LOCAL MOTION
Councilman Eric Garcetti's quixotic neighborhood campaign strategies might be exactly what the Democ
Last weekend, Eric Garcetti braved torrential rain and threw his all into the campaign to retain his city council seat in Los Angeles's 13th District. First off was a pancake breakfast at a Hollywood charter school, where he addressed an eclectic crowd of punks, writers, Scientologists, Latino families and various neighborhood activists. Then he hit the streets - Silver Lake on Saturday, Hollywood again on Sunday - to register new voters before the deadline for the March 8 election.
"I want your vote very much," he told his constituents. "I want to earn your vote."
So far, so ordinary, except for one thing: Garcetti is running unopposed. Most politicians would take that as a free pass to spend more time playing golf, or schmooze with future campaign contributors, or hang out more with their children. But Garcetti is campaigning anyway, and has done so with zeal and energy on each of the last several weekends.
His rationale is simple. Democracy is not something that comes around every four years. It is a daily exercise. In his district, the third poorest in the city, barely 10 percent of eligible voters show up on Election Day, so there is hardly room for complacency. Besides, as he sees it, voting is only the starting point for democratic participation. If people are to have a stake in their city, they need to be involved - intelligently, passionately, continuously.
It's hard to argue with any of these observations. They are, after all, the bedrock of what any flourishing democracy is supposed to be about. And yet, simply by making the observations and living by them, Garcetti is triggering a quiet revolution in the way politics is practiced - not only in this city, but potentially much further afield.
For too long, American politicians have focused on the core group of voters who can be counted on to get them reelected, and ignored everyone else. Electoral competition has shriveled down to almost nothing, as gerrymandering and campaign finance rules have made incumbents well-nigh unassailable. Positions on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors have turned into virtual sinecures for life, as has the position of county sheriff. Not a single congressional or legislative seat in California changed party hands last November. On March 8, Garcetti will be one of three council members whose races are uncontested, along with Rocky Delgadillo, who faces no opponents for city attorney.
Garcetti's approach is refreshing, and not only because he has the candor to acknowledge how unhealthy this situation is. He is also addressing it head-on. For the past four years, he's organized a Leadership Institute, cycling groups of 25 to 40 district residents through a three-month training program that teaches them the basics of community organizing, how to conduct meetings, and how to interact with the city bureaucracy. He's also gone on monthly neighborhood walks, held coffee meetings in constituents' houses, and held regular clinics at his offices for all comers to air their grievances and their problems.
Rather than structure government so that it steers clear of ordinary people's lives - the great Los Angeles disease, in Garcetti's view - he wants to show people what government can do and how they can help effect the changes themselves. It's about giving a voice to the voiceless - those people ignored by canvassers at election time because they don't tend to vote, and by elected officials all the time. It's about making sure that those who are politically motivated get properly organized and wield real influence, not just bang their head against a wall at neighborhood council meetings. It's about, he says, "building democratic participation in a city whose ethos runs counter to that."
The result in his district has been a dramatic decrease in gang-related violence over the past four years, a doubling of the number of public parks, and the emergence of new school buildings and affordable housing projects. Some of that has been due to Garcetti's energy, but some of it, too, has been the result of direct responses to community needs.
"I always tell people at the end of our neighborhood meetings to find one small problem and do something about it. Go find one pothole or one graffiti tag and call it in," Garcetti said. "Sometimes people get frustrated trying to fix the big things. It's much easier to go after the small things at first. If they don't attack the small things, they won't take the journey."
L.A. is a city that has too often abdicated its political responsibilities, splintering itself into a patchwork of pseudo-suburban mini-fiefdoms that refuse to acknowledge the extent to which their problems are shared, only to play up the ways in which each of them fancies itself as superior to its neighbors. Garcetti has ambitions to change that - to refashion Los Angeles as the single city that it is and create a strong regional infrastructure as well as a local one, so citizens are no longer captive to what he calls the "messy middle."
Democratization is the cornerstone of this vision. Garcetti wants to take advantage of the energy displayed in last November's presidential election and plug it into local politics. At the same time, he believes that creating an army of activists who relate to the political world first and foremost through their own communities is the key to more rational leadership at the regional, state, and national level.
What he is articulating is, in fact, the challenge facing the entire Democratic Party as it seeks to roll back the ever expanding Republican tide: essentially, the need to reconnect with voters and reestablish itself at the grassroots level. Los Angeles may not be in danger of going Republican any time soon, but it is nevertheless a good illustration of the problem. When neighborhood councils were first introduced a few years ago, they caused much of the city's power elite to fret that the only consequence of empowering citizens would be to bring out the NIMBYs and make community-minded decision-making that much harder. Garcetti has always taken issue with that thinking, arguing that citizens only become petty-minded when they have too little power, not too much.
"For me," he said, "we don't have a choice but to make neighborhood activism work. What's the point of democracy at all if we don't let people in that already have a knowledge of politics and want to be involved? If we don't strengthen our participation in a grassroots, local way, shame on us. We're all worse off for it."
This is the language that was conspicuously absent from the Democrats' platform for the White House. John Kerry never looked like someone who cared what ordinary people thought. Indeed, his campaign scarcely mobilized on the ground at all in many states, preferring to rely on progressive volunteer groups to do the legwork while simply raining down campaign ads from above.
It's not a language that has been heard much in Los Angeles, either, above the din of the property speculators and real estate agents and politicians sitting idly by while certain neighborhoods slump into decay. All Garcetti is lacking, in fact, is a worthy opponent in the election. If he had one, the conversation could start getting really interesting.Published: 02/24/2005
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