If you look at Antonio Villaraigosa's resume line-by-line, you'd conclude that, time and again, he bought that one-way ticket to political Palookaville.
It wasn't his doing that he grew up in the projects in East L.A. But after that, his choices: agitating for immigrant workers (in the 1970s, when this interested nobody but the fringe types); the obligatory volunteer work in Cuba (where he learned that Castroism was way too authoritarian for his taste); organizer for the teachers' union; president of the board of the local ACLU.
Schlepping this resume, he entered a 1994 race for state assembly in a district just north of downtown Los Angeles. The Latino establishment in that largely Latino district (with significant enclaves of white liberals) had a candidate who happened to be white: the chief-of-staff to the outgoing incumbent. The c.o.s. had more money and endorsements; Villaraigosa had stunning charisma, an ability to make a majoritarian case for progressive ideas, a growing group of inspired volunteers, and an absolute determination not to run as the Latino candidate. He didn't have to. He won going away.
Some victories take longer. When Villaraigosa was elected mayor of Los Angeles last Tuesday, it was the culmination of a half-decade campaign that had one huge bump in the road: his defeat four years ago at the hands of the man he defeated this week, James Hahn. But it was Villaraigosa's 2001 mayoral campaign, in which he came up a buck short (he got 46 percent), that laid the groundwork for his 17-point victory this week. He was dazzling in his first mayoral run -- something new under the city's smoggy sun: charging around town, galvanizing L.A. liberals as they had not been since the 1960s, exciting local Latinos with the prospect of a mayor who is one of them. His campaign became a holy war for L.A. unions, headed by local AFL-CIO chief Miguel Contreras (one of Villaraigosa's closest allies). On Election Day, thousands of union activists walked the precincts and made the phone calls. After all, when the cameras were there and when they weren't, Villaraigosa had always been there for the city's mushrooming Latino working class -- picketing sweatshops, brokering settlements, pushing legislation.
But despite the fact that he had until recently between the speaker of the California assembly, Villaraigosa was still largely unknown in L.A., where media coverage of state government and all things Sacramento was, until the advent of Arnold, essentially non-existent. Hahn's handlers took one look at Villaraigosa's resume, and, with a loud hoo-hah, zeroed in on that ACLU item. Villaraigosa was a coddler of criminals, a shadowy menace with whom it wasn't all that hard to scare older white and black voters.
And black voters posed a special problem, since Hahn had what amounted to a genetic lock on them. Few figures were as beloved in black L.A. as Hahn's father, Kenny, who'd represented South Central on the county board of supervisors from 1952 through 1992. Kenny had been the first white elected official to champion civil rights in Los Angeles, for which his son -- an affable city attorney who hadn't particularly offended anybody on his rise to the top -- was the political beneficiary.
Villaraigosa's civil rights bona fides were second to no one's, but that didn't seem to matter. (U.S. Representative Maxine Waters [D-CA], who, like the entire black political establishment in 2001, backed Hahn, went through the entire campaign pretending that she'd never met Villaraigosa, though both had been featured speakers at numerous local ACLU events.) Villaraigosa was left with the impossible challenge of trying to build a left-to-center majority absent the black community, in which many working-class residents felt threatened by the effect of Latino immigrants on wage rates, and the political elite felt threatened by the effect of Latino immigrants on the racial make-up of formerly majority black districts. In the end, despite the best efforts of labor, Hahn carried the black vote by an overwhelming margin of 80 percent to 20 percent. (All the demographic particulars in this piece come from Los Angeles Times exit polls.)
That could have been the end of it, but for Villaraigosa's understanding of one of the key episodes in Los Angeles history: the ascent of Tom Bradley, the city's first African American mayor. In 1969, Bradley had waged a campaign much like Villaraigosa's campaign of 2001, mobilizing the city's liberals; building on and forging a coalition between the city's black and Jewish communities; and walking right into the buzz saw of incumbent Mayor Sam Yorty's red-baiting, black-baiting, scare-the-bejesus out of everybody campaign. Bradley, a career police officer until he was elected to the city council, was portrayed as a co-conspirator of the Black Panthers (this was 1969, after all) and saw his lead turned into a deficit by Election Day. But he maintained the loyalty of L.A. liberals and the black community; when he ran four years later -- no longer an unknown quantity and waging a studiedly centrist campaign -- he ousted Yorty and governed the city for the next 20 years.
Villaraigosa followed the Bradley plan to the letter. Retaining the allegiance of liberal L.A. (and in the Los Angeles Times exit poll, 47 percent of Tuesday's voters identified themselves as liberal) and the Latino community, he ran a very cautious campaign to expand his support among groups he lost to Hahn four years ago. "I'm less exciting and less scary than I was four years ago," he told me during the primary, and he surely was. Hahn's henchmen dredged up variations of the same attacks they'd leveled four years previous, but they didn't stick this time around. Partly, that was because Villaraigosa unswervingly affirmed such centrist positions as support for a larger police force. Partly, that was because Hahn's own tenure was both lackluster and pocked with sleaze.
With Tuesday's election, Villaraigosa has successfully formed a new urban liberal coalition, with the Latino immigrants who have remade urban America at its core over the past quarter-century. This, too, follows in the path of Bradley, whose 1973 victory was a harbinger of the dominant urban liberal regime of the 1970s and 1980s, in which the African American community was pivotal.
Four years ago, Villaraigosa was already the candidate of the future, winning 57 percent support among voters under 45. (On Tuesday, he swept that group with 75 percent support.) This time, he increased his share of the black vote from 20 percent to 48 percent -- with 59 percent support from blacks under age 45. To a certain degree, that's because Contreras's labor movement has cultivated and helped elect a new, younger political leadership in black L.A. that shares Villaraigosa's class-based liberalism. Villaraigosa lost the white vote to Hahn by 18 points four years ago; he and Hahn each got 50 percent this time around.
With the Latino vote, of course, Villaraigosa cleaned up, pulling down 84 percent support. What's crucial here is the growth of the Latino electorate (just as the growth of the black electorate -- now in decline -- was crucial to the rise of Bradley). In 1993, when Republican Richard Riordan won election as mayor, Latinos constituted 10 percent of the electorate. Four years ago, when Hahn was elected, they amounted to 22 percent of the voters. This Tuesday, the Latino share rose to 25 percent, and turnout was highest in the city's two most heavily Latino council districts. A quarter of the electorate is a big enough bloc to put a Latino candidate in the mayor's office -- if that candidate is, as Bradley was and Villaraigosa is, a persuasive tribune of a non-nationalist progressivism.
That's certainly a fair characterization of the record Villaraigosa built as assembly speaker. There, he was a leading advocate for greatly increased spending on schools and parks. In the city, he's been identified with the idea of linking development to mandates for a living wage, community-based hiring, and environmental mitigation (sort of a "growth-with-justice" agenda).
With L.A.'s public schools in sorry shape, and in a city where the mayor has no statutory power over the school district, Villaraigosa's chief challenge will be to use his moral suasion and political clout to achieve some power over, and some improvement of, the schools. It's a daunting challenge, but the exit polling makes clear that improving the schools is certainly the number-one expectation of those voters, particularly the Latino voters, who supported him. In a world of mobile capital and declining political clout for cities, any mayor's freedom of maneuver is limited. If anyone can shape a new generation of civic liberalism, however, Villaraigosa's the guy.
He certainly comes to power with an unusual pedigree. Most Latino mayors and citywide elected officials in other sizable cities -- Henry Cisneros in San Antonio and Federico Pena in Denver, among them -- have been darlings of some parts of the business establishment, which championed their rise to power. Villaraigosa rose in large part on the strength of L.A.'s civic left, a network of activists whose power ultimately depended on the city's labor movement, the most potent and dynamic of any American city. Only after he ran first in the 2001 primary did he win significant backing from leading figures in the city's business elite. The trajectory of Villaraigosa's career, in this sense, reflects a civic balance of power peculiar to Los Angeles. He has triumphed on the strength of the new Los Angeles, whose future is now his to chart.
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large. His column appears weekly.