All You Need Is Love, and Ideas

Los Angeles mayoral candidates Antonio Villaraigosa, Bob Hertzberg and Bernard C. Parks linked arms Sunday and sang -- we couldn’t make this up -- “Kumbaya.”

OK, so they were hamming it up for a Super Bowl party. A photo Monday in The Times captured the moment, along with the candidates’ personalities. A kinetic Hertzberg roared with laughter, arms flung in a wide embrace of his two rivals. The statesmanlike Parks stood ramrod-straight, a little apart, impeccably dressed even in casual mode. Villaraigosa continued to work the room despite being locked in Hertzberg’s bear-trap hug.

Forget the hand-holding and singing (please), but after the March 8 election and, if one is needed, the May 17 runoff, we do wish that whoever wins reaches out, if not to be best friends, at least to share best ideas.

Villaraigosa envisions a biomedical research triangle connecting USC, UCLA and Pasadena’s Cal Tech. He also has big plans for expanding light rail. Hertzberg sees South Los Angeles as one of the city’s great missed opportunities and wants to invest in both housing and commercial development there. In debates, Parks has recast “the homeless” from abstract problem to concrete categories such as the mentally ill and veterans, and he offers realistic proposals for helping them. State Sen. Richard Alarcon (who was at the Super Bowl party but not in the picture) has made lifting the working poor to the middle class the heart of his campaign. Mayor James K. Hahn, whose job these four challengers covet (and who did not attend the party), has made gang violence a priority worthy of any mayor.

Good ideas abound. So do dumb ones, but we’ll get to those in another editorial.