from L.A. Weekly
MAY 19 - 25, 2005
Powerlines
Los Angeles
New Mayor, New City
Antonio can remake the city as he pleases — well, sort of
by HAROLD MEYERSON
It may not always have been pretty, but it was goddamn important.
The election of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor of Los Angeles, by a stunning
17-point margin, signals a civic transformation almost without parallel in
modern American history. The leopard has changed his spots: This is not the
city of Yorty, Poulson or Riordan; of Nixon and Reagan; or even of Tom Bradley.
A vast population has moved away, a vast population has moved here, and the
tensions that go with such a cosmic makeover have abounded. On Tuesday,
Villaraigosa demonstrated that he had mastered this most basic test of
political leadership: He won support from all quadrants of what is a famously
divided city, and by margins that entitle him to claim a mandate for — and here
the studied vagueness of his campaign emerges as a retrospective plus — damn
near anything. The magnitude of his victory means that, for the foreseeable
future, the City Council will exist chiefly to do his bidding.
The campaign — oy, the campaign — may have been uninspiring, but there have been
plenty of inspiring liberal campaigns that didn’t make it past the finish line.
We have something much more unusual and important in Los Angeles today: a city
government soon to be headed by a charismatic leader with a record of
liberalism, in a city that has a civic left capable of governing to the
advantage of the L.A. working class. That doesn’t make Los Angeles the New
Jerusalem of All Things Progressive, but at a time when the right runs the show
nearly everyplace else, it does make L.A. ground zero for liberal innovation.
It was liberal institutions that helped make this victory. Sure, the County Fed
and most of its member unions endorsed Jim Hahn, but activists from such key
locals as Local 11 of the Hotel Employees waged an unofficial but very
effective get-out-the-vote campaign among 80,000 sometime voters in the Latino
community — and not to the advantage of Jim Hahn. County Fed leader Miguel
Contreras, who died so suddenly on May 6, understood that the campaign the Fed
had waged for Villaraigosa four years ago resounded still, that there was no
way the labor vote would go to Hahn. (Which was fine with Miguel, who remained
a Villaraigosa buddy and backer. One mutual friend told me at Villaraigosa’s
election-night celebration that in their last conversation before he died,
Miguel had asked him, “When’s the earliest on election night that I can come
over to Antonio’s party? 10:30?”)
It was L.A.’s liberal operatives who helped put Villaraigosa over the top as
well. His field campaign was captained by Anthony Thigpenn, one of a cadre of
progressive younger African-Americans who are transforming the politics of
South-Central. And Villaraigosa’s victory is the crowning achievement in the
career of Parke Skelton, possibly the most principled political consultant in
the business, who has steered to elected office virtually every liberal pol in
greater L.A. — among them, Hilda Solis, Eric Garcetti, Jackie Goldberg, Sheila
Kuehl, Karen Bass and Martin Ludlow. Having won the city district by district,
on Tuesday Parke won it across the board.
But the victory is fundamentally Villaraigosa’s, and he won it in two stages.
The first stage was his campaign of 2001, which set liberal L.A. ablaze with
excitement and probably pulled down as many votes as such a liberal campaign
could conceivably amass: 46 percent. The second stage, his campaign this year,
was deliberately duller, devoted largely to reassuring older African-Americans
and San Fernando Valley centrists that he wasn’t such a dangerous character
after all. Underpinning both campaigns was an energy, a palpable engagement
with all things L.A., that could not have contrasted more sharply with Jim
Hahn’s visceral lack of commitment to the calling of mayor. It is impossible to
imagine that Hahn would ever have entered public life absent the example of and
pressure from his father, legendary county supe Kenny Hahn. If nothing else,
son Jim offered proof positive that a public career cannot be built on filial
piety alone.
Hahn’s sins of omission as mayor have now been compounded by his sins of
commission as a candidate. He ran the worst kind of law-’n’-order campaign,
modeled, much as his 2001 campaign was, after Poppy Bush’s 1988 savaging of
Michael Dukakis as a criminal-coddling ACLU-nik. But Los Angeles of 2005 is not
the United States of 1988, nor was Villaraigosa the pushover that Dukakis had
been. The irony is that while history will remember Hahn as the mayor who beat
back secession, he pitched his campaign this year to the very voters who were
the core of the secession movement, voters who couldn’t abide the
transformation of L.A. into a cosmopolitan, progressive city.
And just how extensively will Los Angeles be transformed? The limits on
municipal policy in an age of capital mobility and conservative hegemony are
quite real, but that doesn’t mean that a city can’t commit itself to the
promotion of living wages, affordable housing and a basic growth-with-justice
agenda. Mayor Villaraigosa can call on a locally based progressive talent pool
that includes such policy activists as Occidental government professor Peter
Dreier and nonprofit housing advocate Jan Breidenbach (in housing), Roxana
Tynan of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (in development), Larry
Frank of UCLA’s Labor Center (in work-related issues), and the Liberty Hill
Foundation’s Torie Osborn (for general administrative genius). A Villaraigosa
administration would be a coalition of progressive and centrist forces, of
course, and the names currently popping up on his transition team have a more
centrist pedigree: Bob Hertzberg, Robin Kramer, who worked for Riordan, and Ari
Swiller, who worked for supermarket magnate Ron Burkle. How exactly Villaraigosa
balances out these forces will be one of the first indications of the course
he’ll chart.
There’s one further bonus to Villaraigosa’s victory, as there was to Tom
Bradley’s first victory, 32 years ago: It’s likely to lead to a spate of civic
self-congratulation. And, as with Bradley’s victory, it’s not entirely
unearned.
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