Summer's Over

By Frank J. Gruber

I've had a relaxed summer, column-writing wise. It seems like months since I've written anything with much weight to it. It's been travels and buses and trees.

But now comes Santa Monica's biannual political season and I have to write something substantive, much as it seems that I could pull some old columns out of cold storage.

I wouldn't have to change many names. This year, as usual, all three City Council incumbents whose terms are ending are running again. It's been a long time since a sitting council member has voluntarily stepped down -- not since Paul Rosenstein chose not to run in 2000. Meaning: (i) it's great to be a big fish in a small pond, and/or (ii) no one has figured out how to use the Santa Monica City Council as a springboard to higher political office.

Likely as not, all three incumbents -- Robert Holbrook, Kevin McKeown, and Pam O'Connor -- will win. Notwithstanding the constant complaining of squeaky wheel Santa Monicans, incumbents here lose elections less often than in Beijing.

This year it's as if the local politicians have got their acts down so tight that they're not even trying to do anything new. No Green Party tantrums over candidates who don't get the SMRR endorsement, no famous names like Bobby Shriver, no former SMRR endorsees turned independents like Mr. Rosenstein running alone, no spirited, multi-candidate fights over the SMRR endorsements, no new acronyms or civic groups (representing the same-old SMRR opponents), no angry, plague-on-all-your-houses candidates that anyone has ever heard of, let alone have a chance to win.

It's that same old song: SMRR and its candidates; the Pavlovian opposition to SMRR; and a liberal trying to run in between the two.

This year the liberal I'm talking about is Planning Commissioner Terry O'Day who, notwithstanding that his real-world (i.e., outside Santa Monica) progressive credentials are at least as good as any SMRR candidate, will have to fight to avoid the fates of predecessors like Susan Cloke and Matt Dinolfo. I.e., the fate of being caught up in the anti-SMRR vortex.

Mr. O'Day has already received the endorsement of the Chamber of Commerce, which could be his kiss of death. I am reminded of the 1998 election, when the "Santa Monica Civic Forum" originally promoted by true leftie Rosenstein as a home for independent liberals got commandeered by the SMRR opposition. The Forum ended up endorsing both Mr. Holbrook and civic good guy but Republican Frank Schwengel, along with Ms. Cloke, instead of endorsing Pam O'Connor and maintaining some credibility among Santa Monica's massive liberal center.

Ms. Cloke, despite her record as a progressive activist, could not avoid the stigma and got pigeon-holed on the right not only by SMRR's attacks by association, but also by the ham-fisted anti-SMRR campaign run supposedly on her behalf -- a campaign that Mr. Rosenstein had to disassociate himself from in a bitter letter just before the election.

You might have thought the Chamber would have learned from that, but we're talking about political hatreds handed down for a generation. By endorsing only non-SMRR-endorsed candidates, the Chamber has made itself irrelevant as compared to, for instance, the police and fire unions who are savvy enough to evaluate candidates independent of Santa Monica's ancient ideological divide.

What kind of Chamber of Commerce is so shortsighted, or rather so blinded by partisanship, that it won't endorse a hometown candidate who is the First Vice Chair of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority?

So how do I handicap the race? The past is not destiny, but it's a good place to start looking for it. Here are the figures for the top vote-getters in the 1998 and 2002 elections that featured much of the same cast of characters:

Votes Percentage

1998:

2002:

The first thing that should be obvious is that Ms. O'Connor and Mr. McKeown have been significantly more popular than their opponents. Based on the votes for local propositions on the ballot, it appears that in 1998 and 2002 about 27,000 Santa Monicans voted.

That means that in 2002, for instance, the two headliners on the SMRR ticket received the votes of approximately 50 percent of the voters -- an impressive showing in a field of six strong candidates. (Don't be fooled by the low percentage of votes the winners received; remember that each voter could vote for up to three candidates and these are percentages of the total votes cast.)

Negative campaigns against Ms. O'Connor by the likes of Santa Monicans for a Livable City (which campaigned against her at the SMRR Convention) or against Mr. McKeown by the likes of the hotel-backed Santa Monicans for Sensible Priorities may succeed, but they have an uphill battle.

The second thing that should be obvious is that Holbrook has barely won reelection each time (by 92 votes in 1998 and 296 votes in 2002). Not only that, but (i) each time his closest challenger was the third SMRR candidate (Richard Bloom in 1998 and Abby Arnold in 2002) and (ii) the independent liberal (Ms. Cloke in 1998, Matt Dinolfo in 2002) came in next, in fifth place, a significant distance behind.

Based on these numbers, we can expect that Holbrook will defeat Gleam Davis, this year's third SMRR candidate, by a few votes, and that Mr. O'Day will come in fifth.

But maybe not. In both the 1998 and 2002 elections there were six candidates with strong support from within Santa Monica's political establishment. In 1998 the sixth was Mr. Schwengel, swinging from the right side, and in 2002 it was the Green Party member Josefina Aranda from the left.

This year, there doesn't appear to be a sixth candidate who will run with the support either of SMRR's loyal opposition, as Schwengel did, or with the support of a major local political figure, as Ms. Aranda did when she ran with Michael Feinstein's support.

So there are votes for Ms. Davis and Mr. O'Day to go after. For the former, the question will be whether she can do just a little better than Mr. Bloom and Ms. Arnold did in 1998 and 2002. For Mr. O'Day, the question will be whether he can, without the benefit of a famous liberal name, capture a significant portion of Bobby Shriver's 2004 constituency -- Holbrookian conservatives, non-SMRR liberals, and SMRR-supporters not happy with all three SMRR endorsees.

Stay tuned.