Endorsements, Election Day March 8

 Mayor: Antonio Villaraigosa

We’re disappointed and even annoyed that with five Democrats in the mayor’s race, we do not see an ideal candidate running for mayor of Los Angeles. We want someone who can represent all of Los Angeles, someone who will bring the city together. We want a candidate overflowing with ideas — and detailed plans for carrying them out. We don’t just want good intentions, we want someone who knows how to make the city’s departments work together. And we want to hear a strong orator fostering empathy and unity and inspiring residents to overcome the social forces and miles that make South L.A. seem so far away from Woodland Hills.

Antonio Villaraigosa is almost this candidate.

In the past, Villaraigosa displayed the leadership, drive, vision and risk-taking we want in a new mayor. Running against Jim Hahn in 2001, Villaraigosa energized many in the city around a movement to improve the lot of L.A.’s low- to middle-income residents and rallied us with a call to empower his new coalition behind unionization and living-wage drives. All that is now put at risk by his lackluster campaign. Villaraigosa must rekindle citywide talk of those aspirations, and nail down specifics on how he’s going to fix the city unless he wants to deliver another concession speech. He’s made a point of saying that he is not scaring voters this time around. Well, he’s overcompensated. He needs to stop being so afraid of alienating whites, or at least white moderates. The city’s demands have intensified in four years, and so have ours. He needs to be less arrogant around his natural constituency and more careful about the promises he makes — specifically, when he “unequivocally” assured residents from Eagle Rock to Boyle Heights in 2003 that he would serve his full City Council term if they elected him instead of the incumbent.

A good deal of Villaraigosa’s appeal in 2001 came from his personal story of overcoming hard luck — raised on the Eastside by his mother who was beaten by his abusive, drunken father, abandoned by his father at age 5, kicked out of Cathedral High School for bad behavior, graduated from UCLA and later rose to speakership of the state Assembly in four years where he brought together Republicans and Democrats to support health care for poor families and massive bonds for parks and new schools. Such a powerful story is no longer enough. We want to see more of the attributes developed in those harsh formative years: the brashness, the fighting spirit, the impetuousness. Years ago, Villaraigosa removed the words “Born To Raise Hell” that he had tattooed on his right arm as a 15-year-old. Too bad. He needs to draw on that spirit now because the city needs him.

More than a quarter of the city’s residents live in poverty and only 39 percent own a home, the second lowest rate in the nation. The police department, recovering from the Rampart scandal and now questioned for the senseless fatal shooting of 13-year-old Devin Brown, still resists steps to make itself fully accountable to the public. The environment, from our worst air in the nation to our polluted beaches, sickens and kills thousands every year. L.A. needs a big-city transportation system, with subways and light rail to serve more than a few pockets of the city. A major city institution, the 8,000-employee Department of Water and Power, is rocked by allegations of mismanagement and rampant discrimination of workers and retaliation against those who seek fairness.

Most important, Mayor Hahn and his administration face three investigations into allegations that the best way to win a lucrative city contract is to donate lots of money to Jimmy’s campaigns. If it were not for these investigations into his office by the feds, the district attorney and the Ethics Commission, Hahn would almost be appealing. Forget the fact that he seems like a guy who can’t wait to leave City Hall and go home at 5 o’clock, and has the personality more befitting an IRS auditor. Hahn gets credit for hiring PR-savvy Police Chief William Bratton, who’s spent much of his first two years restoring order in a department wracked by corruption. Hahn also fought off Valley secession and became much better on labor and environmental issues the closer he got to his re-election campaign. But the Hahn era of city corruption cannot be ignored. Even though he has been untouched so far by indictments, Hahn has done nothing to assure us that he will put an end to the malfeasance nor even shown real outrage over the wrongdoing. Villaraigosa, at least, has put out an ethics proposal and spells out plans for cleaning up City Hall. And when Hahn hesitated to get involved in the MTA strike of 2003, Villaraigosa stepped in and helped end the 35-day strike.

Bob Hertzberg, the most moderate Democrat among all the candidates, would be a near perfect fit for the job were it not for his pandering to the white-flight vote with a vague plan to break up L.A. Unified. His undefined plan won Governor Schwarzenegger and Richard Riordan’s backing. The ploy to curry the Valley and Republican vote is all the more disheartening because Hertzberg has resisted all attempts to get him to outline his plan. It’s simply too big of a deal to drop on voters and expect them to wait for specifics until he’s elected. Splitting up the school district is not a new idea, and would further strain the division of haves versus have-nots in the city. We want better L.A. schools, but too many things can go wrong for Hertzberg to expect voters to trust him on this one.