It’s Riordan’s Suite Irish vs. Hayden’s Street Irish

In the crazed summer of 1968, when Tom Hayden went to Chicago to assail a tottering old order and Mayor Richard J. Daley unleashed his cops to defend it, the thought that Hayden would one day be seeking Daley’s mantle ran through absolutely nobody’s mind.

Three decades later, Hayden is running for mayor of Los Angeles. And in the unlikely, but by no means impossible, event that he succeeds, he will become, as Daley was, the Irish American mayor of America’s second city.

Through such real or fictional figures as James Michael Curley and Frank Skeffington, the Irish mayor has long been a figure of American political lore, and Daley was certainly in the grand tradition. Ethnic chieftain and capo of the machine, the Irish American mayor, ever surrounded by his retinue of pols, is etched into our historic consciousness. Though the world of European ethnic and classic machine politics has long since vanished--in Los Angeles, it never existed--the Irish mayor has survived into the third generation in such figures as Richard M. Daley the Younger and Boston’s Ray Flynn.

Hayden, though, has long seemed to lack one stereotypically Irish-pol gene: the ability to cultivate other pols. He has been a member of the Legislature for 14 years but has remained the perpetual outsider, partly because some of his colleagues were scared off by his radical past, partly because he himself often wished to play a role that was more prophetic than legislative. For years, the rap on Hayden was that he authored more books than bills.

In the past several years, however, Hayden has become increasingly effective playing the outsider on the inside. Chairing a state Senate committee, he’s held hearings that put the spotlight on such municipal follies as the MTA’s performance in awarding contracts and digging tunnels. (Since the MTA’s rationale has seemed to be that it’s necessary to destroy the city in order to save it, Hayden’s Vietnam-protesting past has been peculiarly germane.)

Curiously, the incumbent whom Hayden is seeking to oust is yet another Irishman who not only seems genetically incapable of cultivating pols, but actually shuns any contact either with his fellow elected officials or with the public at large. Richard Riordan presides over Los Angles in somewhat the same manner that Howard Hughes presided over his empire in his later years. We do not see him. The City Council seldom sees him. We must assume that he’s up there in his office--or at the California Club, or his home in the Idaho ski country--doing something at least vaguely municipal.

Riordan came to office as one of the more successful leveraged-buyout operators of our time, and, as such, he is accustomed to working in stealth. When the business of the city requires his back-room acumen--as in his dealings with airlines over increased landing fees at LAX--he’s right at home. When it requires public leadership or the practice of politics, he’s plainly uncomfortable. Indeed, the most notable thing about Riordan’s tenure is his silences.

In 1994, when half the public figures in America were taking sides on Proposition 187, the mayor of the city where 187 would have the greatest impact had nothing to say. In 1996, when Congress repealed a range of services to legal immigrants, the most the mayor could venture was that this would pose a problem for county government, but not the city. Riordan’s no more comfortable with the democratic give and take of negotiating with the council than he is talking to the public. Indeed, if the city Charter is reformed as Riordan would like it, future mayors will largely be able to bypass the council altogether. Apparently, it’s not enough to shun politics himself; he now seeks to discourage it in others.

In an odd way, Riordan’s a good fit for a city that seems disinclined to better, or even contemplate, itself. Local TV news does not want to cover the city or its government, and Riordan provides them virtually no occasions when they must. Even when he goes over the council’s head “directly to the people,” as he is doing with his charter-reform initiative, he does not seek to persuade voters himself. Riordan comes before the voters much as a corporation would wage a P.R. campaign: He funds the production and airing of commercials. If Hayden offers a charismatic alternative to the normal bureaucratic rule, Riordan offers an alternative that’s flat-out corporate.

Both Hayden and Riordan are running under the slogan of All Power to the Neighborhoods. In Hayden’s case, this is a greener and more citywide adaptation of the inner-city, anti-establishment organizing he undertook in Newark, N.J., 30 years ago. In Riordan’s case, this is substantially a smoke screen for shifting power from the council to the mayor. In either case, the slogan suggests a vision of government that’s inadequate to our needs. For while Angelenos do need more ability to control the growth and development of their neighborhoods, the greatest problems confronting L.A.--the transformation of the city into the American capital of low-wage work and the Dickensian inequality that has followed it--are thoroughly beyond the scope of any neighborhood to address. The question is whether there’s anything the city can do about them.

On this, Riordan and Hayden are diametrically opposed. The mayor believes that market forces will provide the solution. Hayden supports the proposed living-wage ordinance currently under consideration in the council, which would mandate benefits and hourly wages in the $7.50 range for employees of city contractors. Riordan and much of the city’s business community are treating this proposal, which would cover fewer than 10,000 workers citywide, as if it were just one step removed from rule by workers’ and peasants’ soviets.

The vast immigration and the substantial emigration that are integrally linked to the economic transformation of Los Angeles are transforming the city politically, too. In the opening week of Hayden’s campaign, Riordan’s consiglieri, attorney William Wardlaw and consultant Bill Carrick, both sounded gleeful at the prospect of dredging up the erstwhile radical’s past. But exactly whose vote they propose to win with this wedge issue is unclear. The ideological conservatives are already with Riordan, and the swing white voters of the kind who once responded to Sam Yorty’s red-baiting of Tom Bradley don’t live here any more, at least in nowhere near the numbers they used to.

In fact, Los Angeles is becoming every bit as much an immigrant city as Curley’s Boston--only on a scale and with a diversity that Curley could never imagine. At some point, the city’s dominant ethnic group, Latinos, will register enough voters and cement enough cross-town ties to put one of their own in the mayor’s office, in a 21st-century version of the Bradley coalition. This year, though, their choice--the city’s choice--is basically between Riordan’s Suite Irish and Hayden’s Street Irish. In a money-driven process, the Suite is usually favored. But if Hayden has shown us anything, it’s that he gets a lot accomplished out on the streets, as Old Mayor Daley could amply attest.*