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The GOP In City Hall
Originally appeared in the Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, July 5-11, 1993
A Republican big-city mayor is an exotic creature. In recent times, the League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, eager to appear bipartisan, have recruited Republicans from Cleveland, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Orlando for one-year terms as president. But more often, these organizations have had to go to places like Colorado Springs, Colo.; San Juan; York, Pa.; and even Scotland Neck, N.C., to find card-carrying Republican mayors.
Thus it was a novelty to have recent visits by newly elected Republican mayors of the Democratic bastions of Jersey City and Los Angeles. The victories of Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler and Los Angeles Mayor-elect Richard Riordan have brought great cheer to the GOP. But after listening to the two men, my guess is that the help they can give the Republicans is very different from what the party leaders may suppose.
Schundler, a 34-year-old Wall Street whiz, was a registered Democrat until three years ago and worked for Gary Hart's unsuccessful presidential bid.
Riordan, a 63-year-old venture capitalist, has as his political alter ego William Wardlaw, a Democrat who chaired President Clinton's 1992 California campaign. Wardlaw was at Riordan's side every step of the mayoral race and now heads the transition team planning the new administration.
On his first visit to Sacramento, the mayor-elect says, he publicly rebuked an enthusiastic Republican assemblyman who hailed his victory as a boost for the beleaguered state GOP "You're not helping me," Riordan told the cheerleader.
To say that neither man is overtly partisan is not to say that their victories are unimportant signals of underlying political shifts. Jersey City had been under Democratic control for 75 years; Los Angeles, for 36. Clinton endorsed Riordan's opponent, who employed hot-shot Democratic media strategist Robert Squier; in Jersey City, Sen. Bill Bradley and the state and local Democratic organizations went all-out to beat Schundler.
The election of these two white businessmen in heavily minority cities clearly suggests that the Democratic "lock" on city hall is as mythical as the Republican "lock" on the White House proved to be last year. Riordan benefited from the visible loss of energy in the regime of retiring 20-year Democratic Mayor Tom Bradley. It was the jailing of the previous Democratic mayor of Jersey City that created the special election last November in which Schundler won a narrow plurality victory over 18 foes. In May, when he went head-to-head with a single Democratic contender for a full term, Schundler trounced him 2-1.
Both men profited from the law-and-order issue that has been a staple of national Republican campaigns. Riordan won middle-class voters by promising to put 3,000 more police on the streets in the next four years. Schundler sharply increased foot patrols during the eight months between his first and second campaigns and was able to brag of a 13 percent reduction in crime.
But beyond that, neither man offers a conventional Republican approach. Schundler's top priority is creating a city-wide experiment with education vouchers -- a radical remedy for a school system that he says is spending $9,200 per pupil but getting less than one-third of its students through high school. Riordan mourns the fact that "a 6-year-old minority child in Los Angeles has only a 10 percent chance of reading at grade level when he or she finishes the 12th grade, which means there's a 90 percent chance that child will be almost unemployable."
He says the school system holds the key to Los Angeles' future. But since he does not control the schools, he will focus on reducing the threat of crime, which he calls the biggest barrier to bringing in more jobs.
Both these men are comfortable talking in more compassionate terms about social problems than their image as hard-headed businessmen first suggests. They both seem personally burdened by the plight of their cities' underclass. True, they want to provide relief for local property-taxpayers; Schundler already has begun. But in a notable deviation from national Republican rhetoric, both explicitly argue that suburbanites will have to pay more of the costs that now fall on center-city residents. Redistribution is not anathema to them.
Partisan or not, they represent a welcome -- and needed -- new strain of Republican leadership. T he GOP has had so little first-hand experience with big-city government that never in 20 years have Republican administrations had a secretary of Housing and Urban development who had spent a single day as an elected official in city hall. Conceivably, despite their nonpartisan stance, people like Riordan and Schundler will have lessons to teach.
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