Even by the fast-forward standards of California politics, where term limits bump off the entire state legislature every eight years, Antonio Villaraigosa has had a meteoric career. In the early 1990s, he was an organizer for the teachers' union, a county supervisor's delegate on the L.A. transit board, and president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California--none of these particularly promising starting points for a career in politics. By 1998, astonishingly, he had become speaker of the California Assembly--and today, he is the great progressive hope in the upcoming election for mayor of Los Angeles.
The question now is whether Villaraigosa can hasten the course of L.A.politics-- and that of urban progressivism generally--as he has his own career.For if he is to win the election to succeed the term-limited (and conservative)Richard Riordan as mayor, he must construct a brand-new electoral alliance amongcommunities that have almost nothing in common.
The Villaraigosa coalition begins with the Latino immigrants, who have beenvoting for only the past few years, and with Los Angeles's Latino-led labormovement, which has brought those immigrants to the polls. His coalition thenradiates outward to include those liberal, Democratic, and Jewish voters for whomVillaraigosa's core electoral base is so economically and culturally distant fromtheir affluent Westside world that it may as well be on another planet.
Urban politics in America is the politics of ethnic succession, and aVillaraigosa mayoralty would signal the transition from the black-led urbanliberal coalitions that came to power beginning in the 1960s to Latino-ledcoalitions that will certainly dominate urban politics within a decade or two.Most black-led coalitions sputtered and died in the early 1990s: As theAfrican-American share of America's major cities began to decline, and as blackcommunities became more politically isolated from their historic allies, MayorsTom Bradley of Los Angeles and David Dinkins of New York City, both blackDemocrats, were each succeeded by white Republicans. In Chicago, Mayor HaroldWashington's early death led to a restoration of the Daleys. In the 1997 mayoralelections in both New York and Los Angeles, the number of Latino voters equaled(in New York) or exceeded (in Los Angeles) that of black voters for the firsttime.
It's clear from Los Angeles's changing demographics that the city's Latinocommunity will by sheer dint of numbers be able in eight years to elect a mayorof its own. By running this year, however, Villaraigosa is attempting to dosomething much more important. Precisely because the Latino vote is by itselfstill too small to sweep anyone into city hall, he is building a cross-racial,citywide progressive coalition--much as Tom Bradley did when he was first electedmayor 28 years ago.
In the years leading up to his mayoral victory, Bradley built a crosstownreputation as an apostle of civil rights and police reform while immersinghimself in the causes of a vibrant and very liberal Democratic-club movement.Villaraigosa has consciously modeled his career on Bradley's, updating his causes for the exigencies of the time. He is pre-eminently the tribune ofeconomic equity--a champion of the city's janitor and hotel worker unions, ofthe living-wage and affordable-housing movements, of urban parks, and ofcivilian control of Los Angeles's perpetually paramilitary police.
But the political landscape that Villaraigosa confronts may provemore treacherous than the one that Bradley faced. The blacks and Jews who cametogether to elect Bradley had been working together in the civil rights movementfor a full decade when Bradley first ran; they had gotten to know one anotherthrough the city's Democratic-club movement. No equivalent crosstown fraternityor political structure exists today; and the Democratic clubs that have wheezedinto the new century look for all the world like chapters of the American Association for Retired Persons.
To be sure, the institutions of the next urban progressive coalition have allendorsed Villaraigosa--the main environmental and women's groups and, mostimportant, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, which by expertly mobilizing union members and Latino voters has won nearly every contest in which it has intervened over the past five years. He also has the support of Congressman Henry Waxman, an icon of Westside Jewish liberalism.
Indeed, of the six major mayoral candidates, Villaraigosa is one of only twowho poll respectably across racial lines. His problem is with constituenciescloser to home. He is splitting the Latino vote with a second Latino candidate,Xavier Becerra, a congressman with an almost impeccably liberal voting record.But Becerra has been as absent from Los Angeles's political scene and itsstruggles as Villaraigosa has been ubiquitous. He registers virtually no supportoutside the Latino community--yet his support within it is the reason whyVillaraigosa trails the leading candidate, City Attorney James Hahn, as the April 10 primary election approaches. (In California's nonpartisan municipalelections, if no candidate receives a majority in the primary, the top twofinishers then run against each other in the general election. The latest LosAngeles Times poll shows Villaraigosa tied for second with Republican businessman Steve Soboroff, whom Riordan supports; one of them will likely oppose Hahn in the June runoff.)
Hahn owes his lead to the fact that he's the only candidate with an electoralbase largely to himself in the primary: the African-American community. Not thatHahn himself is black. The black share of the L.A. electorate is too small, andthe black political leadership too old, to mount a candidate of its own. Hahn'sfather, however, the legendary Kenny Hahn, represented South Central, the centerof black Los Angeles, during his 40-year term as a county supervisor; hechampioned the community before any other local elected official dared do so, andhis son still reaps the goodwill his father sewed.
Villaraigosa's difficulties in black Los Angeles go beyond the Hahns, however.Though it's Villaraigosa, not James Hahn, who is the leading exponent of policereform in this year's mayoral field, the black community is no longer marchingunder the police reform banner. Tom Bradley solidified his support in black LosAngeles by standing up to the racist brutality of Chief William Parker's cops atthe time of the 1965 Watts riots. In 1993 mayoral candidate Mike Woo won thevotes of black Los Angeles over Richard Riordan by opposing the racist brutalityof Chief Daryl Gates's cops at the time of the Rodney King beating. YetVillaraigosa gets no such bump today. He's been a leading critic of the racistbrutality of Chief Bernard Parks's cops in the Rampart police scandal--in whichpolice have admitted to shooting manacled suspects and generally running amok ina poor, immigrant neighborhood. But because Parks is black and the department'svictims were Latino, the black vote for the police-reform candidate--a sine quanon of the old black-led liberal regimes--is nowhere in evidence.
Should the runoff pit Hahn against Villaraigosa, it would truly be acontest between the last standard-bearer of the old urban liberal order and thefirst standard-bearer of the next. Programmatically, Hahn seems like a throwbackto the Bradley past; he advocates a hugely expensive subway construction projectthat endears him to some old-guard building trades unions. Villaraigosa's supportcomes from the more low-wage, service-sector union locals. While Villaraigosaerrs on the side of spontaneity, Hahn combines some of the stiffness of Al Gorewith a bit of the dullness of George W. (like Gore, he's the career-pol son of acareer pol). Both candidates can be counted upon to support most mainstreamliberal causes--but Hahn would be led to them, while Villaraigosa would lead themhimself. Between this white black candidate and this Latino labor candidate, LosAngeles will actually be choosing between epochs, between regimes.
