Los Angeles
THERE WAS a curious symmetry about the settings of this year’s party conventions. 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. 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.”
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. 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). Riordan ran on the motto “Tough Enough to Turn L.A. Around.” But within days of his taking office, it was apparent that “tough” applied only as the adjective in “tough love.”
And if it was tough, it wasn’t right-wing. 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. Southern California conservatives soon dismissed him with the epithet R(h)INO (Republican in Name Only). But his administration proved overwhelmingly popular. 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.
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. Are there lessons Bush can take out of Los Angeles?
Rocky Delgadillo, the Mexican-American 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. “The only adjective we’re interested in applying to this administration is effective,” says Delgadillo. He describes his job as “using the greatest power on the planet — the economy — to address social ills.” 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. His latest project is the Genesis L.A. plan managed by Stan Gold of Shamrock Partners (Roy Disney’s company), which uses similar partnerships but focuses on inner-city neighborhoods.
It seems inevitable that Bush will wind up using some similar approach if his compassion ever moves from rhetoric to programs. The Riordan model has the advantage of keeping (traditionally Republican) boardrooms happy while convincing (traditionally Democratic) underprivileged voters that a booming economy has something to offer them, too. Nor does it exclude the sort of cooperation with religious institutions Bush has urged. Riordan’s rapport with Mexican Americans stems from years of (largely Catholic Church-based) charitable work in inner-city neighborhoods.
On the downside, this is a model that doesn’t require a Republican to administer it. Former California assembly speaker Antonio Villaraigosa has put together a coalition that could make him Riordan’s successor. That coalition is pro-growth, pro-labor, and pro-Latino. Said one Democrat during the convention, “Riordan has revived L.A. to the extent that the Democrats may be inclined to take it back.”
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. 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. Bush may have a harder time finessing it.”
Skerry points to increasingly strident arguments between immigration advocates and foes over “amnesties” for undocumented aliens. Even proimmigration activists used to countenance the drawing of a sharp line between legal immigrants and illegal ones. 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. 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 big problem is not Mexicans’ loyalty to Democrats but the GOP’s extreme disloyalty to Mexicans. 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 working-class 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.
Gregory Rodriguez, a demographer and Los Angeles Times contributing editor, considers the Republican gaffes grave ones. 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. Bush, in fact, could be headed for about a third of the Latino vote in California. “He has a rapport,” Rodriguez says. “He speaks to Latinos’ strengths. The one great line of his convention speech was his notion about injecting conservative values into the fight for social justice.” Traditionally conservative Mexican-American families might be receptive to that.
Delgadillo agrees that Bush’s appeals to Latinos have caught the attention of California voters. “I’ve heard a lot of Latinos comment on it,” he says. “Those things are resonating. I’m not sure that they’ll make Latinos break a voter loyalty of many years.”
Rodriguez believes that Bush’s Latino support in Texas has been overstated. 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. An even more serious problem, Rodriguez thinks, is that his rhetorical openness hasn’t brought with it much in the way of new initiatives. “It really hasn’t translated into policy in Texas,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t translate into votes in California.”
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
