Universal City
Caldwell, Christopher
1 t's hard to conduct a mayoral election while you're waiting for a riot, but that's what Los Angeles residents did in the days leading up to the April 20 primary. Those who expected rioting in the...
...The "Future-of-L.A...
...The plan—or Plan—involved "leveraging" $180 billion in federal transportation funds earmarked •for Los Angeles over the next thirty years, mostly through "mixed-use" industrial spaces...
...You ask them what their greatest achievements are, and they say, 'I sued the marina developers...
...Yet much of Riordan's economic policy could be described as Clintonite, or at least Galbraithian...
...And Katz was right, as Riordan's campaign manager admitted two days later...
...At least, that was the impression one got from his family background...
...With Emily's money in hand, Griego began to play the Riordan/Katz symbols game with live ammunition, specifically, an AK-47 bullet, which she pulled out to introduce her plan to ban—not guns, which would be unconstitutional—but bullets...
...to Dana Rohrabacher and Bill Bradley...
...The election was ostensibly non-partisan, but Riordan didn't hesitate to identify himself as a Republican...
...Katz in a leather jacket called up memories of Michael Dukakis in a tank...
...But it also has the smallest police force per capita of any of the nation's largest cities, and everybody wants more cops—the right simply for their own sake, and the left so the LAPD can begin functioning as a police force and not as the commando-squad-cum-star-chamber it became under the leadership of Daryl Gates...
...Mexicans are among the most conservative constituencies in the country on abortion rights—to say nothing of women in the workplace or lawand-order—yet Mexican politicians, stranded in their gerrymandered slum districts, are generally so strapped 'for cash that they have to go begging for it from pro-choice groups.1 Wachs and White Fragmentation Joel Wachs, a Valley councilman who had been a Republican until the Bush presidency, was fond of pointing out during the campaign that, while L.A.'s bus riders were subsidized by $1.17 per ride, Metrolink commuters arriving from the suburbs were subsidized $22.50 a ride...
...Of course, that message should have been the first thing he put forward at the start of every forum...
...His campaign seemed to recognize as much, and ran television ads picturing Woo with the unbelievably popular new police chief Willie Williams—leaving the false impression, Woo opponents claimed, that Woo had Williams's endorsement...
...But Woo is a more attractive candidate than even Clinton, not so much a panderer as a policy minimalist...
...Riordan may try to use the Yorty strategy," said political scientist Raphael Sonenshein, "and deal with the black vote by isolating it...
...All his purported strengths turned around and bit him...
...Sanders was a Rhodes scholar who returned from Oxford to attend Yale Law School and has a daughter named Chelsea...
...The L.A...
...With 5,000 National Guard troops in the barracks, the city could deploy its entire police force in high-crime areas...
...Wachs took heat, though, on his own subsidies for the arts, on the same grounds...
...Katz could conceivably have been a tough runoff opponent for either Riordan or Woo, but the political climate that he spent much of his early career trying to create did him in...
...Weekly tried to link him to the Senate filibuster of Clinton's stimulus package, Riordan reminded him that the election was non-partisan, as was his support...
...Riordan prefers to call himself an "Eisenhower Republican...
...Here it will be determined in the next half-century whether the American democratic capitalism towards which most of the world is moving can be made to work in a polity that is already atomized by ethnicity...
...A big change came over the inner city after the verdict-weekend mobilization, a change that will have broad ramifications for Los Angeles politics...
...2 When Wachs went after Riordan in earnest, he sent out three, different mailers—one accusing him of being too tied in to City Hall, one attacking him as too conservative, and one attacking him as too liberal...
...I don't think there'd be a lot of point to having enterprise zones in the central city and have them be capital-intensive...
...All over L.A., Latin and Asian immigrants and their children were working in occupations that hadn't even existed ten years before...
...Woo took only 14 percent of the white vote...
...But Sanders's critique of downtown—by which he meant big business—was right on target...
...I blocked the freeway.'" Patsaouras flagged in the polls, though, as Linda Griego rose...
...politicians like [Councilwoman] Ruth Galanter is the old politicians wanted to be remembered for what they built, and the new ones want to be remembered for what they stopped from being built...
...He was the largest single recipient of lobbyists' funds...
...Houston showed 'every sign of wanting to play the entitlement game...
...By then, however, Woo wanted to take the focus off Cathay Bank, which—it was revealed in the Los Angeles Times—had never made a loan to an African-American, at least not since 1989...
...Why not rewrite the environmental regulations he was getting rich on as a lawyer...
...blacks may have faced was an addiction to political power that had begun in the early 1960s with the capture of the three City Council seats they hold to this day...
...Would you invest because you're going to be given a tax break...
...But eighty-six percent of the votes cast in the primary were cast by blacks or whites, giving these two groups one last chance to create a society in which some degree of fellow-feeling could be fostered...
...Someone to run this city who's a failure...
...Confronted at a debate by the bagperson-cumgadfly (and mayoral candidate) "Melrose" Larry Green, Woo had to say in exasperation, "Look...
...Los Angeles is the world's first truly universal city...
...The business message didn't have to hurt, either: with only half the black population of New York, Los Angeles had twice as many black-owned businesses...
...We provide equity, he provides the expertise—free market...
...Willie Brown has picked up enemies pari passu as he's picked up power, and much of the money Katz got from Brown's machine was blown on a huge advertising buy that aired while people were out shopping for canned goods and Glock 9s before the Rodney King verdict...
...Unemployment, crime and other symptoms of urban decay afflict the city...
...The following day, a hundred or so of his volunteers gathered in Westwood Park underneath the San Diego Freeway, ready to begin the afternoon's precinct walking, and Riordan was in his element...
...his mayoral platform called for the appointment of three deputy mayors by race: one Asian, one black, and one Latino...
...politicians like [County Supervisor] Kenny Hahn and the new L.A...
...Riordan said...
...Angelenos were certainly being offered two competing visions of L.A., but they were incomplete ones, as they have to be...
...Still, Riordan's evasion on the environment gave hope to capitalists that he would actually take on the Air Quality Management Districts and the Workmen's Compensation Act that together were responsible for so much of the business flight from L.A...
...It's a big incentive to come across and get $5,000 a year...
...Hughes, while pulling thousands of jobs out of Los Angeles, was playing a masterful game of corporate blackmail with the affirmative-action card—holding black jobs hostage in hopes of winning tax concessions from California and direct cash payments from the federal government...
...Free market...
...The Latinos, by contrast, claimed 40 percent of the population and just over a tenth of the votes...
...At a time when politicians were so invisible as to invite speculation that Gates had gathered enough dirt to blackmail them, Woo's stand was properly seen as courageous...
...Riordan had promised 3,000 more police officers, which he proposed to pay for by leasing Los Angeles International Airport to a private company—probably Lockheed...
...Woo's father was an officer of Cathay Bank, first of the great Asian-American financial institutions...
...Far from being a right-wing ideologue, he was using immigration for Great Society ends...
...You're an investor...
...The illegal ones," Houston said, "I don't think their sole reason is coming for a job...
...A short, cocky Princeton grad fond of disco dancing, Houston decided to make undocumented immigrants his big issue, and hit the airwaves with a series of spots speaking to what he saw as the problem of gangs and illegal street vendors—whom he tended to mention in the same breath...
...Los Angeles Dials 911," read the cover of one of his brochures—and Riordan would use the slow response of the LAPD to 911 calls as an issue to both reinforce the symbol and distance himself from his pro-police stance in the months following the Rodney King beating...
...Forget it, forget it—let's be basic...
...He opposed Proposition 1 as providing too few police and imposing too high a tax burden (he says he will eventually lower taxes...
...When he finally came up with "rebellion," the entire congregation burst into laughter...
...Riordan actually had spoken in favor of diversity, but only in the twelve-minute organizational video shown in the houses of his supporters—that is, he trumpeted diversity to white people...
...Four hundred dollars is big money to them...
...Riordan was obviously choosing his venues badly...
...A six-term state assemblyman, he was Assembly Speaker Willie Brown's personal footsoldier in the race, with all the funding potential that implies...
...People in the Riordan campaign felt the press had poisoned blacks against him (he pulled only 4 percent of the black vote), but there were indications that hunting for votes in South-Central would not be in vain...
...These were brought home when the Dallas Morning News reported that Riordan, when canvassing door-to-door, had been asked by an old white harridan, "Black people are just awful...
...But Katz stuck to his guns, and Riordan was finally left to say, "That's simply not true...
...According to KCET television commentator Hugh Hewitt: "Woo's a classic Bill Clinton...
...And Proposition 1, which would have raised $101 million in property taxes to pay for a thousand new policemen—got less than the two-thirds majority necessary to pass...
...Finally, black political empowerment antedated massive federal involvement in the civil rights movement, which had prospects of leaving their politics in Los Angeles more flexible than black politics elsewhere in the country.3 In the long run, the deepest problem L.A...
...And indeed, he did fight over a center bloc with Councilman Joel Wachs that accounted for about 17 percent of the votes...
...That was before I was involved with Mattel," Riordan said...
...A Republican, he had nonetheless given over half a million dollars to various Bradley campaigns...
...Richard Riordan The most interesting financial angle was that Woo was running against his most famous campaign contributor...
...He had given to Jack Kemp and Maxine Waters...
...Riordan was visibly rattled at the end of the debate...
...Griego went nowhere until Emily's List and other groups forked up half a million dollars—which Griego spent on a series of dazzling feminist TV ads, the first of which featured Griego walking through black-and-white cardboard cutouts of her male opponents in a bright red dress...
...The enmity was bitter, and ever since it had become clear that the runoff would be between "Woo and Who," as the joke went, Ferraro had vowed to endorse "Who...
...He even ran a commercial on MTV...
...Now that the Bradley bloc had crumbled, no Anglo alternative was there to replace it...
...Big corporations were the only ones making "reach-out" efforts to the black community—in fact, in a new variation on masked politics, "entrepreneurial" had become a euphemism for anti-affirmative action...
...The obvious parallel was with Ross Perot, and Riordan did little to discourage it...
...around...
...And the people of South-Central were—almost unanimously—overjoyed, telling reporters things like, "It's the safest this neighborhood has been in years...
...You don't say...
...It was getting harder to justify asking the Koreans and Latinos burned out of years of labor by the 1992 riots to subsidize theater and sculpture for the largely white "arts community...
...Woo, the fear was, would have no easier time uniting such a collection of people than Riordan would have policing them...
...Rebuild Los Angeles," the business consortium that Bradley had invited Riordan's close friend Peter Ueberroth to head, seemed to be faltering, but it was a venue for black input—and set-asides, for the RLA companies were the only powerful entities in L.A...
...He was absolutely right, of course, that, after denouncing him as a racist, the L.A...
...That's nonsense...
...Riordan and Woo each would try to blockade the other at the center...
...Reilly set out early to run a campaign rich in symbolism, under the slogan "Riordan: Tough Enough to Turn L.A...
...Times and other candidates picked up on his theme that Los Angeles had the right to ask the federal government for a bailout...
...He had made an enemy of City Council President John Ferraro, a liberal Democrat, two years ago during council redistricting, when Woo was re-elected even in the face of the machinations of other council members to redistrict him out of his seat...
...Democratic City Councilman Michael Woo, 41, the first Chinese-American to have won elected office in L.A., took 24 percent to finish second...
...As Bill Boyarsky summed up Clint Reilly's inspiration in the Times: "Los Angeles...
...cynicism towards the 1980s job growth, noting that 56 percent of the new jobs created in L.A...
...And when, during an early-April mayoral forum, Harold Meyerson of the L.A...
...The same could be said of Nick Patsaouras, a Greek immigrant engineer who billed himself as the "Man with the Plan" in his campaign ads...
...And when Katz sought to publicize his tough-on-crime stance he did so with an ad in which he appeared wearing a Fonz-type leather jacket while sirens blared in the background...
...Katz had some problems, including the soporific oratorical style of a five-minute PBS funding pitch, but he was a nice, well-educated suburbanite with nuanced political views...
...What do you want...
...As a black from Watts who had compiled a résumé to rival Bill Clinton's and Richard Nixon's combined, Sanders was the only candidate who could vie with Riordan for the title of most impressive private citizen, but he too had made his mark as wheel-greaser par excellence—and his close ties to the entire ruling directorate of Los Angeles made his attempts to run against "downtown" as ludicrous as Katz's attempts to run against City Hall...
...His own campaign promised to enforce the existing abortion laws, yet Riordan had given money to Americans United for Life, not to mention heading a group of investors that gave a $400,000 helicopter to Los Angeles's Roger Cardinal Mahony...
...Los Angeles politics is terribly skewed: due to age demographics and low rates of naturalization, the groups who have begun to drive the city's economy don't have the vote yet...
...Houston and the End of the Great Society Katz's mantra, repeated at every forum—"You can't change government until you change the people who run it"—worked against him...
...To make matters worse, Voting Rights suits to increase minority representation had produced rotten boroughs: in this election, 53,018 votes were cast in the Anglo liberal 5th district, 48,023 in the Anglo conservative 12th, and only 10,118 in the Latino 1st...
...The Anglo Candidate...
...And he was trying: When he addressed a black congregation at the First African Methodist church one Sunday this spring, he paused fully six seconds before settling on a word to use to describe the May 1992 events...
...Furthermore, Riordan said, he was backing the president on this one...
...Further, he wasn't against all immigrants...
...The first candidate onto TV with his ads was Tom Houston, a man with impeccable liberal credentials, including long service in the Jerry Brown machine and a stint at City Hall as Tom Bradley's deputy mayor...
...This was a political situation that offered Riordan great opportunities, but also great dangers...
...The government provides the equity and a developer keeps a third of the money...
...Riordan's 33 percent left him in a strong position, even in a city that was threequarters Democratic, and other election results had further tipped the balance in Riordan's favor...
...Woo was far ahead of the field in fund-raising until Richard Riordan entered the race, at which point Woo's organization began accusing Riordan of trying to buy the election...
...one kept one's promises, though, not by removing regulations but by bartering exemptions for political contributions—in effect, living off the City Council's depredations as Chaucer's pardoner lived off canon law...
...It was thought that unrest in the aftermath of the second King trial would help the law-and-order candidate Riordan, while peace would help Woo...
...There was a case to be made that his LBOs had created jobs, but he was already politician enough not to make it...
...But Patsaouras developed the most eclectic intellectual base of any candidate, from paleocon County Supervisor Mike Antonovich to Marxist urban theorist Mike Davis...
...Like Woo and fellow candidate Richard Katz, he urged public-private partnerships, touted investment tax credits, and cited the Bible of the Clinton campaign (though certainly not the presidency), Osborne and Gaebler's Reinventing Government...
...is going downhill and everyone knows it...
...T hree days after the April 17 verdict, Los Angeles residents chose two men—off a confusing roster of twenty-four candidates—to enter the June 8 runoff to replace Tan Bradley...
...He takes the butwhat-kind-of-jobs...
...Whites were the second-largest minority in town, and blacks were soon to be the fourth...
...And although Zev Yaroslaysky, the fifth-district councilman, had been challenging Gates since the late 1970s, Woo was the first member of the City Council to call for his resignation...
...Riordan put graffiti on a list of seven explanations—including crime, lousy education, and job flight—for why people were leaving L.A...
...in droves...
...So busy was Carville—with the Florio campaign in New Jersey and his attempted rescue of the Clinton presidency—that he was able to show up in California for only one $150-a-plate breakfast, which he spent discussing Hollywood and Georgia's Zell Miller...
...It didn't work out that way: South-Central was calm, but no one was thinking about the mayor's race at all...
...But in Los Angeles, this uniracial support would threaten the Riordan coalition with a dead end...
...It's an idea of the left, but it's a sophisticated one that addresses a potentially disastrous consequence of Kemp-style enterprise zones: their proven tendency to suck viable cutting-edge businesses out of border areas and into the inner city, where they fail...
...At dead-center of Riordan's campaign was an attempt to use a complex of fears about safety and economic decline to mobilize a liberal electorate, much as—in San Francisco's 1991 mayoral race—former police chief Frank Jordan had harped on homelessness to win the mayoralty of an even more liberal city...
...Fellow candidate Nick Patsaouras tried again and again to drive home that a "governmental efficiency committee" Woo frequently bragged about establishing had met only a handful of times in its entire existence, to no avail...
...Despite his best efforts, voters saw him as locked into politics-as-usual, which even liberals admitted was overextended and out of money...
...That was stretching it, but there was no question that the perception—and reality—that Riordan's support was 90 percent Anglo was hurting him...
...Wachs hates Woo, and won't endorse him...
...What Sanders favored was enterprise zones based first on investment tax credits, but to a lesser degree on what he called employment credits: "Tax breaks based on the number of employees hired, so we give breaks to labor-intensive businesses," he said...
...Woo had received campaign funds from developers who had benefited from Los Angeles's notorious Community Redevelopment Authority, but few seemed to notice...
...had had only two mayors since the Kennedy administration...
...Katz repeated that it was...
...So Riordan hired Jordan's consultant, Clint Reilly, who used over $4 million in contributions—$3 million out of Riordan's own pocket—to set up the nuts and bolts of the grassroots campaign, including the hiring of eighty precinct leaders...
...Candidates Throughout the election, three candidates were singled out as symbolizing the politics of L.A.'s future: Stan Sanders and the two griegos...
...No, no, no...
...I've helped out there," Carville said when called for this article, "but I'm not sufficiently up to speed to give an in-depth interview...
...Barely had he begun when a lanky fellow in tennis clothes and sunglasses yelled, "We love you, Dick...
...Don't you think so...
...We give the developer incentives, rather than subsidies...
...Her only other issue was choice on abortion, and the ads she aired worked only to the extent that they alienated her from the bloc she claimed to represent...
...He tries to avoid issue-clutter, so the few issues he does go to the line on—censuring Gates, gay rights, a Council order banning the LAPD from cooperating with Immigration authorities after arrests—resonate as a sort of allegorical ideology: a soft leftism, with an expertise on, and willingness to work with, business...
...and had replied, "Some of them...
...It was easy to campaign as a deregulator...
...in 1988 and 1989 had incomes below $16,600 ("a wage that will put thousands of working families at the poverty level," his pamphlet direly warns...
...County supervisor Gloria Molina, the juggernaut of the Latina/feminist center-left, stayed out...
...Worries were that the candidate and his staff were running two different campaigns, along Clinton lines, with the charming and flexible Woo put forward as a beard for the bearers of party orthodoxy...
...But Daryl Gates was no longer police chief, and Woo may have gone to the Daryl Gates well one too many times, as Republicans did with Jimmy Carter...
...Katz's campaign was almost perfect in every way except that no one wanted to vote for him...
...W oo had other problems...
...it also offered him a powerful financial base...
...He had hired James Carville as his senior adviser at the time of Carville's triumph on the Harris Wofford campaign...
...I agree...
...If anything, voters of all races were disillusioned to find that it was not mayoral politics that had finally brought peace to the inner city but a moment of political panic...
...Those who expected rioting in the wake of the Rodney King civil rights trial turned out to be wrong, but it was nonetheless fitting that trial season and primary season should have overlapped...
...The spot drove her into third place by the final week of the election, and won her the right to debate Woo and Riordan on election eve...
...While not wanting to penalize big business, Sanders pounded home in speech after speech that small businesses were creating 80 or 85 percent of L.A.'s new jobs...
...Sanders was a possible mayor of the future, but only to those who had already decided that the future would be social-democratic industrial policy...
...the Asians were almost as numerous as the blacks, but had only 4 percent of the vote...
...Los Angeles is notoriously hostile to property-tax hikes...
...Harold Meyerson then said, "You were, were you not, part of the 1980s mania that lost a lot of jobs...
...My dacl is not running for mayor...
...Despite its embrace by elements of the Clinton administration, Sanders considered any cuts in the capital gains tax a "Republican conservative nostrum...
...The Woo donation was made to a councilmanic campaign through Riordan's law firm...
...blacks, with a tenth of the population, cast twice their share...
...And Katz's prescient choice of Carville even before he had become famous led to Midas-like misfortunes...
...Houston bombed not because immigration was not a legitimate political issue but because he was trying to make himself mayor off of the havoc wrought by the social programs he was still defending...
...In a platform that had an answer for everything, the fact that Riordan mentioned clean air not at all was a dog that was very loudly not barking...
...In all sixty-four pages of your booklet," a Mexican-American journalist said to Riordan on TV one night, "you never mention diversity," and once again Riordan fumbled for an answer...
...It was clear in this election that the 1980s had turned whites—even under their rhetorical disguise as "commuters"—into a minority bloc, fighting for their own subsidies and perks and set-asides...
...And when we saw Mike Woo go into an Asian—a Korean—group and explain why it was good for Asians to elect an Asian mayor, it validated our plan to go to the Jewish community and remind them about Joel's leadership...
...One Los Angeles Times reporter saw the "merchant classes" and multi-ethnic labor as replacing the old white working class as ballast for any "conservative" campaign, and they were the votes Richard Riordan had to win, if he wanted a victory that wouldn't be seen as a parting shot from white legerdemain...
...But Houston would not hear of cutting those benefits, or of reforming government...
...Despite L.A.'s non-partisan primary system, a legacy of the Progressive era, it looked on the outside like a traditional mayoral race, even a caricature of one—with a conservative Republican tycoon facing off against a Democratic minority professional...
...He's in this mayoral race because it's the next logical step for Mike Woo...
...Katz and the End of Clintonism If Riordan was camouflaging his conservatism, it's not clear that he had to, for consensus liberalism faced roadblocks most visible in the candidacy of Richard Katz, who finished a distant fourth...
...That is, he would visit South-Central and kiss a few black babies, but not enough to bring explicitly racial issues to the fore...
...But in his attempts to make the tax code sit, heel, and roll over, Sanders never considered reducing the tax burden overall...
...His invocation of the Brown Peril was a call to Washington to send yet more money...
...Are you going to South-Central if you're not a benevolent person...
...At his campaign headquarters in Sherman Oaks—a disused men's haberdasher's where papier-mâché elephants and posters reading "Next Stop: City Hall" hung on the walls above rows of phone-manning volunteers gabbing busily ("Our numbers are going through the roof')—there were certainly quite a few minorities, including Mexican press secretary Annette Castro and her black deputy Alex Tucker...
...I love that," Hewitt said...
...Fifty-four percent of those who voted for Woo on April 20 said that his confrontation of Daryl Gates within days of the release of the Rodney King videotape had been a key to their support...
...Woo was going to win the black vote handily, but Riordan had worked in the community as a parks commissioner, and Woo was so dependent on blacks—who gave him 42 percent of his primary votes—that Riordan could destroy Woo's candidacy by taking a quarter of the black vote...
...One Democrat, though, tried to make a sharp break with that politics, albeit in a predictable way...
...I want to move it forward...
...In a similar fit of racial sensitivity, Riordan said privately at an April 3 rally that PC reigned because people who came out of the sixties were "afraid to calla...
...Woo's popularity—and Teflon—may have owed something to the political underrepresentation of his race...
...Riordan's campaign manager, campaign director, press secretary, and field director are all veterans of the Clinton campaign...
...Mayor Joel Wachs is good for the Jews...
...The Woo campaign seized on Katz's contributions from lobbies as unseemly in one who presumed to run against the City Hall establishment...
...He had given to George Bush and to Dianne Feinstein...
...It was the blacks of South-Central, given the simmering frustrations that could lead to another riot, who most needed what Riordan claimed to be selling—safety and jobs—and who would determine whether what Riordan had was sloganeering or a real vision...
...He was an All-American football player at Whittier College and was drafted by the Chicago Bears...
...Furthermore, insiders hinted that in May, Council Finance chairman Zev Yaroslaysky—a liberal Democrat and longtime Woo ally, who supported Woo against an incumbent in 1981—would shock his largely liberal Jewish constituents by endorsing Riordan, who beat Woo 3-2 among Jews...
...Woo had promised 1,000 more officers—and Proposition 1 was his police plan...
...Richard Riordan, in fact, with his net worth of $100 million, was among the biggest campaign contributors in the history of electoral politics...
...Whites, with just over a third of the population, cast two thirds of the votes...
...Politics had enabled blacks to control fully 30 percent—triple their percentage of population—of government jobs in Los Angeles County, nice work if you can get it, but a precarious economic base in an era of governmental retrenchment...
...The Nation called RLA "corporatism dressed up in the language of cooperation," but the right called it PC dressed up in the language of the free market...
...Two term-limits initiatives—one of them spearheaded by Richard Riordan and aimed at precisely such career politicians as Michael Woo—passed handily...
...At the same forum, Riordan was stung by questions on some of his leveraged buyouts, particularly from Dennis Schatzman of the black Los Angeles Sentinel, who mentioned that after the Boys supermarkets buyout, food prices went up in South-Central...
...This still left Woo needing not only to win a mind-blowing majority—along the lines of 90 percent—of black votes, but also to drive black turnout through the roof, thanks to the extra white votes Riordan's grassroots campaign had mobilized...
...Broadly stated, Riordan was running on law-and-order and Woo was running on racial harmony...
...and this year's was the first mayoral election without an incumbent since the Hoover administration...
...a fact a fact...
...Dick Riordan I'm sure has done it with Catholic voters...
...Even kcEr's Hugh Hewitt was high on Patsaouras: "He builds things...
...His police message was not necessarily a loser: liberal Democrat Mel Levine had beaten Barbara Boxer in South-Central in the 1992 senatorial primary with ads that showed riot footage and proclaimed, "A democratic society can't tolerate mob rule...
...After a lunch of tacos provided by a local chain, Riordan walked over to a picnic table under a tree to address the faithful...
...Patsaouras rejected tax cuts out of hand...
...A poll last winter showed that 3 percent of Angelenos thought graffiti should be the first priority of the new mayor—a higher response than for health care and the environment combined...
...I think it's coming for freebies, to immediately go on benefits...
...This lineage not only insulated Woo from accusations that a person who had never had a job in the private sector was the wrong person to lead a city in a financial crisis...
...He was a truce vote...
...And he took the most innovative approach to the tax code, proposing a 25¢ levy on video games to pay for school libraries...
...Don't let anyone make you defensive about your money...
...He then sent out his "Jewish mailer," signed by Wachs's mother, which told voters: "I want you to think about our shared heritage...
...In another ironic twist for the entitlement state, black politicians were almost unanimously championing the military-industrial complex, at least so far as Hughes Aircraft was concerned...
...Racial polarization was a loser for a conservative in South-Central—but it wasn't necessarily a winner anywhere else, and it was certainly a loser, too, among Jews...
...The black activists of Danny Bake-well's Brotherhood Crusade were flocking to RLA enterprises, if only for the purpose of dragging Latino workers off worksites...
...around...
...The first thing Houston would tell reporters visiting his twenty-fifth-floor office in the Bank of America tower was that he was not a racist or a right-wing ideologue...
...The candidate who defines himself, or herself, as the person with the credentials to handle it wins...
...Foes of Wachs accused him of "divisiveness," but his chief campaign consultant Harvey Englander was proud of the mailer...
...The genius of the blacks and Jews who made up the Bradley bloc had been to bite into a Midwestern Protestant majority as it was losing its bearings and its moral certitude...
...There were some who said that the Williams ad was part of a pattern of truth-shading and unquenchable ambition...
...The difference between the old L.A...
...The King affair marked the close of an era of biracial politics, whose primary obsessions were—depending on who was in power—white racism and black crime, and whose culmination was a riot in which 3,500 businesses were destroyed and 55 people killed in the name of everyone getting along together...
...There was no doubt Riordan had devoted massive amounts of his time and money to reading and computer programs in inner-city schools, most notably through the LEARN program he had helped launch...
...The former deputy mayor was the only woman and the only serious Hispanic candidate in the race, and she was in it only because L.A...
...And he was a "new" liberal, i.e., a big spender who sought to appeal to Joe Sixpack by ardently championing the electric chair—symbolically, of course, for the mayor of Los Angeles has no say over criminal sentencing...
...While stumbling over a clarification and a denial at the same time—foolishly, because the exchange had been taped—he was ultimately saved only by a remark by Woo's press secretary Garry South: "Los Angeles isn't about to elect an old, rich, white Republican...
...Which led to an irony: Michael Woo, the candidate of unity, would have to polarize the electorate to win...
...But in a successional war between eleven different political tendencies and four different highly diverse ethnic voting blocs, there was no real center, only a gauntlet one could run through mumbling, "Me too, but less...
...F urthermore, blacks had— through their association with the Bradley regime—implicated themselves in the sort of corporate activism Riordan personified...
...Bush pulled only 62 percent of the votes in Los Angeles last fall, though, so when Riordan was endorsed by Ronald Reagan, Woo began running his own ads to publicize the fact ("He wants to turn L.A...
...Clearly a developer's idea of the free market...
...that could afford them...
...The 62-year-old Irish-American venture capitalist Richard Riordan, a Republican who had staged one of the most expensive campaigns—and one of the most spectacular dark-horse rallies—in recent mayoral politics;took 33 percent of the vote...
...Los Angeles is the capital of the post–melting pot world, and April started the season in which Los Angeles would find out whether it had a politics worthy of the role or a leader worthy of the moment...
...But why were government programs the only untouchables in this immigrant equation...
...Big business was negotiating a separate peace in the tax war that government was waging on the economy, and was offering up very few jobs in return...
...Of the plan itself, Patsaouras said: "Let the developer do what he knows...
...I want to let the developer do his thing without interference from the government...
...It's good for everyone in Los Angeles...
...What did worry people was Woo's organization, drawn from the most doctrinaire ranks of the Democratic Party...
...Wachs was godfather to the Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts, whose $5-million budget Richard Katz proposed spending on police...
...Why not raise property taxes in the Hollywood Hills, where he lived...
...neither whites nor blacks thought he'd form a coalition that would bludgeon them...
...Michael Woo Woo was caught in a particular quandary, for it was the police issue that had made him a plausible candidate in the first place...
...Keep an eye on Katz," people warned until the final days—and it's symptomatic that the closer one got to the Democratic political establishment, the more fervent the Katz boomlet became...
...to Pete Wilson and Ernest Hollings...
...Weekly compared Katz to former State Assembly speaker Jesse Unxuh, who had been drubbed trying to run down the middle in a highly polarized 1973 election between Bradley and mayoral incumbent Sam Yorty...
...Bradley, the first black mayor of a major American city, had been elected to City Hall during the Nixon administration...
...Woo did not have to appeal for Jewish money on the Westside before he went into South-Central to appeal•for black votes...
...And that is not to mention the weird lacunae—the municipalities like West Hollywood and Beverly Hills and Torrance and Culver City—that are surrounded by Los Angeles, inhabited by its work force, indistinguishable from its culture, and liable to destruction in any riot, but don't vote in the mayoral elections...
...Pay him a third for his expertise, and let the community own a part of it...
...Every candidate in this race has been appealing to either ethnic or religious groups," Englander said, "very blatantly in fact...
...Katz added that the Mattel buyout, Riordan's most famous, had actually sent jobs to Mexico...
...In a largely white city, such numbers can be a sign that a candidate is refusing to practice special-interest politics...
Vol. 26 • June 1993 • No. 6
