Politics

Lessons From Los Angeles

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

June 8, 2001 / 4:48 PM EDT / CBS

In her latest Political Points commentary, CBS News Senior Political Editor Dotty Lynch takes a look at the Los Angeles mayor's race

This time history was not made. Despite the hype around the census reports of the "new Hispanic era" which tickled the fancy of the pundits, the Los Angeles mayoral election had a very pedestrian outcome.

The popular politician son of a popular politician father got elected because he followed the old playbook. He ignored the conventional wisdom and the editorial boards and put together an old-fashioned Democratic coalition. He found a wedge issue and ran a stingingly effective negative ad.

There are several political and journalistic lessons to be learned from the outcome:

1. Good campaigns beat bad ones. James Hahn's campaign put Antonio Villaraigosa's on the defensive on a key issue: crime and public safety. Hahn used the harshest of ads to pound the point home and Villaraigosa could never convince voters that he would make the city safer.

2. Seventy-eight percent beats 22 percent. Latinos are becoming a major force in politics across the United States and constitute 46.5 percent of all the people in Los Angeles. But despite the fact that their proportion of the electorate has more than doubled since 1993, from 10 percent to 22 percent, a big vote from Latinos isn't enough to win. Whites, blacks and Asians constituted the other 78 percent of the voters, and Hahn won almost two-thirds of them.

3. Minorities are not monolithic. The Los Angeles Times exit poll makes this starkly clear:

	Latinos	Blacks	Asians
Hahn	18%	80%	65%
Villaraigosa	82%	20%	35%

Hahn was endorsed by virtually all of the older L.A. black political leaders — including Rep. Maxine Waters, Yvonne Burke and Mrs. Tom Bradley. And Hahn's father had represented heavily black South Central Los Angeles for 40 years. A lot has been made of this ethnic balkanization and of blacks choosing the white candidate over the Latino. But much of Hahn's support from African Americans was for positive reasons— confidence in the Hahn family's track record and a belief that Hahn would owe them big time for their loyalty.

4. All politics is local. Especially when you are electing a mayor. Hahn and his family have represented L.A. for almost half a century and older voters, in particular, felt vercomfortable with his knowledge of how things work. Villaraigosa grew up on the East side of L.A. but his political success was in Sacramento, where he rose to be Speaker of the California State Assembly.

5. Watch out who you call the "union candidate." Labor made a big investment in Villaraigosa (in part to try to get a foothold in the Latino community for further labor organizing), but the L.A. Times exit poll shows that Hahn won 52 percent of the votes of union members.

Despite the loss in L.A., Hispanics are still squarely in the sights of both political parties.

The labor union movement sees great potential for growth in membership among these new workers and George W. Bush has been overtly courting them for years — first in Texas and then nationally. He has insisted that a "Hispanic" element be a part of almost all his political trips and his strategists say that he needs to grow his support from 35 percent to 40 percent of Latino voters if he is to win in 2004.

Aware that the Hispanic strategy is in the forefront of the Bush political calculus, conservatives have raised a red flag on a potential Bush Supreme Court choice. Terry Jeffrey, former Pat Buchanan campaign manager and now editor of Human Events, wrote this week that there is a "hot rumor in Washington" that Mr. Bush might choose White House counsel Al Gonzales to fill the first vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Gonzales is a longtime friend of Mr. Bush's. The son of a migrant worker, he worked his way up though Harvard Law School.

But Jeffrey writes that Gonzales was one of five justices on the Texas Supreme Court who signed an order allowing a second trimester abortion for a minor who did not have parental consent. This move has signaled, says Jeffrey, that Gonzales is a "judicial activist of the worst sort. His life story may recall Clarence Thomas but his judicial mindset recalls David Souter."

Liberals say their worst nightmare is that Bush will appoint just such a justice, "a pro-choice Hispanic Republican would be very hard to oppose," said one union official who is trying to organize Latinos.

Ethnic politics in the 21st century is a minefield of contradictions and nuances. Based on early predictions in L.A., both politicians and journalists have some homework to do to get it straight.

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