Next week’s mayoral elections here could wind up being the most significant in two decades, and the Jewish vote is likely to play an important role in determining the outcome.
On June 8, Los Angeles voters will elect a successor to Mayor Tom Bradley, who has led America’s second-largest city for the past 20 years. Bradley’s retirement will also mark the formal end of an alliance between the black and liberal Jewish communities that first elected and then sustained the African American mayor during his long tenure.
When Bradley announced last year that he was finally stepping down, it seemed as if every second Angeleno decided to go after the job. In the April primary election, 24 candidates were listed on the ballot, an embarrassment of choices that left a Chicago Tribune headline writer to wonder, “Is This a Casting Call or L.A. Mayoral Race?”
When the dust cleared, the two top votegetters, Richard Riordan and Michael Woo, qualified for the runoff. Left behind in third and fourth place respectively were the two top Jewish candidates, City Councilman Joel Wachs and State Assemblyman Richard Katz.
The contrasts between the surviving candidates could hardly be sharper and neither could the political divisions among Jewish voters.
Riordan, 61, was the only Republican among the 24 primary candidates, and although the mayor’s post is officially non-partisan, nobody is buying that fiction.
A white Catholic, conservative lawyer, venture capitalist and multimillionaire, Riordan, who is making his first run for public office, has some of the outsider appeal of a Ross Perot, though he lacks the ex-presidential candidate’s folksiness and ear for the pungent phrase.
Woo, 41, is a third-generation Chinese American, urban planner, city councilman and liberal Democrat, who has pitched his appeal to the same minority groups and voting blocs that supported Bradley.
HARD TIMES BRING UNCERTAIN VOTING
In normal times, there would be little doubt that Woo would win in this preponderantly Democratic city, and that he could count on a Jewish community that cast 88 percent of its vote for Bill Clinton last November.
Yet these are anything but normal times. As the Los Angeles Times recently put it, “Laid-back Lotus Land, inventor of the Good Life, capital of dreams, has hit upon hard times,” with “riot, recession, real estate bust and racial tension.”
In the primary campaign, Woo and Riordan largely ignored Jewish voters, assuming that Jews would back Wachs or Katz in any case. The assumption was only partially correct since Wachs and Katz together garnered only a fraction over half the Jewish vote.
The two surviving candidates are trying hard to remedy the earlier miscalculation, propelled by a number of considerations.
Woo and Riordan have both come to the realization that their neck-and-neck race will be determined by the undecided middle class, to which most Jews here belong. And they are keenly aware that Jews, who cast 16 percent of all votes in the primary, are evenly split over whom to support.
As a result, there is hardly a Bar Mitzvah or Jewish testimonial dinner without one or both candidates in attendance. Last week alone, Woo and Riordan debated their platforms at five synagogues and other Jewish venues.
Put in simplest terms, most Jewish voters are torn between the social liberalism of Woo and the fiscal conservatism of Riordan.
The chief beneficiary of the split emotions has been Riordan, with a considerable number of lifelong Democrats announcing their support for the conservative Republican.
Chief among the defectors is Ed Sanders, senior presidential adviser during the Carter administration, ex-president of the Jewish Federation Council and arguably the single most respected figure in the Jewish community.
Sanders’ support and that of others who are opting for the first time in their lives to vote for a Republican have given a certain aura of political correctness to the Riordan cause that would have been unthinkable even a year ago.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
