This Race Is Too Long

First there was that televised debate a couple weeks ago at 5 p.m. on a weeknight. It’s as if the political Powers That Be tried desperately to find a time to stage an appearance of the candidates without anyone noticing. “I’ve got it!” some genius must have said. “It’s L.A.! We’ll have it during rush hour, when everyone’s in the car or on the bus or in the elevator or at the grocery store. No one will get hurt.”

Can’t get any lower-profile than that. Except maybe last Saturday morning’s debate. Yep, Saturday morning. 8 a.m. To control the number of witnesses, presumably.

But the candidates, too, are almost see-through. We already know Jim Hahn has a tendency to blend into the woodwork. Now Antonio Villaraigosa has started to vanish as well.

Vanishing, even with that 18-point lead and broad support around the city? Yes. Just for fun, check out the last couple weeks’ worth of Los Angeles Times headlines, up until Wednesday’s big story about the latest poll. It’s great that the Times has begun to put a few mayor’s race stories on the front page, which usually is reserved for articles on things like the gun trade in Iraq or changing life in West Texas. But I guess the Times doesn’t want to take this local stuff too far, because until this week the latest batch of mayoral stories ran under the fold and only one column wide and, sorry, Antonio, but “Villaraigosa” is just too long a word for headline writers to squeeze into one column.

So, to make things fit, Villaraigosa is now officially “Rival.”

March 25: “Waters Endorses Hahn’s Rival.” March 26: “Mayor Escalates Attacks on Rival.” March 30: “Hahn Portrays Rival as Waffler.” April 5: “Parks To Back Hahn’s Rival.” April 7: “Unlike Rival, Hahn Won’t Release Calendar.”

That last one really must hurt, because it was a four-column job in the middle of the California section with plenty of headline room. It’s just that the guy’s name has now become “Rival.” I’m starting to wonder whether voters will be stymied on election day when they walk into the voting booth and scan the ballot up and down, in vain, in an effort to vote for “Rival.”

I’m sure the Times isn’t really trying to make Villaraigosa disappear, since the paper has kind of, sort of, almost, endorsed him for mayor (the Times gave Antonio Villaraigosa and Bob Hertzberg a joint endorsement in the March 8 election and although it hasn’t yet done so, it will almost certainly endorse Villaraigosa for the May 17 penalty phase. I mean, runoff).

But I suspect that Antonio Villaraigosa’s people are only too happy that their candidate’s profile is being lowered a bit. They learned their lesson four years ago, when Villaraigosa’s exciting and purpose-filled crusade of a campaign riveted liberals, labor and Latinos.

It also may have freaked out high-propensity voters in South L.A. and the San Fernando Valley, and made them susceptible to Hahn commercials that questioned his Rival on crime, gangs, drugs and ethnicity. Villaraigosa was done in by the very same excitement that put him in the running.

His people don’t want to make the same mistake this time out, so they’re trying to go easy on that liberal, labor and Latino stuff. Disappointed as he was not to get the backing of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor again, Villaraigosa seems to relish the opportunity to depict himself as independent from Big Labor. As for the liberal part, there’s nothing about his message of restoring trust, improving traffic flow and adding more cops that’s particularly liberal, or particularly different from Hahn. On the Latino stuff, his aides have asked reporters and editorial writers to stop referring to him as the “Latino candidate” and to give a rest to such standard lines from four years ago like the one that goes, if elected he would be the first Latino mayor of L.A. since Cristobal Aguilar.

Yes, there still could be a bit of racism, possibly, at play among Anglo and African-American voters. But I think Hahn’s Rival is slightly off the mark if he thinks racism and fears of a rising Latino tide did him in last time and could do him in again. If that’s so, how do you explain Rocky Delgadillo, the underdog Latino candidate who ran away with the city attorney’s election in 2001 (and is cruising in for another term without opposition last month), scoring much of his ballot-box advantage in supposedly xenophobic South L.A. and the supposedly racist San Fernando Valley?

No, it wasn’t a race thing. It was a package deal — Harvard guy, football player, lawyer with a passing resemblance to Matt Dillon, and establishment, business-oriented ties. No excitement, no crusade, but also — and this is important — no fear that as city attorney Delgadillo would be getting in our face, asking uncomfortable questions and calling upon us to change.