From Riordan to Bush
Caldwell, Christopher
From Riordan to Bush Los Angeles is the true capital of compassionate conservatism. BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Los Angeles THERE WAS a curious symmetry about the settings of this year’s party...
...something to offer them, too...
...Even proimmigration activists used to countenance the drawing of a sharp line between legal immigrants and illegal ones...
...It really hasn’t translated into policy in Texas,” he says...
...Are there lessons Bush can take out of Los Angeles...
...Around...
...The big problem is not Mexicans’ loyalty to Democrats but the GOP’s extreme disloyalty to Mexicans...
...He has a rapport,” Rodriguez says...
...Those things are resonating...
...But his administration proved overwhelmingly popular...
...Traditionally conservative Mexican-American families might be receptive to that...
...I’ve heard a lot of Latinos comment on it,” he says...
...But, Skerry adds, “If compassionate is going to mean appealing to Latinos, a lot is going to depend on the state of the immigration issue...
...residents to question whether comity among the city’s galaxy of ethnic groups was a lost cause (and led 400,000 of them to buy guns in the days after the violence...
...The Riordan model has the advantage of keeping (traditionally Republican) boardrooms happy while convincing (traditionally Democratic) underprivileged voters that a booming economy has Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The one great line of his convention speech was his notion about injecting conservative values into the fight for social justice...
...Nor does it exclude the sort of cooperation with religious institutions Bush has urged...
...Gregory Rodriguez, a demographer and Los Angeles Times contributing editor, considers the Republican gaffes grave ones...
...Delgadillo worked with ’84 Olympics impresario and ex-MLB commissioner Peter Ueberroth at Rebuild L.A., a series of job-creating, infrastructure-building partnerships between big corporations and community groups...
...Rodriguez believes that Bush’s Latino support in Texas has been overstated...
...I’m not sure that they’ll make Latinos break a voter loyalty of many years...
...He speaks to Latinos’ strengths...
...And if it was tough, it wasn’t rightwing...
...What’s more, Mexico’s president-elect, Vicente Fox—a traditional hero of American conservatives for his efforts to topple Mexico’s one-party oligarchy— has recently floated an economic growth program for his country that involves freer movement of labor northward...
...The campaign’s touted claim that Bush got 49 percent of the Hispanic vote in his 1998 run is drawn from Voter News Service polls, which have an 11 percent margin of error...
...His latest project is the Genesis L.A...
...Republican Richard Riordan was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1993, months after the most deadly race riot of recent years led a lot of L.A...
...Riordan’s rapport with Mexican Americans stems from years of (largely Catholic Church-based) charitable work in inner-city neighborhoods...
...Riordan won a number of non-traditional ethnic constituencies into the GOP: He won Jews, Latinos, and Asians in 1997, to secure his reelection against a weak challenge from Tom Hayden...
...Bush may have a harder time finessing it...
...Skerry points to increasingly strident arguments between immigration advocates and foes over “amnesties” for undocumented aliens...
...The only adjective we’re interested in applying to this administration is effective,” says Delgadillo...
...Republicans have been punished for the excesses of Pete Wilson, whose sponsorship of Proposition 187 and incendiary tone on immigration matters riled Latino voters at exactly the moment when the white workingclass voters to whom he was seeking to appeal were leaving the state in droves...
...Defeat after electoral defeat has meant the GOP’s virtual disappearance as a statewide force since the mid-1990s...
...But that doesn’t mean it won’t translate into votes in California...
...to the extent that the Democrats may be inclined to take it back...
...Former California assembly speaker Antonio Villaraigosa has put together a coalition that could make him Riordan’s successor...
...Said one Democrat during the convention, “Riordan has revived L.A...
...That coalition is pro-growth, pro-labor, and pro-Latino...
...Riordan ran on the motto “Tough Enough to Turn L.A...
...plan managed by Stan Gold of Shamrock Partners (Roy Disney’s company), which uses similar partnerships but focuses on inner-city neighborhoods...
...Delgadillo agrees that Bush’s appeals to Latinos have caught the attention of California voters...
...But within days of his taking office, it was apparent that “tough” applied only as the adjective in “tough love...
...An even more serious problem, Rodriguez thinks, is that his rhetorical openness hasn’t brought with it much in the way of new initiatives...
...Riordan opened up the highest ranks of City Hall to gays, Mexicans, blacks—and in general bent over backwards to build the broadest American city-government coalition in living memory...
...It seems inevitable that Bush will wind up using some similar approach if his compassion ever moves from rhetoric to programs...
...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Los Angeles THERE WAS a curious symmetry about the settings of this year’s party conventions...
...They no longer do, and the sudden emergence of the AFL-CIO as a deep-pocketed supporter of amnesty, after its successful drive to recruit undocumented aliens, has changed the dynamic of the issue...
...Republicans picked Philadelphia, whose mayor Edward Rendell spent the 1990s turning his city into a showcase of the very New Democrat leadership that the GOP wants voters to reject...
...Peter Skerry, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna University who is the author of the definitive book on Mexican-American politics, agrees that public-private partnerships have been a big tool in wooing Latinos...
...He describes his job as “using the greatest power on the planet—the economy—to address social ills...
...Bush, in fact, could be headed for about a third of the Latino vote in California...
...But he thinks the shibboleth of Southern California political commentators—that it will “take a generation” for Republicans to recover the ground that Pete Wilson lost—is overstated...
...Rocky Delgadillo, the MexicanAmerican Democrat who serves as Riordan’s deputy mayor for economic development, rejects the idea that there’s any obvious connection between the Los Angeles mayor’s governing and what Bush envisions...
...Southern California conservatives soon dismissed him with the epithet R(h)INO (Republican in Name Only...
...Democrats, meanwhile, who couldn’t have predicted Republicans’ campaign themes when they picked Los Angeles, wound up in what could be the birthplace of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism...
...On the downside, this is a model that doesn’t require a Republican to administer it...
...Thus, the one project George W. Bush claims to want most passionately to carry out—assembling a new Republican coalition across race, class, sex, and even party lines—is something only Richard Riordan has done...
Vol. 5 • August 2000 • No. 47
