EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was written for the current issue of Nina Royal’s North Valley Reporter.
Last winter, dozens of community activists fired off emails to thousands, manned phone banks and fanned out across Los Angeles to spread the word that the solar energy Measure B was a fraud – a multi-million rip-off of ratepayers.
They beat the City Hall political machine despite being outspent 70 to 1.
It showed that grassroots movements could make a difference if they had truth on their side and a better, well-honed tory line and used all the tools available in this high-tech era.
Two months later, community activists came together again and formed the base of support that helped elect Carmen Trutanich as City Attorney over the machine’s hand-picked legal gofer Jack Weiss and nearly pulled off an upset in the Council District 5 where Neighborhood Council leader David Vahedi faced ultra-liberal professional politician Paul Koretz.
In both those elections, solid Republican support was vital. Though only 25 percent of the electorate, Republicans are organized and often vote as a bloc, which means if you have them on your side, you only need a third of the remaining votes to win.
The CD2 special election to succeed Wendy Greuel was trickier. None of the eight candidates who actually stood a chance before the seat opened up ever stood a chance.
Assemblyman Paul Krekorian and Hollywood lobbyist Chris Essel had all the money and support from public employee unions and the power structure. They easily made the runoff, leaving the activist community in a quandary over who was the lesser of the two evils.
NC members, homeowner groups and other activists spent a lot of time auditing the candidates and overwhelmingly came to the conclusion that Krekorian was the best hope for better representation at City Hall.
The challenge now is to hold Krekorian’s feet to the fire, to make sure his staff is responsive to community needs and that he has the support he needs to stand up to the back room dealing and bungling at City Hall and avoid being co-opted.
Krekorian said rightly that the election represented “democracy as it’s supposed to be,”
neighborhood leaders coming together to beat the machine’s candidate despite having a 2- to-1 money advantage, much of it spent in nasty hit attacks.
Taken together, the elections this year provide a road map to how to seize power at City Hall.
Campaigns for seven Council seats – the even-numbered districts,
including Krekorian’s – will get under way next fall for the March 2011
primary so the time to start to work to win some of those seats is now.
We need to identify strong potential candidates who can beat Tom
LaBonge, Tony Cardenas, Herb Wesson, Bernard Parks, Jose Huizar and
Greig Smith’s anointed successor, his chief of staff Mitch Englander.
And we need to start our own political action committee to raise funds
to support candidates who will stand up for the city’s residents and
fight for reform.
At the least, a well-organized, citywide citizen’s reform movement will
put heat on the incumbents and put them on notice that we are watching
their every action and capable of ousting them from office.
Help those who help you, punish those who hurt you – that’s how DWP
union bully boy Brian D’Arcy operates, why he spent another fortune in
Essel’s losing cause.
As far as he is concerned, winning or losing don’t matter as much as
having everyone in office looking over their shoulder all the time,
fearful that he will come after them.
If the activist community wants a seat at the table of power, it will
have to act just as ruthlessly and have a credible capacity to
intimidate as well as help those who hold office.
Anyway, that’ my take-away from this year’s elections.
Which district do you live in, Ron?
I would like to nominate Stephen Box for Tom LaBonge’s seat (District 4).
Stephen Box is one-dimensional. Bikes, bikes, bikes.
Seize power and give it to the incompetent, sold out Greuel, although the judge ruled otherwise. It should make the thug and her boss D`Arcy very happy. He will at least feel he did not waste his money.
Ron lives in CD 3. He can carpet-bag over to CD 12 though. That district needs anyone but Mitch Englander to run.
That seat has been hi-jacked since 1979. Come on people, 39 years of the same exact men. First Hal Bernson was there 23 long years, from 1979-2002. Then his chief of staff, Smith (same policy) took over in 2003. Now Smith’s chief of staff, Englander wants to take over in 2011 and that will last for 12 years!
Do we really want the exact same representation from 1979 – 2023? I don’t think anyone wants 44 years of the same horrible representation!
Somebody must run against Mitch Englander. None of his Jaycees, Kiwanis, hospital board appointments, naming himself volunteers of the year will help him win. I’ve been to that district and those people are desperate for anybody but Mitch Englander.
Can you blame them? Why should anyone want 44 years of the same old thing?
Who wants to go to CD 12 to run against Mitch? Come on… You come out and declare your intent and the people of the district will do what CD 2 did and slaughter Mitch’s chances of winning.
It can be done in any district, but this is one district screaming ANYONE else!
In the spirit of cutting out the intermediary, I nominate TIMOTHY J. LEIWEKE President & CEO of AEG for CD9.
Great post!! I say let’s pick candidates for SLAP, LANCC and all the Alliances to run for the 11 seats. Ron you should run for Mayor. The people can do this because the momentum is on our side.
To: December 15, 2009 10:00 PM
You may have only seen the cover of Stephen Box – he is more than just bikes. He has interests in development, transit, environmental, energy efficiency, and much more.
He thinks “outside the box” and yes, bikes are one component that ties into others such as environmental, traffic, and dependency on foreign oil.
Unlike La Bonge, he isn’t the scarecrow – he actually has a brain and hasn’t been part of the system and therefore hasn’t been corrupted like La Bonge.
Anytime I see the name Stephen Box I chose to not attend a meeting. Stephen Box wants to control and give orders.
I will gladly vote for Ron – but then Ron would have to become “nice”. He’d have to kiss babies.
What would Bruno do then? LOL
Ron,
Thank you for calling Paul Koretz an “ultra-liberal”. As you are a former newsman, I’ve always respected your honesty.
The depiction of Krekorian over Essel as “the lesser of two evils” was very accurate. Very few people I knew were highly excited about the prospect of voting for either of them.
You have to admit that defeating Measure B was lucky. The Mayor “dumbed-down” the election by refusing to appear at a single campaign event with any opponents. The awful local media didn’t even cover the election until the last two weeks. Turnout was horrific. If the Mayor had been facing a few well-funded candidates, the spillover from higher turnout probably would have pushed Measure B across the finish line.
I agree that the citizens need to target the 2011 election to try to regain control of this City, which is currently in the hands of madmen who, evidently, believe that City funds grow on trees.
It is UNACCEPTABLE that horrible officials like jan Perry and Richard Alarcon were given a free pass and ran UNOPPOSED for their seats. City activists need to start branching out and being active with others neighborhoods.
Here are vote totals from 2007:
WENDY GREUEL 10,575
TOM LABONGE 8,486
TONY CARDENAS 4,803
RICHARD ALARCON 5,131
BERNARD C. PARKS 9,620
HERB J. WESSON, JR. 8,506
GREIG SMITH 14,749
JOSE HUIZAR 8,785
Are you kidding me? 9,000 votes to get rid of Huizar?
6,000 votes to get rid of Alarcon??
5,000 votes to get rid of Cardenas!!???
This City needs to be re-taken from the corrupt people who run it now.
I suggest Walter Moore in District 12. And I suggest David Hernandez move into either 6 or 14 and start making the rounds and getting to know people.
I suggest the following people but we have to get behind them and actually run a GOTV effort not a Walter Moore or Zuma Dogg campaign.
CD 4 – Louie Pugilese (move to NoHo Louie!)
CD 6 – David Hernandez
CD 8 – Keep Parks
CD 10 – Ted Hayes
CD 12 – Kim Thompson
CD 14 – Scott Johnson
LeBonge will be hard to beat.
But Cardenas is a sitting duck in a district with one of the city’s lowest Latino voter registration.
With a few bucks, Pugliese could blow him out of the water there- and Panorama City is his home turf.
First and foremost, for any grass root candidate to win they need to do the following:
1. Raise at least $150,000 from people personal checks. Why? With matching funds $125,000 becomes $300,000.
2. You need to hire Eric H.? Because he has the message that motivate voters to against the downtown machine.
3. Good campaign manager, to run the day to day operation.
4. Great field organizers that understand who highly likely to vote.
5.Run an a great absentee voter campaign.
6. Have a clear over message and stay on message, and understand the hot district issues, and over all city wide issue, so media does label you as a joke or glad fly.
7. Do not hire a consultant who does not like getting dirty. Politics is not for the weak.
8. Good luck and may the masses wake-up and fight back city wide.
9. do not fear the dumbass mayor and their flunkies.
10. Finally, make aggressive outreach effort to republican voters letting them know that these fake elected official have raised their taxes beyond belief.
A year ago, I urged the people attending one of Ron’s meetings to run for City Council, and I ran the numbers by them. Here’s the video, that someone posted at YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkvYKKCqr6I
It would be very easy to take over control of the City Council in the 2011 election, but only if people UNITE, city-wide, behind a slate of candidates, one for each of the districts at stake.
By the way, more people have voted for me than have voted for anyone sitting on the City Council, and that is 100% people power. I had no party behind me, no union money, no developer money. Just a bunch of hard-workting, tax-paying people from both parties who want someone real in office.
My supporters contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars, in small amounts they could afford. They spread the word door to door, person to person, by downloading flyers from me, or picking them up at a Kinko’s after I arranged for mass printing. We ran a lean and incredibly cost-effective guerilla campaign. We were outspent 15 to one, but outvoted just two to one.
That means if other people with something resembling suitable credentials — a lawyer, an accountant, a business owner, a teacher, whatever — will step up to the plate to run for office, then the PEOPLE will get behind them as candidates.
P.S. If you’re reading this, and thinking about running for office, let me give you one bit of advice: everyone thinks he or she is a genius about how to run a campaign. Monday morning quarterbacks abound.
Before you follow any advice anyone here or elsewhere offers you, ask this simple question: “Tell me about the campaigns YOU have run.”
You’ll get silence or excuses about why that’s a dumb question.
Everybody’s an “expert.” Few have actual experience.
Oh, and uh, if you can get two TERRIFIC talk show radio hosts behind you, that’s kind of huge, too! : )
P.P.P.S
In the unlikely event anyone is still reading this or cares, here are the numbers on how easy it would be to take over City Council, from an essay I wrote in August 2008:
http://web.me.com/waltermoore/WalterMooreForMayor/Essays/Entries/2008/8/2_Why_You_Should_Run_For_City_Council_-_And_How_You_Can_Win.html