Un Alcalde For L.A.

19 May 2005 |permalink | email article

Antonio Villaraigosa is the first Latino to be elected mayor in 133 years. An historic victory, but not a surprise upon further reflection. My observations:

FIrst, the spirit of Tom Bradley lives. He lost to Sam Yorty in 1969, but came back to win in 1973 with a broad based coalition led by a black-Jewish alliance. Villaraigosa has blazed the same ethnic trail. After losing to Hahn four years ago, he was able to refashion the Bradley connection, this time forged by a black-Latino alliance. Significantly, Villaraigosa won on more than the votes of Latinos, who make up almost half of the city’s population but barely a quarter of the electorate - the same way Bradley succeeded 32 years ago. 

Second, L.A. Times poll data is revealing. The March primary had the former Assembly Speaker beating incumbent James Hahn by 18 points. That number dropped to 11 points last week. But the final vote tally restored the percentage to 18. If there was any uncertainty about the outcome it was because both candidates ran such negative and uninspiring campaigns that Hahn’s fatal vulnerability was not always transparent.

The conventional wisdom was that a turnout well below 30 percent might help Hahn, while a higher total would give a huge boost to Villaraigosa. Wrong. When Hahn beat Villaraigosa by 7 points in 2001, turnout was 37.6%. This week, just 30.37% of Angelenos voted and Villaraigosa won. That 70% of registered voters stayed away suggests to me that L.A. qualifies, politically, as a “siesta city.” 

The CW also was, as both candidates made clear, the campaign would come down to which one the voters trusted more. Wrong again.

LAT’s exit poll said voters sent a clear message they wanted change at City Hall. More than 7 in 10 said a new direction was necessary, including roughly a third of Hahn’s supporters. While voters had a very favorable view of Villaraigosa, the opposite was true about Hahn. The two constituencies where Hahn hoped to become the “comeback kid” - among blacks and in the San Fernando Valley - he struck out. Among black voters who supported Villaraigosa, nearly 2 out of 5 cited the firing of Police Chief Bernard Parks, who is black, as a main reason for their vote. In the Valley, nearly 3 in 10 cited secession as the main reason for supporting the challenger. These issues killed the mayor in his two 2001 strongholds.  Hahn’s the first L.A. mayor to be denied a second term since 1933. That year, John C. Porter lost to the corrupt Frank L. Shaw, who was recalled in 1938.

Third, Villaraigosa is the first mayor of Mexican-American heritage to lead the city since Cristobal Aguilar’s two terms ended in 1872. His victory this week needs to be viewed in the fuller context of L.A.‘s Hispanic character - not well known and lacking in main media perception.

To refresh the facts, Los Angeles is historically a Mexican city with a rich Spanish past. The late L.A. historian W. W. Robinson wrote that the city was born on September 4, 1781, as a farming community - a Spanish pueblo - on the west bank of the Porciuncula or Los Angeles River. “The founders or first settlers were eleven families - forty-four men, women and children - who had been recruited and outfitted in Sonora and Sinaloa, Mexico. The heads of the families were all farmers, men of Indian, Spanish and Negro ancestry who knew how to work the fields.”

Octavio Paz, who briefly lived in L.A. during the late 1940s, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. His celebrated study of the Mexican character, The Labyrinth of Solitude, offers a quintessential snapshot of the city at that time:

“At first sight, the visitor is surprised not only by the purity of the sky and the ugliness of the dispersed and ostentatious buildings, but also by the city’s vaguely Mexican atmosphere, which cannot be captured in words or concepts. This Mexicanism - delight in decorations, carelessness and pomp, negligence, passion and reserve -  floats in the air.  I say “floats” because it never mixes or unites with the other world , the North American world based on precision and efficiency. It floats, without offering any opposition; ...it sleeps or dreams; it is ragged but beautiful. It floats, never quite existing, never quite vanishing.”

In real time, there is the blogger Marc Cooper’s prescient observation in the Huffington Post yesterday that the election of a liberal Latino Democrat “has huge political symbolism at a time when the national immigration debate is simmering.” And simmering it is.

Bob Hertzberg, ironically, was the only candidate who figured out, through early polling, that change is what voters wanted. His web site was changela.com. Had he not lost to Hahn by just over a point, the runoff with Villaraigosa might have been very different. The front runner never felt the need to spell out in detail what he meant by moving the city ahead, either in debates or with frustrated editorial boards. But his rope-a-doping worked with non answers because Hahn was a one-issue opponent on crime. The mayor-elect is the un-Hahn who does not yet command broad political allegiance despite his huge vote.

Suddenly, Villaraigosa is the smooth-talking new national Latino media star, a player in the 2006 state and federal campaigns with a seat at the table in selecting the next presidential candidate. There is a concern that all this may divert his attention from preparing to take office in six weeks; putting together the savvy staff that Hahn lacked; acting on his ambitious agenda; bringing in a new breed to replace rollover city commissioners; tapping into the neighborhood councils for talent;  and developing tough conflict-of-interest ethical standards.

He makes both business and the city teachers union nervous. And there are many huge campaign promises with no funding answers yet - 1,300 new cops; billions to extend light rail citywide; 100 million annually for the city’s Housing Fund Trust; billions for an alternative to Hahn’s controversial plan to modernize
LAX which he rejects.

Welcome to City Hall!

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