Mayor Needs to Extend a Hand to Rest of L.A.

We can’t escape our pasts. Although Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan subscribes to the social activism of progressive Catholicism, he is also a product of the 1950s, when white men ruled for the benefit of other white men. Since then, his experience has been in a narrow segment of the business world.

Riordan, a lawyer, specialized in leveraged buyouts and other intricate corporate takeovers. This is a business for tough, paragraph-by-paragraph, dollar-by-dollar negotiators. It’s lawyer versus lawyer, facing off in private rooms, far above the crowd. Most important, while these attorneys often engage in ferocious combat, they’re usually the same kind of guys. And I mean guys.

Compare Riordan’s business life to that of the CEOs of Ford, General Motors or Chrysler. They must see the big picture. They oversee research, manufacturing and marketing. They face engineers, assembly line workers and unions, fickle consumers and government regulators, as well as boards of directors and shareholders. If they can’t deal with this diverse constituency, they fail.

Riordan’s own special business experience is reflected in his work as mayor. Nobody knows exactly how he spends his days, since his daily schedules are so brief as to be useless. But his aides say he works his tail off.

Much of what he does, they say, is behind the scenes, leveraged buyout style, on the telephone in his private office, persuading businesses to locate in L.A. Snagging the DreamWorks film industry complex for Playa del Rey is evidence of that.

He also, aides say, spends many hours in the community. I’ve been on some of those trips. Riordan usually speaks to fans. When he ventures into predominantly black and Latino South Los Angeles, more often than not the mayor is talking to friendly or nonhostile groups carefully selected by his staff.

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I reflect on the mayor’s background and style in light of new poll results that demonstrate Riordan’s continued failure to win support of African Americans and Latinos.

The Times Poll, taken last week, showed that 60% of the whites surveyed approved of the way Riordan was doing his job, compared to 30% for blacks and 34% for Latinos. Asian Americans are more inclined to support Riordan, but not to the extent whites do.

Most Latinos and a plurality of blacks told pollsters Riordan wasn’t doing a good job of reaching out “to all kinds of residents.” Most whites said that he was.

This may not be of immediate concern to Riordan and his political advisors, already hard at work on his 1997 reelection. While African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos are a majority of Los Angeles’ population, whites, with a higher election day turnout, constitute a slight majority of the electorate.

Still, I think one of Riordan’s tasks is to at least try to bring these diverse and often feuding groups together. I know that not everyone agrees. As one of my readers said in an e-mail the other day: “We have let L.A. slowly slip down the drain due to apathy, factionalism and a woefully misguided faith in the values of ‘diversity.’ ”

I wouldn’t trust people who think that way to run a city, an army, a country, a corporation, a university or any other institution in a society that is moving away from the narrow views of a past America that was supposed to speak in a single voice.

But Riordan, a stubborn creature of another time, finds it hard--and perhaps not particularly worth his while--to change.

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Leadership in L.A., 1996, is having the guts to meet with opponents, even if they’re hostile and unmannered. Years ago, I covered another rich, white, Catholic guy, and he did that. Robert Kennedy talked to anyone, any time, until he was killed, ironically, by a man who preferred a gun to dialogue.

But before Kennedy died he showed the value of meeting with people who disagreed with him. Riordan should also meet with his critics in L.A.’s many communities.

The mayor no doubt will take comfort from many of the poll numbers. They show he can be reelected, especially against a punching bag of an opponent. But they also tell him that he’s only mayor of part of L.A. And that’s not nearly enough.

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Correction: Last week, I misread my notes and called a Superior Court judge Edward A. Ferris. He’s Edward A. Ferns. I should have listened when my elementary schoolteachers told me to improve my handwriting.