Nation Topics - James Hahn | The Nation

An effective progressive movement must start in cities.

Some progressive municipal officials have jumped beyond the boundaries of their communities to address state and national issues.

The Los Angeles mayoral race raises difficult questions for progressives.

The pilot manufacturing factory for SweatX, the noble anti-sweatshop brand that aspired to prove that fully unionized and even worker-owned garment factories can thrive in a sea of sweatshops, qu

Almost a thousand boisterous supporters--most of them unionized Latino service workers--showed up on March 4 at the vote-counting and subsequent victory party for new City Councilman-elect Antoni

After nearly two years' absence from politics, Southern California's most popular progressive politician, Antonio Villaraigosa, is back on the stump.

Two years after a tragic accident, activists are celebrating a major victory.

Politics, they say, is the art of the possible. And for much of the spring it seemed possible that America's second-largest city would elect as its mayor a progressive Latino who at one time had a tattoo that read, "Born to Raise Hell." Antonio Villaraigosa hailed from the barrio, marched with striking workers, replaced municipal bromides about economic development with a call for "economic justice" and asked the right questions about the drug war, immigration and a tattered safety net. The high school dropout who parlayed a second chance into the Speakership of the California Assembly sought to build a rainbow coalition of the left in a rapidly diversifying city.

So Villaraigosa's 53-to-47 loss Tuesday to City Attorney James Hahn, the colorless scion of the city's best-known political family, was more than just another municipal dream deferred. It was a reminder to progressives in LA and nationally that coalition politics is always easier said than done. Villaraigosa's army of 2,500 union volunteers tripled Latino turnout from just eight years ago, but African-American voters--many loyal to the moderately liberal Hahn because of his father's long advocacy for communities of color, and others worried about losing political clout in a city that is 47 percent Hispanic--gave Villaraigosa barely one-third of their votes. And suburban Anglo voters were scared off in droves by a relentlessly anti-Villaraigosa campaign that portrayed the former president of the Southern California ACLU as soft on crime. Last-minute Hahn mailings to suburban neighborhoods sought to link Villaraigosa to a cocaine dealer and warned, "Los Angeles just can't trust Antonio Villaraigosa." Shelly Mandell, president of the LA National Organization for Women, said, "I've never seen anything worse done to a good person."

The viciousness of the final phase of the campaign was not typical of Hahn, whose record and rhetoric suggest he will be a more liberal leader than outgoing mayor Richard Riordan. But Hahn will never be the movement mayor Villaraigosa would have been.

The election was "a gut check," said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute. LA didn't quite have the guts to embrace what the Los Angeles Times described as "the audacity of [Villaraigosa's] aspirations for the city." (Nor, if a close unofficial tally holds, did it have the guts to elect the audacious Tom Hayden to the City Council.) But in a year when New York, Detroit, Cleveland and other major cities--all experiencing their own demographic and political shifts--will elect mayors, opportunities remain for progressives to make the rainbow real. The challenge, and it is a big one, will be to recognize that the rainbow does not just appear; it must be created. And it must be strong enough to withstand the politics of fear and division that can dash even the most audacious aspirations.

His mayoral campaign platform is the most progressive in modern city history.

VILLARAIGOSA IN LA

Labor Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa's raucous victory party at Union Station on April 10 was rife with the symbolism of a Los Angeles undergoing radical change since the election eight years ago of Republican Mayor Richard Riordan. Throngs of unionized Latino workers chanted "¡Sí Se Puede!" and the candidate addressed the crowd in English and Spanish. Villaraigosa won more than 30 percent of the primary vote, topping a crowded field in the LA mayoral race. Organized labor poured hundreds of thousands of dollars and battalions of foot soldiers into this unabashedly progressive campaign. Though he didn't enter electoral politics until 1994, Villaraigosa has forged a citywide multiracial coalition that could power him to victory in the June 5 runoff against moderate Democrat James Hahn. (Also in a runoff: ex-state senator Tom Hayden, vying for a council seat.)

ECHOES OF FUJIMORI

Former Peruvian President Alan García came literally out of exile to finish a surprising second in the primary round of voting. He will face front-runner Alejandro Toledo in May's runoff. But with either man, Peruvians can expect little relief from the radical free-market economy left behind by the Fujimori regime. Toledo promises even "more privatizations." And García says he has learned from the "mistakes" of his social-democratic past.

ON THE WEB: thisweek@thenation.com

Go back in history and read original Nation reporting from the early 1950s on legislative and judicial attempts to block black enfranchisement in Florida and Georgia. Also read Terry Allen's web-only article examining some changes on the government's official Fish and Wildlife Service website, and check out April's Death Row Roll Call (www.thenation.com).

NEWS OF THE WEAK IN REVIEW

Taking a leaf from the Chinese, David Horowitz presented an apologize-or-nothing ultimatum to the editors of the Daily Princetonian. The paper ran one of Horowitz's flaky ads attacking reparations for African-Americans (see Victor Navasky, "Publish or Speech Perishes," April 23), but in the same issue ran an editorial criticizing the ad. Now Horowitz refuses to pay his $1,007.50 ad bill unless the paper apologizes for the editorial. For Horowitz, it seems, free speech runs only one way.