The Deja Vu of Bernard Parks vs. Mark Ridley-Thomas

Magic formula? Johnson, now a wildly successful businessman, endorses Bernard Parks.

Two black political heavyweights are facing off to replace an old, retiring supervisor and splitting the black vote in the process. Both received degrees from the University of Southern California. Both claim that the county's health care system has woefully failed its residents; both promise to restore it. Both are Democrats but very different kinds. Mark Ridley-Thomas is a state senator heavily backed by labor. Bernard Parks is embraced by business groups. Both coveted Congresswoman Maxine Waters' endorsement: It went to Parks, whose campaign is run by a little-known political operative named Herb Wesson III.

Now, replace "is" with "was." Replace "Ridley-Thomas" with "Diane Watson." Replace "Parks" with "Yvonne Brathwaite Burke." Replace "USC" with "UCLA." Replace "Wesson III" with "Wesson II." Chant an incantation. Repeat it. Voilà! In uncanny political symmetry, 2008 becomes 1992.

"It's funny how the Democrats — both these guys are Democrats — are fussing about change ... change," says Ted Hayes. "The only change is just a reshuffling of the chairs. It's the same reshuffled, recycled black politicians."

Hayes cuts an extreme example. He's running as the Republican for Congress against Maxine Waters, from his van, where he currently resides. But his take on this déjà vu race is echoed by others. "Time has stood still," says political commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson. "History is not so much repeating itself as there has been just political stagnation in terms of black leadership."

The result, say political observers, is malaise and dissatisfied black voters. Sixty-seven percent say Los Angeles is headed in the wrong direction; 84 percent say the same about their own neighborhoods, according to a February poll by Loyola Marymount University's Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles.

Schools are deficient. Poverty is high. Crime is rampant, and the area's big public hospital, the county's King/Drew, was so mismanaged by the county government for so many years, it had to be shuttered.

"There's probably the lowest voter turnout in the state here," says Dermot Givens, who has advised several candidates, including Parks in his 2005 run for L.A. mayor. "The electorate doesn't care. They've heard it all before. Nothing has improved. Their issues — crime, education and community development — have been the same for 50 years. Ain't shit got done!"

He adds: "Ask them what Maxine did for her district. Can't name a thing. Ask them what Diane Watson did for her district. Can't name a thing. Ask them what Yvonne Brathwaite Burke did. She got King/Drew closed!"

Back in 1992, neither the ultimately victorious Burke nor her rival Watson won an outright majority, so the campaigns headed for a November runoff. Just as today, there was no consensus on who would win. That the victory went to Burke — the more moderate, fiscally conservative, pro-business "Bernard Parks" of 1992 — has important implications for June 3: She won over black voters despite opposition from labor and the local Democratic Party apparatus. The same situation is faced by Parks, whom Burke has endorsed.

Councilman Parks is well known as the former chief of LAPD. The tall, athletic fiscal watchdog has a business-friendly streak uncommon among Democratic politicians who dominate Los Angeles. He has voted against extending living-wage laws; he is less likely to insist that developers build "affordable housing" units; and more likely to support contracting out services handled by government workers. As chair of the L.A. City Council's Budget Committee, he's something of a hawk intent on balancing city expenses and revenues — even if that means making enemies by voting against union-pushed wage increases.

Brathwaite Burke's staid doppelgänger, Parks, would have good reason to believe he'd win, if the city hadn't seen dramatic demographic and political changes that belie easy analogies to 1992. A district seat once considered forever "safe" for black candidates is probably one election away from being dominated by Latinos.

In the 1990s, tens of thousands of black residents left the 2-million-person district for safer and cheaper homes in the Valley, the Inland Empire and the U.S. South. For every black resident who left, Latinos moved in, and are now a majority, although the large numbers of illegal immigrants are hard to calculate.

In the crude calculus of ethnic politics, Latino political power is coming at blacks' expense. Latinos account for 25 percent of registered voters — a fact not lost on Parks or Ridley-Thomas, who sent out campaign literature in English and Spanish.

Back in 1992, political observers say, the strident Watson lost the race because she came across as radical to voters in south L.A. and nearby areas, where residents were badly rattled by riots that had ravaged their streets following the acquittal of four cops accused of attacking Rodney King.