A Stumble by Padilla Shows His Naivete

Los Angeles City Council President Alex Padilla is getting a bum rap from those who accuse him of playing racial politics with his recent committee appointments. That said, Padilla also deserved the lambasting he took over those appointments.

The youngest member of the council, at 28, Padilla has been president of the council since July 3, when he defeated veteran Councilwoman Ruth Galanter for the post on a 9-5 vote. The flap over his first major decisions began when he excluded all three of the council’s African Americans--all of whom had supported Galanter--from two key committees that deal with economic development, housing and social services.

Those are topics of concern throughout the city, including in Padilla’s own San Fernando Valley district. But they are especially urgent in the central and South L.A. districts represented by Mark Ridley-Thomas, Nate Holden and Jan Perry. Not surprisingly, many constituents of these three council members were unhappy and, last Tuesday, 300 of them showed up at City Hall to prod Padilla into reconsidering. Padilla took the public scolding gracefully and, a few days later, announced new committee appointments that somewhat calmed the situation. He expanded the committee that oversees housing from three to five members, appointing to the new seats Holden and Janice Hahn, the white liberal whose district includes Watts. And he put Perry on the committee that oversees economic development, shifting retiring Councilman Joel Wachs to another panel.

But these moves hardly cleaned up the mess that Padilla had made. For one thing, still pointedly on the outs is Ridley-Thomas, which is no surprise but also not very smart of Padilla. Ridley-Thomas was the most outspoken critic of Padilla’s appointments and also backed for mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who lost to James K. Hahn--Padilla’s candidate. But Ridley-Thomas is not the kind of guy a savvy politician keeps as an enemy. He’s smart and respected in the black community.

Sadly, alienating someone like Ridley-Thomas is consistent with the ham-handed way that Padilla handled the committee situation. From the start, Padilla insisted that his controversial appointments had nothing to do with race, but he admits that they had a lot to do with politics. The question in the air was, why should he reward council members who had not supported his bid for president?

But if you’re going to pay hard-ball politics, play it well. And even a neophyte pol like Padilla should have known that a slap at all three African Americans on the council would upset the black community.

Padilla’s own district, after all, includes a large black population that dates from the 1940s, when Pacoima was the only part of the Valley where African Americans (and Mexican Americans) could buy homes. Any of Padilla’s black supporters in Pacoima could have warned him to handle Ridley-Thomas carefully. While it’s not believable that Padilla’s failure to do that was the result of racial insensitivity--he has too many supporters in Pacoima’s black community for that to ring true--it certainly was politically naive, and even a bit arrogant.

Padilla is not the only young Latino politician in town who suffers from those shortcomings. Like Padilla, many others of his generation attended elite colleges (Padilla went to MIT) and are impressive young men and women. But too often they lack the street smarts to balance their book smarts, and that comes off as hubris. I have lost count of how often I have heard the word “arrogance” uttered in reference to Padilla and his young allies--even by Chicano activists who dreamed of the day when a Latino would be mayor, or council president, in Los Angeles.

There is even concern about Padilla getting too full of himself in his own council district, where I grew up. One veteran community leader told me: “Everyone assumes Alex and his pals want a machine out here like [other Latino politicians] have in East L.A. If they can pull it off, more power to them. But I worry he’ll get so busy playing la politica downtown that he’ll forget where he came from.”

I’ve been spending time in the old neighborhood lately, learning about Padilla and his emergence as a citywide political force. This is the first time that a Pacoima homeboy has been in such an auspicious position. Too bad I can’t come up with anything more positive to say than this: Almost anything that comes next has to be better than such an inauspicious start.