealer, whose Argentine immigrant dad was a campaign contributor, is certainly fair game. If I’d been here, I know I’d have taken batting practice on him.

But in one Hahn TV ad, a swarthy, snake-eyed Villaraigosa shares the screen with a crack pipe, as if he were running his own drug cartel. The ad ends with the foreboding: “Los Angeles can’t trust Antonio Villaraigosa.”

Here’s a question: Can it trust a candidate who’d run such a smarmy ad?

The whole idea of the Hahn ad is to take our most decent human instincts and corrupt them, says Loyola Marymount political analyst David Ayon. It’s not an observation that breaks new ground in political science, but I’ll let him explain.

“People in L.A. have developed a strong comfort level with diversity, but that’s not their entire identity,” Ayon says. And so along comes a set of ads that dig into your basest fears--ads that link a Latino candidate with a culture of drugs and crime, and remind you of a time, he says, when “people wouldn’t dream of driving into East L.A.”

In Hahn’s defense, it appears to be working, which is all that matters. This isn’t profiles in courage.

A Times telephone poll that hit the streets Tuesday gave a 7-point lead to Hahn. Among likely voters who didn’t have the good sense to hang up, Hahn scored high with the election’s critical swing group--conservative whites.

I’m not sure where this question came from, but when asked whether the candidates would pay too much attention to minorities, three times as many thought Villaraigosa would.

Among those who said immigration is a bad, bad thing, 2 to 1 like Hahn.

They keep coming.

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Steve Lopez’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can run him out of town by e-mailing him at steve.lopez@latimes.com