Hayden Begins Bid to Become Mayor of L.A.

Promising to make Los Angeles more livable by empowering neighborhoods and creating jobs for inner-city youths, state Sen. Tom Hayden on Sunday officially launched his campaign to unseat Mayor Richard J. Riordan in April.

Introduced by his 23-year-old son, Troy Garity, as a man “with more heart and more courage than anyone I’ve ever met,” the ‘60s radical-turned-legislator and government watchdog vowed to bring together the two sides of Los Angeles, divided by race and class, which he said are “broken apart like tectonic plates” that “erupt every few decades in social earthquakes.”

“The living truth, as opposed to manufactured statistics, is that Richard Riordan has not turned L.A. around,” the 57-year-old Democrat said as he stood at his Westside campaign office in front of a wall painted red but for the stenciled “HAYDEN for MAYOR.”

“I want to build a Los Angeles that is more livable, more peaceful and more just,” he said. “We will give birth to a spiritually grounded politics instead of the traditional, business-as-usual, corrupt, entrenched old-boy, special-interest politics at City Hall.”

In pledging to merge Los Angeles’ two cities, he described one as “overdeveloped and congested,” and the other as “underdeveloped and poor,” with both living under the “complacent control of an establishment in denial.”

Riordan campaign consultant Bill Carrick welcomed Hayden into the race and said the mayor stands ready to defend his first-term record of improving public safety and making the city more viable economically.

He decried Hayden as a career politician “shopping for a new political office” because term limits give him only four more years in Sacramento and as a carpetbagger who just last fall moved into Los Angeles--in fact, into Riordan’s Brentwood ZIP Code--from his longtime home in Santa Monica.

“If he wants to debate the Riordan record versus the Hayden record, I think he’ll find that the city of L.A. will reject the Hayden record pretty dramatically,” Carrick said Sunday. “No one’s done more to make neighborhoods safer than Dick Riordan. . . . Economically we’re better off. In terms of public safety we’re better off, in terms of fiscal management we’re better off, in terms of getting along with each other we’re better off.”

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Political observers said they expect Hayden, a vigorous campaigner and media darling, to force Riordan to spend the coming months out in public detailing his accomplishments. While few say Hayden can capture enough votes to oust the incumbent, they say he is an ideal candidate to lob criticism at the multimillionaire businessman-lawyer who was elected as an outsider in 1993 and who has maintained strong approval ratings.

Though the race is nonpartisan, Hayden could win points challenging a Republican in a majority-Democratic city. But Riordan has been proactive at heading off a challenge from the left, amassing endorsements from prominent African Americans and women in recent months.

“That there will be at least one other candidate in the race is very healthy,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at Claremont Graduate School. “He may force the mayor into getting more visible, more out there, and that is helpful for the city.”

Asked whether Hayden has a chance at victory, UCLA’s Xandra Kayden said “not a very big one.” Still, she said he can run “a credible race.”

“I’m very happy he’s doing it. If he didn’t, it would be kind of a tragedy for the city,” Kayden said. “We need debate. We need a race. We need to focus the issues, and I think Tom can do that very well. . . . I think people will listen to what he says whether they vote for him or not, and I think that’s good.”

Other politicians have shied away from challenging Riordan because of his immense personal wealth--he spent $6 million of his own money in his last campaign--and because term limits will leave the chief executive’s seat open in 2001. Riordan has already amassed nearly $2 million in campaign contributions. Hayden--who is also a millionaire, although his wealth pales compared to Riordan’s--so far has raised $18,000 and said Sunday that he would throw $100,000 of his own funds into the till.

“Guts beats money,” he said. “I believe that my past, from my ‘60s radicalism to my experience as a state senator, better prepares me for public service than a background in corporate mergers and acquisitions.”

Hayden started his first official day of campaigning at an African American church in the West Adams district. He spent the afternoon walking precincts in his familiar turf of the Fairfax district and in Van Nuys, where he has long bonded with homeowners protesting noise pollution at the local airport.

Clad in a taupe suit and baby-blue oxford-cloth shirt, Hayden met with the media for an hour at a campaign office decorated with 1960s-era Kennedy posters--John and Robert--and homemade picket signs from his many battles with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Among the mostly white crowd of more than 50 supporters was a sprinkling of aging hippies--one wore a Hayden-for-Senate campaign button from 1976--and a few black and Latino faces dotted the decidedly Westside and Valley crowd.

“He’s a person that comes to the community. He knows where the poor live, and he thinks they’re human too,” Teresa Allison, of the South Los Angeles group Mothers Reclaiming our Children, said of Hayden. “I’ve never seen the mayor in my community.”

Rabbi Steven Jacobs of Temple Kol Tikvah in Woodland Hills called his candidate “a thinker and a doer.”

“He was a man of the ‘60s. He has grown. He is a man for the ‘90s,” Jacobs said of Hayden. “I appreciate his candor. I appreciate his passion. I appreciate his kindness and his tears that will make this city great.”

On Sunday, Hayden vacillated between distancing himself from his radical roots and embracing them. He left out the parts of his prepared speech that had quoted Bob Dylan and named the rebellious “Catcher in the Rye” as his favorite book, and repeated his mention of his Irish immigrant ancestors and middle-class parents.

Then he ticked off his civil rights credentials.

“I went to jail with Martin Luther King, I carried the coffin of Cesar Chavez, I helped bring Soviet Jews to Israel. I helped protect the workers in Poland in the Solidarity movement,” he said. “I believe a lifelong commitment to human rights is important to the future of Los Angeles. . . . If all the people who ever marched for peace or marched for civil rights in this city registered and voted, I would win overwhelmingly.”

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Hayden said he would release an official platform in coming days, but he sketched an outline of his priorities Sunday:

* Electing neighborhood councils with decision-making power over zoning, policing and economic development issues.

* Reforming the MTA. “Richard Riordan has had four votes for four years, and he has failed,” Hayden said. “We have to end the scandal at the MTA.”

* Creating a service corps of 3,000 college students to serve as tutors for inner-city kids.

* Expanding local schools to “deliver education and services day and night.”

* Passing a “living wage” for the working poor employed at companies that contract with city government.

* Reviving a downtown river running from the Valley through Cahuenga Pass to “the wasteland of Taylor Yards,” and improving environmental protection from the mountains to the bay to the downtown air and neighborhood parks.

* Lobbying federal and state government for summer job funds for inner-city teenagers, and nudging businesses into hiring the poor.

He declined to specify how he would pay for this broad agenda, saying only: “I’ve never seen a budget I couldn’t cut. I’ve never seen a bureaucracy I couldn’t slash.

“We need a mayor who’s connected, and who can connect with people, and who thinks livable neighborhoods matter,” Hayden said. “When I am mayor, the message will be this city is not for sale. With a mayor that leads a renewal movement, we can make Los Angeles the first example of a global city that’s livable. The possibilities of this renewal are there. Let’s not forget them.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Profile: Tom Hayden

* Born: Dec. 11, 1939

* Residence: Los Angeles

* Education: Univ. of Michigan.

* Career highlights: Calif. Senate 1994-; Calif. Assembly 1986-1992; founder and chairman, Calif. Campaign for Economic Democracy 1977-; candidate for California Democratic Party’s nomination for U.S. senator 1976; co-founder Students for a Democratic Society 1961, president 1962 and 1963; author: “Port Huron Statement” (1962); “Rebellion in Newark” (1967); “Trial” (1970); “The Lost Gospel of the Earth” (1996).

* Interests: Environmentalism; Irish history

* Family: Barbara Williams, wife; son Troy, daughter Vanessa with former wife Jane Fonda

--Rossana Flores, Times desk assistant