Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 7, 1994 TAG: 9403080020
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: George Will
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Today after breakfast, he is bound for the funeral of a policewoman killed in the line of duty two days after graduating from the police academy. One measure of the city's mood is that Californians have just gotten permission to own a self-defense device called ``pepper spray'' and demand has dwarfed supply. Just another day in paradise. But at least the ground is holding still.
Riordan is not. He is an action-is-my-eloquence businessman who owns 40,000 books, one being ``Bureaucracy'' by UCLA's James Q. Wilson. It explains what Riordan is experiencing. Bureaucrats are more competent than he thought but bureaucracy is less so.
In the private sector, where Riordan, now 63, made pots of money, priorities are apt to be few and clear: Act quickly and at low cost. But government bureaucracies have tossed salads of priorities - do not embarrass the boss, please the politicians, comply with rules regarding affirmative action, racial set-asides, the handicapped, the environment, etc. So Riordan's approach often is to forge ahead, forgoing permission and hoping for forgiveness, as when he slalomed around normal procedures to seize a fleeting opportunity to buy land for a new police academy.
And there was the saga of ending an unnecessary towaway zone on a street in the garment district. He said: Let's do it. The bureaucracy said: Read this. The 25-page memorandum detailed the various permissions and procedures and bids necessary to get the ``traffic mitigation study'' and other stuff. Perhaps, he was told, the towaway zone could be gone in three years.
It's gone. One of Riordan's deputies and his son went out one night and took down the signs. Riordan did not authorize that, but it was inspired by a tone of wholesome exasperation set at the top.
While getting to the top, Riordan got the picture. When campaigning last spring, he filmed a commercial in front of City Hall, where the law required the presence of three city employees - a fire marshall, someone having something to do with making sure the city's cultural heritage was not damaged, and ``I never did figure out who the third guy was.''
The guy at the top of the federal government sure knows who Riordan is. Bill Clinton campaigned for Riordan's opponent but, hey, no hard feelings. Riordan purrs contentedly about his relations with the Clinton administration.
On a piano in the house on Washington's S Street where Woodrow Wilson lived his last years, there stands sheet music to a song titled ``Be Good to California, Mr. Wilson (California Was Good to You).'' Wilson, like Clinton, was elected with a plurality of the vote in a three-way race, and he won re-election because California tipped to him by 3,420 votes. Today California has 20 percent of the electoral vote total needed to win, and Southern California is the crucial battleground. That helps explain a lot, from the federal government's full-court-press response to the earthquake, to Clinton's intense intervention in negotiations that got Saudi Arabia to agree to purchase U.S. commercial aircraft worth $6 billion, a lot of which will trickle down to Southern California.
Clinton's hope for a second term depends in part on a Republican mayor's success in settling this region's jangled nerves. But the brushfires and earthquake that followed the riots may now be followed - no kidding - by killer bees coming from Arizona. So, are we having fun yet?
Riordan is, because he is doing well, and by doing so he is a living refutation of an argument against term limits, which have been imposed on California's members of Congress, the state legislature and the Los Angeles City Council. The argument is that ``seasoned professionals'' are not just preferable to ``amateurs,'' they are indispensable.
Riordan, a supporter of term limits, had a life before public life, and in it he acquired virtues (impatience; innovative approaches to evading rules) that scandalize people socialized by the culture of government. And he can equably contemplate returning to private life, so he is not risk-averse. Which is to say, he is a politician by avocation. What will they think of next?
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB