How To Make Boring Beautiful

By MARGARET CARLSON

The city that gave the country personal trainers, liver with kiwi, and Cher ought to be more adventurous than to have a Mayor for Life. But that's what Los Angeles' Tom Bradley is turning out to be. The man the Wall Street Journal calls the "recumbent incumbent" has just been elected to a fifth term, squeaking by with a 52% majority against a weak field of opponents. With no strong challenger to smoke him out, the tall, quiet Bradley got away with something akin to a Rose Garden strategy. He granted few interviews and ran in part on a platform of "the most ambitious sewer-improvement project in the nation." On election night, he talked about a new literacy program, public works jobs, beautifying neighborhoods and household-trash separation.

This in a city known for some of the country's worst air pollution, traffic jams that last most of the day and more than 400 gang-related murders last year; a city where 60% of the people polled said they thought the quality of life has become worse and where half of 12,000 people polled said they had considered moving away in the past year.

"Stealth Mayor" Bradley keeps a low enough profile not to be associated with the city's problems. Unlike New York City's Mayor Ed Koch, who blurts out insults to someone nearly every day, the resolutely dull Bradley has said hardly anything memorable in almost 16 years in office. But the mayor is no accident in California politics. Like most public officials in this trend- making state, Bradley is part of a wave of certifiably boring, aggressively bland politicians. How else to account for Governor George Deukmejian, Senators Pete Wilson and Alan Cranston and others too unrecognizable to mention?

What happened to those glorious days of yesteryear, when California produced Red-baiting Richard Nixon, tap-dancing George Murphy, and the diminutive, tam- o'-shanter-wearing S.I. Hayakawa, who said of the Panama Canal, "We should keep it; we stole it fair and square"? Or, for that matter, the Gipper? On the liberal side, there was Jerry Brown, promoter of Zen politics and Spaceship Earth. Bill Schneider, political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, blames Governor Moonbeam for starting the trend away from trendy. "Brown singlehandedly is responsible for the election of at least two of the most boring politicians the country has ever seen -- Deukmejian and Wilson. Jerry made boring beautiful."

But is fear of being parodied in Doonesbury enough to account for a statewide charisma deficit? Deukmejian, who established an organization called Citizens for Common Sense, is so unadventurous that George Bush makes jokes about him. The most exciting thing about Pete Wilson -- dubbed one of the more anonymous people in American politics -- was his showing up on the Senate floor straight from the hospital in his pajamas to cast an important vote. Wilson was so unremarkable during his first term that one-third of California voters were unable even to rate his performance.

Wilson makes the shy Alan Cranston seem positively flamboyant. Cranston's greatest vice is jogging too much for a man his age (74); the most colorful thing about him is his hair, which he dyed an orange shade of red five years ago to update his haggard look for a brief run for the presidency. For a while it looked as if Cranston might lose his seat in 1986, but that will take someone a lot duller than challenger Ed Zschau, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who believes in memory chips and the Pacific Rim.

Part of the insouciance about local politics, according to pollster Mervin Field, comes from sheer confusion. In a metropolis where as many as 85 languages are spoken, that extends from the perfumed hills of the Westside to the barrios of East L.A. and the ghetto of Watts, where state, county and regional authorities overlap one another, voters hardly know who's in charge. Bradley and the business community, his biggest supporter, seem to like it that way.

Then there is the agenda-setting Hollywood elite and its preoccupation with national affairs. Ronald Brownstein, who is writing a book about Hollywood and politics, says most political money for Democrats comes from California and about two-thirds of that bankroll comes from Los Angeles. "Stars, though, don't want to slum with the locals," says Brownstein. "They are at the pinnacle of their profession and want to deal at the highest levels. ((Disney CEO)) Michael Eisner wants to raise money for Bill Bradley, not some city supervisor."

So uninteresting have living, breathing candidates become that California is leading the move to dispense with them. Last fall 29 initiatives and referendums made it onto the state ballot; voters were asked to decide everything from taxes to bonds to insurance rates. The movie community also prefers causes to people: the Hollywood Women's Political Committee devoted most of its efforts this year to the April 9 abortion march on Washington, with Morgan Fairchild, Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Cybill Shepherd and others leading the charge.

But politics can become only so boring before it ceases to exist at all. Last week Los Angeles held an election and almost no one came -- only 23% of the voters turned out. Bradley does not need charisma to attract money; the bankers and developers in Los Angeles have wallets as fat as Michael J. Fox's. But politicians do need to inspire people, or at least keep them awake, if they are to lead as well as win.

With reporting by Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles