War, Fear and an L.A. Election

Everyone, please just stop.

Count to 10. Don’t call out the hazmat team every time someone scatters doughnut sugar on the counter. White powdered substances have killed uncounted Americans--cocaine, speed, even fake coffee creamer, if your arteries are feeble--but not anthrax.

Get back to work. Get back to your mailbox. Do as the flier says, the one from the Los Angeles County labor federation: “Send a message. . . . Showing the flag and not showing up to vote dishonors America.”

Oh yes, there’s an election, and it’s next Tuesday. For the first time since Lyndon Johnson was president of the United States and Vietnam was the war du jour, the 4th Los Angeles City Council District will be sending someone other than the late John Ferraro to sit in that big brown leather swivel chair in City Hall.

Elections, like winter rain, always seem to take Los Angeles by surprise. What, rain again? What, vote again?

The special primary election for the council seat was held on Sept. 11, a date which will live in infamy but not in the history of local politics. Nonetheless, 17% of registered voters voted--quite respectable for a city where a police chase can pull a bigger crowd than a candidate.

And however altered the international landscape, I suppose it’s perversely reassuring that we still get some of the same-old, same-old warfare here at home.

The candidates left standing after the primary, Beth Garfield and Tom LaBonge, have been shelling voters with mailers, some of them sunny, like LaBonge’s 2002 calendar with his own photos of L.A., and Garfield’s personalized invitations to neighborhood meetings.

Then it’s back to accusations and defenses, the did-not, did-so minutia that make politics almost as expensive as government.

Take law enforcement: Since Sept. 11, firefighters have walked on their own hose water, and even cops can do no wrong. The handsome generic cop in a Garfield mailer turned out to be Web site clip art. LaBonge has the endorsement of L.A.’s police and firefighter unions, and some pictures of them to prove it.

True, but Garfield does have the backing of the L.A. County’s Sheriff’s Deputies’ Assn. and L.A.’s school police, and there’s the association’s president, Roy Burns, in her ad. (Good Marine tattoo, Roy, but you’re sewing-challenged: We know that for policy reasons, you had to cover up the sheriff’s sleeve patches so you could appear in the ad, but the real ones are still peeking out under the fakes. Think duct tape.)

Garfield ads note that LaBonge took thousands from tobacco companies in an earlier election. LaBonge’s camp says “thousands” was $1,500, the election was eight years ago, and he wasn’t on the council to vote on tobacco issues. (This TV ad sent the LaBonge campaign to the League of Women Voters’ Campaign Watch Commission to complain that the spot was untruthful. Nope--just shows how he does business, says the Garfield camp.)

All this costs a hunk of dough. Garfield recently busted the city spending cap, writing her campaign a second $350,000 check; LaBonge’s donor list runs to 18 pages of $100-to-$1,000 donors, people and businesses. Garfield says, “What’s important is that I’m not beholden to special interests.”

Why all this for a job the winner can only keep for eight years? Some of it is about two people with different styles for the same job.

LaBonge is literally, deeply, L.A.; his great-grandfather is buried in an East L.A. cemetery. City garbagemen know his name. His first city job was a summer gig when he was 20, and thereafter he worked as a deputy to Ferraro, to Richard Riordan, to the DWP. He’s always lived in the same ZIP Code, and practices the same pothole-filling politics that Mayor Jim Hahn lays claim to. “700,000 dollars,” says the outspent LaBonge, “can’t buy 27 years of experience.”

Although Garfield is a bit older than LaBonge, hers is a more progressive broad-brush political style (quirkily, the candidate who lays claim to the more liberal vote sounds more conservative when she faults her opponent’s time in government with the slogan, “Two decades in the bureaucracy. Too beholden to special interests.”)

She’s lived half her life in the district, and eight years on the community college board. Her husband, Wally Knox, was a longtime assemblyman. She knocked former state Sen. David Roberti out of the council primary by going after him as being anti-abortion, and so earned the support of women’s groups.

City services should be delivered in “proactive, comprehensive” fashion, she says, not “piecemeal, on a favor system.” LaBonge says, third-personly and stoutly, that residents “know Tom LaBonge and know what kind of service I’ve given.”

LaBonge polled ahead in primary; the two are now about statistically even. So who is the tortoise, and who the hare? And when does the day come that “gutter politics” means getting the drains fixed?

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.