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.
