Be Positive

By Frank J. Gruber

Two lessons from this year's Santa Monica elections: 1, Negative campaigns in the absence of voter anger have limited utility here, and 2, Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights, notwithstanding the demographic changes that everyone says have altered the local electorate, is still the most trusted name in local politics.

Kevin McKeown not merely survived the barrage of negative mailers and TV ads from the Edward Thomas Management Company, he flourished; Pam O'Connor, bolstered by her SMRR and police union endorsements, shrugged off the attacks from the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City and Community for Excellent Public Schools, and Bob Holbrook ran once again in the money -- albeit, in his customary "show" position -- despite de rigueur attacks from SMRR.

Tom Donner, running for the College Board, lost in the face of attacks from the faculty union, but then it's unclear that he could have run a powerful enough individual campaign to buck the SMRR tide even if the opposing campaign had been all sweetness and light.

As for SMRR, Santa Monica's big tent political party achieved if not all it wanted, at least as much as it could have reasonably expected. Before the vote one can always envision a scenario in which Mr. Holbrook would lose, but then he never does. Of the 14 candidates SMRR endorsed in four races, however, only one lost.

Of course, it wasn't surprising that the incumbents won; this was the third consecutive time McKeown , O'Connor, and Holbrook took the top three places. (See my August 28 column.) However, once all the votes are counted, it does not appear that this year any incumbent will have received more than 50 precent of the vote.

The 25,805 votes cast for or against Prop. V (as of the County's Nov. 10 tabulation) constituted the highest number of votes for any one item on the Santa Monica ballot. Kevin McKeown's front-running 12,446 votes equals 48.23 percent of that, and we don't know how many additional voters abstained on V.

As popular as the incumbents may be collectively, no candidate or candidates can claim to speak for the "residents" as a whole. None can claim a mandate any more plausible than the one Pres. Bush claimed in 2004.

It's hard to call it even a blip in SMRR's juggernaut, but a non-SMRR candidate, Terry O'Day, came in fourth, ahead of SMRR's candidate, Gleam Davis. In 1998 and 2002, the candidate in fourth place was SMRR-endorsed: Richard Bloom and Abby Arnold respectively. But it's hard to say what Mr. O'Day's relative success means.

It might just be the comparative sizes of his and Ms. Davis' campaigns. Mr. O'Day raised enough money to wage a larger individual campaign than that than of Ms. Davis, who mostly relied on her endorsements from SMRR and CEPS. Depending on the political observer you talk to, Mr. O'Day either benefited from the efforts on his behalf of Santa Monicans for Sensible Priorities or suffered from a backlash against them.

The Santa Monica electorate is a discerning one, however, and I believe that as between Mr. O'Day and Ms. Davis, the voters preferred a candidate who had a record that was more relevant to the issues that confront the city, rather than a candidate who, notwithstanding her personal and professional qualities, was known more for her activities in the education field.

What's the upshot of the negative campaigning? Will (i) Edward and Thomas Slatkin (the hotel owners behind the anti-McKeown campaign), the Coalition for a Livable City, CEPS, and SMRR, whose negative efforts all failed, be chastened? Will the faculty union, which succeeded, adopt a dignified, hands-off policy toward the board it used SMRR and negative mailers to elect?

Why is the suspense not killing me?

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What should have been no surprise to anyone was that the most popular vote getters in Santa Monica were (i) our schools (Prop. BB received 20,157 votes in Santa Monica and Malibu, or 66.99 percent), (ii) our beaches (Prop. V: 17,208 in Santa Monica/66.68 percent), (iii) City Manager Lamont Ewell (Prop. U, giving him more authority, received 16,452 votes, or 71.31 percent), and (iv) marijuana (Prop. Y: 15,919/65.23 percent). (All figures as of Nov. 10.)

What's looking bad, though is that Prop. V, the most popular item on the city ballot is barely holding on. It needs a two-thirds vote in favor, and at 66.68 percent, it is barely one-one hundredth of a percent in the black. Worse, the trend as the County counts absentee ballots is down.

The biggest surprise was that Prop. W, the City Council's ill-fated fix for the Oaks Initiative, didn't lose so badly. It has received 47.13 percent of the vote, not bad for an orphaned measure with no campaign that faced determined and well-funded opposition.

Given W's surprising showing, and given the mess the Oaks initiative made of this election, the City Council should convene a commission to study better alternatives. Pasadena, for instance, has had success with its modifications to Oaks.

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Do administrators at Santa Monica High School need a lesson in the First Amendment?

In a front-page story in last Thursday's edition of The Samohi entitled "Book-burning Sparks Controversy," the school's student newspaper reported that school administrators, at the behest of the author of a book the school requires students to read, have forced a student who made a video mocking the book to make a new video that promotes it.

According to the article, a student made a video that depicted two Samo students anonymously burning a copy of Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America, a book that the school assigns to all of its students. The filmmaker uploaded the video to YouTube.

According to a non-random sample of Samo 11th-graders I surveyed, namely my son and his friends, Funny in Farsi has not been a popular choice. The book's author, Firoozeh Dumas, immigrated as a child to the United States with her family -- her father was an oil company executive -- and the book is a memoir. The students in my sample have described the book to me -- in withering tones -- as "ridiculous!"

Although school administrators apparently believed the book would help students empathize with the immigrant experience, those I've talked to say that Ms. Dumas' biggest complaints were with her own family and the tacky vacations they took to Las Vegas and Hawaii. They did not believe her experiences had much to do with those of most immigrants.

According to the article in The Samohi, when teachers at Samo learned about the video, they contacted the school administration to determine the identity of the filmmaker. Once he was identified, the school had him remove the video from YouTube to -- in the article's words -- "prevent further harm once it was clear that its light-hearted intentions had been lost on the viewing public."

Meanwhile, Ms. Dumas also learned about the video, and she objected to the chairwoman of the school's Summer Reading Committee. The student filmmaker offered to write a letter of apology, but Ms. Dumas rejected that. Instead she proposed that the filmmaker make a second video promoting her book. Apparently the school administrators went along with this and the new video is in post-production.

In a statement that might come from 1984, another book students read at Samo, the chairwoman of the Summer Reading Committee described how Ms. Dumas' response "touched" her; the article quotes the teacher as saying, "'What impressed me most was that, rather, than focusing on punishment, she thought the students needed to understand what was hurtful [about the film].'"

One might excuse Ms. Dumas, as an author, for being protective of her work (although she might want to listen to some Lenny Bruce records to learn more about what is funny in American), but our school administrators should know that they have no authority over how students express themselves off-campus. Nor do they have the authority to tell students what to think about the books they require them to read, or to put those thoughts they don't have into videos. They may admonish students to be polite, but the First Amendment does not have a rudeness filter.

Book-burning, of course, presents a repugnant image, but book-burning by the state and book-burning by individuals are two different things. The First Amendment prohibits the former and protects the latter.

Samo school administrators owe apologies -- not only to the filmmaker, but also to the community that expects them -- as government employees and as teachers of children -- to defend civil liberties.

After that, I would let the filmmaker do whatever he wants with his new video. Burn it, if he wants to make a point.

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Big doings at City Hall: tomorrow night the City Council resumes the process of updating the land use and circulation elements of the general plan. Read the staff report .