Old Grey Mayors Ain't What They Used To Be

Eric Ellis San Francisco

08/22/1997

Think "mayor" in the United States and you think unrequited political ambition, if not on the road to the White House then certainly connecting with it at a major intersection. The four most famous mayors in the US are Rudolph Guiliani of New York, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Marion Barry in Washington DC, and Willie Brown in San Francisco. Each is a study in contrasts.

In LA, Mr Riordan got to office because of crime, one in particular being the 1991 Rodney King attack by the police department. Back East, as smug Californians like to say, New York's Mr Guiliani's best claims to staying in office are also in crime - preventing it - though his political fortunes have tumbled after the continuing outrages by the NYPD.

Race, too, looms large in US municipal politics. Mr Riordan, one of the Republican Party's most successful politicians, got re-elected earlier this year by NOT playing the racial card in increasingly Hispanic LA. His Spanish-speaking opponent, touchy-feely Democrat Tom Hayden, played it vigorously and was comprehensively thrashed in the vote.

In mostly white and very-pleased-with-itself San Francisco, Willie Brown is arguably the most popular of all big-city mayors.

An effective dealmaker in black politics on the scale of the late Commerce Secretary and White House super-lobbyist Ron Brown,Willie Brown (no relation) plays the race card by appealing to everyone.

Ethnically integrated San Francisco helps but Mr Brown's best approach is to do the job as it is supposed to be done.

He is immensely popular among whites, blacks, Hispanics and trouble, the more the voters like it. Asians, in large part because San Francisco is one of the safest and most attractive of US cities.

An old California State Senate speaker and former organiser for Jesse Jackson's many presidential tilts, Mr Brown is so confident in office that he even takes pot-shots at sporting heroes, recently suggesting that an under-performing 49er might not be meeting his civic responsibilities playing gridiron the way he was. Mr Brown later "sort-of" apologised but many San Franciscans agreed.

In Washington DC, Mr Barry plays the race card mercilessly and the more he gets in trouble, the more the city's predominantly black voters like it, a symbol for what they see as their own sorry plight in the nation's capital and beyond.

No matter that it's DC blacks who bear most of the brunt of an appalling crime rate and city maladministration, "Ma' Ba' " is their man, one of us, even down to his weaknesses, one of which - cocaine - infamously put him in prison for six months.

Where Mr Brown recently posted a bumper municipal budget for San Francisco, to improve even further what are already impressive urban services, the incompetence and wastage in Mr Barry's system seems endemic.

Where LA, San Francisco and New York are if not awash with funds, then managing adequately, Mr Barry's Washington is permanently strapped for cash, in large part because residents are unwilling to pay for services of which they have never had the benefit. They even lop the tops off parking meters lest the city get revenue from them.

Mr Barry, top banana for 15 of the past 19 years (six months of the period out of office were spent in jail) is gradually having power taken away from him by no less an authority than the US Congress.

Since the Republican Party won Congress control in 1994, the House has passed a slew of actions designed to relieve Democrat Barry of power.

More and more real power now rests with a financial control board in direct opposition to the Barry administration. And even Democrats are abandoning Mr Barry, who has long outlived his political usefulness.

President Clinton has signed into law an amendment that gives this new board the power to reject anyone Mr Barry puts up in key positions. The noose is closing.

In New York, a different type of noose is closing, as elements of the police department seem to have interpreted Mr Guiliani's "take-no-prisoners" line on crime a little too literally.

Two NYPD officers stand accused of sodomising an apparently law-abiding Haitian immigrant with a toilet plunger, and then using it to smash his teeth.

The more lurid press accounts of the incident speak of the officers boasting that this was what tough-guy Guiliani would want in dealing with miscreants, real or imagined.

Mr Guiliani will probably be comfortably re-elected but already his Democrat opponents have gleefully seized on the incident, which is almost certain to relieve the municipality of at least a couple of million dollars in compensation and legal costs