It’s Hard to Kick a Guy Like Alarcon

Call me a wimp, but I can’t bring myself to kick the tires on state Sen. Richard Alarcon’s campaign wagon the way I did with the other candidates for mayor of Los Angeles.

We had breakfast Thursday morning in the Sun Valley neighborhood where he grew up, and I lost my nerve just about the time his eggs and Polish sausage arrived.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting there’s no material to work with.

I could tell you that Alarcon, though steady and capable, hasn’t set the world on fire as a Democratic state senator.

I could tweak him for screaming about Big Money trying to buy City Hall, because Alarcon isn’t bashful about grabbing cash from those who want to play ball in Sacramento.

I could point out that his call to end poverty in Los Angeles is commendable, but he might as well add world peace and a Clipper championship to his wish list.

But what kind of beast would beat up the candidate who’s bringing up the rear?

The other rascals -- Mayor James K. Hahn, City Councilmen Antonio Villaraigosa and Bernard C. Parks, and former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg -- all have a decent chance to at least make a runoff.

Alarcon, if you trust polls, is so far back of the pack you can’t see him through the dust.

As a longshot, he can’t raise big bucks. And so his TV ads look like a last-minute class project at L.A. City College -- 15-second spots in which he alternately resembles Dracula, a Mafioso and a psycho killer.

Hahn, by contrast, who’s rolling in dough, is running slick, snappy TV ads in which he is so doggone dynamic, he can’t walk down the street without drawing a crowd. Pedestrians are everywhere. Go figure. And the mayor has so much pep in his step, it looks like the film has been speeded up.

Over breakfast at Dimion’s, a diner at the crossroads of Sunland Boulevard and the Golden State Freeway, I mentioned the contrasting quality of the TV ad campaigns.

“I’m running against the money,� Alarcon said defensively.

Despite trailing, Alarcon does all right for himself in debates, and he could teach all the other candidates a thing or two about dining with a columnist.

For one thing, he took off the mask and relaxed. He wasn’t coy, calculating or defensive, and even talked briefly about his messy public divorce.

Alarcon made a point of hammering his themes, which include the alleged pay-to-play shenanigans at City Hall. And he reiterated that the city Department of Water and Power is playing games with customers, raising rates while it transfers surplus funds to other city departments and hires a PR firm to prop up Mayor Hahn.

But Alarcon spent most of the time telling me the story of his neighborhood and his middle-class upbringing at a time when the San Fernando Valley represented the American dream -- a job, a house, a chance for your kids to do better than you.

GM and aerospace jobs are long gone, of course. Alarcon says more people find it harder to hold on, let alone get ahead, and they’ve stopped expecting answers from City Hall.

In a roundabout way, we got into the subject of his 3-year-old son Richie’s death in 1987. A 27-year-old man had just signed up for the Army and went speeding away from the recruiting office, plowing into a car driven by Richie’s grandmother.

The boy and his grandmother were killed, along with the driver of the other car.

“I went to the scene of the accident,� Alarcon says.

There in the street, he found the dried blood of the man who had taken his son’s life.

“I spat in his blood,� Alarcon says.

But after a change of heart, he went to the home of the dead man’s parents to tell them he was sorry for their loss as well.

“I knocked on the door,� he says. “They didn’t answer.�

Losing a son didn’t change his politics, Alarcon says. It just made him more driven and more compassionate. He told me that as a boy, he never knew why his Uncle Dan was always drunk. Later, he learned that Dan started drinking after losing two sons to cancer.

“Better to do something positive than do what Uncle Dan did,� says Alarcon, who started a scholarship foundation in his son’s name along with comedian George Lopez, a friend.

After breakfast, we got into Alarcon’s Toyota Prius, which has an “S 20� license plate for his Senate district, and we toured the neighborhood that used to have more horses and more kids flying kites. We met an uncle, drove past the schools Alarcon went to, his bowling alley and the stucco house he lives in with his mother when he’s not in Sacramento.

The open spaces Alarcon played in as a boy became landfills, and he took me to several of them. The land was plundered as developers dug up the rock that built Los Angeles, Alarcon says, and the newly formed canyons of Sun Valley became trash heaps that were eyesores and health concerns.

“We built this city and we got dumped on,� says Alarcon, who carried the environmental justice flag early in his political career.

It’s the underdog speaking for everyone who’s ever been dumped on.

How can you kick a guy like that?

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Steve Lopez writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at [email protected].