Complex Issues Pull Us Together

In case you missed it, the city of Redondo Beach had a mayoral election last week, with two Republicans squaring off. One guy, Mike Gin, is also Asian American and gay, so he’s practically his own minority group.

But despite his GOP bona fides, a California Republican Assembly mailer blasted Gin during the campaign. The Log Cabin Republican was branded a closet liberal with a hidden agenda -- namely that he opposed President Bush’s pro-marriage position. As if that were a relevant issue in a municipal election.

So how did Redondo react?

It voted Gin into office by a landslide, and even his Republican opponent, Gerard Bisignano, denounced the strafing of Gin.

“People looked past personal attacks,” says Gin, who got 61% of the vote. “I was really honored.”

He told me he walked the streets for months and let Redondo residents bend his ear. They cared about creative partnerships between the city and schools, public safety and well-managed growth, so that’s what Gin focused on.

I’m bringing this up because we’ve almost come to believe that the bomb throwers who went after Gin are the best we can do when it comes to political leadership and public discourse in this country. Politics is more of a mud fight than ever, framed by extremists on the left and the right, even though most people aren’t in either camp.

You wouldn’t know that to turn on the radio or television, visit a political website or op-ed page. America is at war on all those battlefields, with little common ground on the subjects of taxes, morality, filibusters, the environment or illegal immigration.

“When people sit down and talk about the issues that matter to them,” says Mark Baldassare, who conducts lots of focus groups for the Public Policy Institute of California, “they rarely bring up the issues that are highlighted by the left and the right.”

This is true nationally as well as in a progressive state like California, Baldassare said. People are interested in the very issues Gin heard about while campaigning in Redondo Beach.

In California, according to Baldassare’s research, people also happen to be willing to kick in a few more nickels for improvements in schools, public safety, job development and healthcare for children and the elderly.

You don’t hear about this in Sacramento’s daily back-and-forth. Any utterance about taxes, as Warren E. Buffett found out when he suggested Proposition 13 needed some rejiggering, is suicide when dealing with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The right isn’t allowed to talk about taxes.

The left can’t admit Hollywood really is nuts.

Baldassare said a March survey revealed that 12% of Angelenos described themselves as very liberal, 10% called themselves very conservative, and the rest were somewhere in the middle.

This might help explain Tuesday’s election results in the Los Angeles race for mayor.

As I said last week, I had a bet with Los Angeles City Councilman Tony Cardenas that Antonio Villaraigosa would knock Mayor Jim Hahn out of office. Cardenas argued that the city just wasn’t ready for the future. Not yet.

As you might have heard, Villaraigosa’s victory was nearly as one-sided as Gin’s victory in Redondo Beach.

Who voted for him?

Fifty percent of white voters, 48% of black voters, 44% of Asians, 62% of other races, and 84% of Latinos.

Among San Fernando Valley whites, considered to be one of the more conservative voting blocs in the city, Villaraigosa took 48% of the tally.

This happened in a city that is depicted in the current movie “Crash” as a seething metropolis, bitterly divided by race and class.

Of course it’s divided. “Crash” got that part right, even if the bigotry was too caricatured and dated to give much punch to the no-brainer theme of unrealized commonality. (My apologies, by the way, for revealing too much of the plot in a column, which ticked off lots of readers.)

But Villaraigosa’s across-the-board support was no movie; it was real, and his rollicking victory party Tuesday night looked like a midnight picnic for the local chapter of the United Nations. If 70% of registered voters hadn’t stayed home, I might even call the election a victory for tolerance.

Villaraigosa became the first Latino mayor in 133 years not long after radio talk shows tried to get listeners worked into a lather over billboards for a Spanish-language TV news station that covers “Los Angeles, Mexico.”

Schwarzenegger jumped into the fray with both feet, warning that the billboards would send more illegal immigrants rushing across the border. He didn’t seem to have any thoughts on immigration reform and didn’t mention that some of those illegals work in the industries that write checks to him.

“It’s easier to frame things in extremes,” Baldassare said of politics and punditry. But when people hear issues discussed with greater complexity, “it tends to pull them toward the center.”

I know what some of you extremists are thinking.

Yeah, Lopez, but haven’t you committed these very sins in your own column?

Once or twice, maybe.

But I can’t think of anyone more grating than Ann Coulter, unless it’s Michael Moore.