Mayoral Runoff Has a Retro Feel

It was a rerun election, the mayor of Los Angeles fighting for his political life against the man he had come from behind to beat once before.

The year was 1973. The candidates were incumbent Sam Yorty and Councilman Tom Bradley, who was bidding to become the first black mayor in Los Angeles history.

It was both a grudge match and a citywide power struggle, resulting in a race that was deeply personal and extremely bitter. It makes the current mayoral contest something of a rerun redux, pitting incumbent James K. Hahn against the man he beat once before, Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, who is bidding to become the first Latino mayor in modern Los Angeles history.

No two elections are alike. And much has changed in 32 years, not least the city itself, which has undergone huge economic and demographic changes.

Villaraigosa is no Bradley, whose silken manner and courtly dignity helped repel character attacks and racial slurs directed at the former police lieutenant. And Hahn is no Yorty, whose sulfurous personality and antic behavior -- including wacky runs for governor and president -- had greatly increased his vulnerability after 12 years in City Hall.

But a look back at Bradley’s 1973 victory, the last time Los Angeles voters turned a sitting mayor out of City Hall, suggests some of the same dynamics are at work as the two candidates replay history -- Villaraigosa hoping for a repeat and Hahn seeking a different outcome.

Villaraigosa has the most to learn from Bradley’s experience. He has struck back hard and quickly whenever challenged -- something both he and Bradley failed to do the first time each ran.

And he has worked to avoid being pigeonholed as the standard-bearer solely for Latinos, describing himself as the best candidate for “black Los Angeles,” “brown Los Angeles,” “the San Fernando Valley, and white and yellow Los Angeles.” (The day he launched his second mayoral bid, Bradley was asked whether Los Angeles was “ready” for a black mayor. “This city is ready for a mayor who has the ability, who has the kinds of programs which will deal with the issues,” he replied.)

Bill Boyarsky, who covered the 1973 mayoral race for the Los Angeles Times and now lectures on journalism at USC, said Villaraigosa “has the same problem that Bradley had, which is the problem of reassurance.”

“From the very first, after that election loss, Bradley made it his business to campaign and be well known and well loved in places like Pacific Palisades, the Westside ... and the Valley,” Boyarsky said. “To show that he was calm, safe and steadfast.”

For his part, Hahn must consider Yorty’s experience the second time he faced Bradley, when the embattled incumbent reprised many of the attacks that had worked before -- only to find them blunted four years later by overuse and the passage of time.

Hahn has never engaged in the kind of race-baiting that became Yorty’s dubious stock in trade. Still, the current incumbent drew widespread criticism for a TV advertisement he ran near the close of the 2001 campaign that faulted Villaraigosa for seeking the early release of Carlos Vignali, a jailed drug trafficker whose father was a campaign donor.

Without disputing the facts, critics said images in the ad, a crack pipe and grainy photo of Villaraigosa, stoked anti-Latino sentiments and helped ensure Hahn’s victory.

Hahn and his campaign team angrily reject those assertions. Bill Carrick, a Hahn strategist, also dismisses any comparison between the 1973 and 2005 elections.

“They’re totally different,” he said. “People who want to romanticize Villaraigosa as Tom Bradley don’t understand what an enormous figure Tom Bradley was in L.A. politics.”

But some analysts say it has been tougher for Hahn to discredit his rival in their second matchup, just as Yorty had a harder time scuffing up Bradley in 1973. In both cases, the challengers were more familiar to voters, having run once before.

“The fear factor in terms of someone of a different race or ethnicity becoming mayor just doesn’t work as well the second time around,” said Steve Erie, who directs the urban studies department at UC San Diego.

Looking back, it is almost comical to imagine Bradley -- a man stolid to the point of paint-drying boredom -- as a consort of Black Panthers and other left-wing radicals. But that is how Yorty portrayed him in their first contest.

A conservative-Democrat-turned-Republican seeking an unprecedented third term, Yorty waged a lackluster reelection effort. Still, he was stunned to finish far behind the more liberal Bradley -- 42% to 26% -- in the first round of voting. He rallied in the 1969 runoff by capitalizing on the city’s hair-trigger racial atmosphere. A scant four years after the Watt riots, amid the national upheaval of the civil rights and antiwar movements, Los Angeles was a city on edge.

Yorty and his allies played off those fears by warning that street crime would soar and property values would plummet if a black man took over City Hall -- bringing the “militants” along with him.

“The place was inflamed, just red hot,” said Boyarsky, who recollected Bradley saying he “couldn’t go anywhere without someone sticking a microphone in his face and asking about Angela Davis,” the radical UCLA professor who made the FBI’s most wanted list in connection with her Black Panther ties.

With a huge outpouring of white support, Yorty handily defeated Bradley in the runoff, 53% to 47%. Overall turnout was a record 76%.

Bradley started running again almost immediately, determined not to be caricatured a second time. “He made up his mind that no one would say, ‘I don’t know the man,’ ” said Philip Depoian, a close Bradley aide who estimates that the councilman shook more than 25,000 hands over the next four years.

Bradley was also determined to fight back in a way he hadn’t in his first mayoral run. Crime was a relatively new political issue in 1969 and a sensitive one for a black candidate and liberal. For many in Los Angeles’ poorer neighborhoods, the police were seen as oppressors, and talk of “law and order” was considered political code to foment fear of blacks among white audiences.

“He wrapped himself in knots,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a Cal State Fullerton professor who has written extensively on Los Angeles politics, “to a point where Bradley” -- a 21-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department -- “felt constrained to not talk about crime.”

That changed in 1973, when Bradley made his police background a central part of his candidacy -- even featuring a blown-up photo of himself in uniform the day he announced his second bid. It is political armor that Villaraigosa notably lacks.

The political climate was different the second time Yorty and Bradley faced off. With the Watts riots having receded another four years, much of the fear and racial tension in the city had dissipated. A Yorty campaign mailer bluntly urging whites to vote against Bradley because he was black backfired: It reminded many voters of the sordid tactics then coming to light in the mushrooming Watergate scandal.

Bradley also ran a slicker, more professional campaign, featuring ads produced by New York media guru David Garth. The spots emphasized attributes that Bradley had played down during his 1969 campaign -- not just his rise through the LAPD ranks, but also his athletic career at UCLA and measures he carried on the City Council that helped both white and black neighborhoods.

“The whole thing with Bradley was getting people accustomed to him,” Garth said. “The reason he didn’t win the first time he ran wasn’t because of anything he did. People just weren’t prepared for this 6-foot-4 black man.... One of our strategies was to get him on television and keep him on TV.”

But race wasn’t the only issue driving the contest. Yorty and Bradley differed sharply on issues, in contrast to the narrow Democratic bandwidth that separates Hahn and Villaraigosa. Growth was a hot topic, with Bradley seeking limits and Yorty saying development was the key to creating jobs. The two also clashed over a proposal to drill for oil off Pacific Palisades, with the mayor in support and Bradley opposed.

In the end, Bradley won 56% to 44%, making Los Angeles the biggest U.S. city at that point to elect a black mayor. Turnout was down from 1969, but still an impressive 64%. Bradley went on to serve an unprecedented five terms.

Today, Los Angeles is a vastly different place, its economy powered by entertainment and service industries that have replaced the region’s shrunken industrial base. The face of the city -- where minorities have become the majority -- has been reconstituted as well, and with it the formerly all-white, all-male bastion of City Hall.

Racial politics are no longer as simple as black and white. One big question now is whether African Americans, their population dwindling in the city, will vote in significant numbers for a Latino mayoral candidate.

Much of the political change can be traced back to those two campaigns in 1969 and 1973, said Sonenshein, who describes the Bradley-Yorty matchups, taken together, as the city’s “race of the century.”

Bradley’s victory, he notes, proved a watershed in Los Angeles’ inexorable shift from one of the most conservative big cities in America to the Democratic stronghold it is today.

Of course, it didn’t seem quite as monumental -- or terribly engaging -- at the time, suggesting that some things never change.

A newspaper headline from March 1973 captured the prevailing attitude and seems to pretty much sum up the mood surrounding this year’s contest as well -- “Voter Reaction to Mayor’s Race: Dissatisfaction, Boredom.”