Tom Hayden - BEYOND THE BRADLEY MODEL

[Kevin Spidel]

(note to admin: I don't know if and where this will be published, so there is not link. This came directly in my inbox from Tom, she is one of our inital founders. He asked I "get it out far and wide." So, I posted the entire article. - Thx)


BEYOND THE BRADLEY MODEL
Villaraigosa’s election is a rare moment to think big and develop a broad progressive vision

~ By TOM HAYDEN ~


ith the election of Antonio Villaraigosa, a progressive moment has arrived in Los Angeles, an opportunity to create a thriving democratic city, to improve the living standards of a majority, and send out a ripple of hope to the country.

Antonio is among the most impressive power politicians I have ever seen, capable of a greatness beyond anything he has achieved so far.

But a power politician needs more than an infectious smile, a polished ruthlessness, a long memory, a funding machine, and the capacity to reward loyalty and punish its opposite. To sustain itself, the power must be connected to a larger purpose, a vision. Antonio is too busy at what he does well to also have that vision at his fingertips. Instead, he can tap into the community’s own search for the larger purpose that power should serve. Antonio can be the conductor for a community making its own music.

This is a mayor who comes from the left and intends to govern from the center. It follows that the progressive left of Los Angeles has the opportunity to shift gears from a culture of single issues and marginality to advocacy of an agenda for a more livable city.

As our orchestra conductor, Antonio can immediately empower several networks of community-based advocates and experts in participatory exploration of visions from below, including such issues as:



• How to deepen and expand programs for the youth of Los Angeles, including the 75,000 young people in Los Angeles who are out of school and out of work. John F. Kennedy launched the Peace Corps. What experience in public service will Antonio leave for future generations?

• How to better serve – and empower – residential neighborhoods in decisions about development and services, beyond the token start of neighborhood councils?

• How to enlist the entertainment industry in supporting arts for all the people, including training and job opportunities in the industry?

• How to make Los Angeles a truly “green” city, weaned from its dependency on coal plants that pollute the Grand Canyon?

• How to teach and cultivate tolerance in a city painfully portrayed in the film Crash?

• How to reduce the public school dropout rate every year?

• How to restore gang intervention programs and finally reform the LAPD?

• How to immediately reduce rush hour traffic, end transit discrimination against the poor, and make rail lines serve the people instead of contractors?

• How to end the self-perpetuating culture of special-interest lobbyists that dominate city hall?

• And above all, how to generate more jobs and economic benefits for city residents in a time of runaway corporations and state/federal budget cutbacks?



As candidate Bob Hertzberg repeatedly said in the mayoral primary, it’s a moment to think big. More than that, it’s a moment to open the doors of downtown to democracy, to the residents who have been suffocated by power, and specifically to the participation of the next generation of voters.

As I observed Antonio in Sacramento, it was after he powered his way to the speakership that he began searching for public policy purposes. In a hurry because of term limits, he sought a big agenda, not simply the power-broker role at which he excelled.

For example, wanting to build schools, Antonio successfully pushed a $9 billion bond measure, three times greater than measures capitol insiders were accustomed to considering. Wanting to be an environmental champion, he was persuaded to push a $2.2 billion parks and restoration measure, the largest in the nation’s history – when it passed, he did it again.

When Antonio saw the possibility of winning big, he took gambles where others had succumbed to the legislative culture of tinkering at the edges.

Naturally there are downsides to this hyperactive, high-stakes approach. Like most great politicians, the whirring, multitasking nature of Antonio’s brain leaves little time for quiet reflection or reading. Mistakes were made in Sacramento, for example, in drafting the school bond allocation formulas that hurt Los Angeles until they were fixed. The risky entanglements with lobbyists and contributors that are required to conduct business in Sacramento will come under much more careful scrutiny in the mayor’s office – as Antonio already has learned over the investigation of Florida money from bidders for airport franchises. Antonio has the old-time desires of a “Pat” Brown or Jesse Unruh in an era when the public is understandably paranoid about moneyed corruption.

Antonio has to create an “ideas network” with the same seriousness that he has built his fundraising network.

So far, all he has offered is the so-called Bradley Model of governing, an emphasis on “bringing people together” in a pragmatic problem-solving exercise. Certainly his immediate intervention in the hotel industry labor negotiations, his visits to troubled school grounds, his assertion of leadership at the MTA are welcome examples of this style.

But the Bradley legacy is a mixed one. Looking back, the greatest achievement of Tom Bradley was his election as L.A.’s first African-American mayor. No one should underestimate the historic importance of such racial breakthroughs. If they were merely “token” achievements, the city would not have been segregated so thoroughly and so long. When Antonio was growing up, Mexican youth were being demonized over the Sleepy Lagoon case, being driven out of Chavez ´´ Ravine, living in fear of deportation and police brutality. When he went to UCLA on the Westside, there were few opportunities for the Eastside. Worse, the Bradley coalition was composed of African-Americans, Jewish liberals, developers, and building trades, while Latinos were almost completely disenfranchised on the other side of the concrete Los Angeles River.

In addition to overcoming all that historic discrimination, Antonio’s victory can make him the dominant figure in Latino politics in Los Angeles, in California, and in the Democratic Party for the next generation. It is extraordinarily important that this former dropout, former MEChA leader, former labor organizer, and former ACLU official is able to shape the future so powerfully. If Antonio had lost, the inevitable transition might have been led by a more conservative figure.

On reflection, however, the Bradley Model failed beyond achieving the racial breakthrough. The developers and building trades got their downtown skyscrapers. The black middle class became the backbone of public sector employment. The Westside liberals got oil drilling foiled in the Palisades. But gang violence erupted in the abandoned inner city projects, the police behaved outrageously under Chief Daryl Gates, and the 1992 upheavals inevitably followed. Then came “Rebuild L.A.” with its false promise of $5 billion in private investment to create 57,000 new jobs in five years – a modern equivalent of the white man’s worst treaties with the Indians.

To this day, Los Angeles has failed to come to grips with the fact that it has no answers beyond clichés, and even worse, no will to demand an answer to the intractable problems of racial and economic exclusion, unemployment, school drop-outs, and child poverty. The conservative strategy simply calls for more breaks for business, the trickle-down formula. The result is that the Army recruiters have more to offer inner city youth than the traditional business community. At least you get paid to risk death in Iraq, while you might catch a bullet for free in South Central.

The liberal strategy is trickle-down with a kinder face: billions in corporate profits in exchange for negotiated community benefits. A smarter, more productive strategy, this approach nevertheless is based on approving massive projects that lead to overdevelopment in residential neighborhoods while leaving structural underdevelopment in the inner city. For example, Eli Broad’s proposed transformation of downtown into a Champs-Élysées is likely to reinforce the worst patterns of downtown special interest politics and leave another oasis of affluence in a surrounding sea of poverty – in spite of developer concessions that reach some of the poor.

Yet in the days following his victory, there was Antonio appearing with Chief Bratton, then Eli Broad, as if to reassure the power elites that Los Angeles – under a liberal Latino mayor – would be making the streets safe for orderly private investment. Arguably these were good gestures politically, as Antonio well knew, but not substitutes for policy measures that might make Bratton and Broad uneasy.

By moving to the center, without denying his past as many Democrats do, Antonio has presented a rare opportunity and a challenge to the left. Instead of Tom Bradley, he could become a modern Fiorello La Guardia, a champion of the people in an earlier gilded age in New York. Pressure him. Hold him accountable. Take jobs in his administration where appropriate. And remember, the music comes from the orchestra, not simply the conductor.

Tom Hayden teaches at Pitzer and Occidental colleges, and is the author of Street Wars. He represented Los Angeles in the state legislature for 18 years.