No matter who emerges as Antonio Villaraigosa's rival in the runoff, the city councilman will have to prove he has overcome the obstacles that toppled his first mayoral bid in 2001: a liberal image and a reluctance to fire back at his opponent. Yet he starts the final push in a substantially stronger position than he held four years ago.
After running a relatively low-key campaign in the first round, Villaraigosa -- with a steady lead in ballot returns and The Times' exit poll -- now faces the prospect of a May 17 rematch with his first adversary, Mayor James K. Hahn, or a bid against a former friend, Sherman Oaks attorney Bob Hertzberg. Both have already shown themselves to be tough campaigners who are willing to brawl.
Villaraigosa took a different tack in the round ending Tuesday, casting himself as the "unity" candidate and trying to stay above the fray while his opponents quarreled. His languid approach was in sharp contrast to the ebullient tenor of 2001, when Villaraigosa would have become the city's first Latino mayor in modern times.
"Antonio believes the reason he lost last time is because he allowed himself to get tagged as too liberal, too beholden to labor, too Latino," said Republican strategist Allan Hoffenblum, who is not involved in the race. "My gut feeling is that he didn't want to get pointed too far to the left and so he just sat on his lead, waiting to come up for a game plan for the Super Bowl."
But in the runoff, Villaraigosa is confronted with the challenge he faced in 2001: piecing together a multiethnic coalition in the tradition of the late Mayor Tom Bradley, the city's first black mayor, who won office in 1973 with the backing of African Americans, liberal voters and Jews, along with a narrow majority of Latinos.
Pulling together such disparate groups is a difficult task. If he seeks to energize Latinos about the prospect of a historic first, Villaraigosa could alarm other voters who are wary of the group's growing political clout, analysts said. But shying away from the ethnic pride associated with his bid could deflate excitement among that important constituency.
"It's a hard balance for any group that hasn't yet sat in the mayor's office," said Raphael Sonenshein, a political science professor at Cal State Fullerton who consulted on The Times' exit poll. "It usually involves a sense of change in a city, and for every person who thinks that change is a great thing, there's another person who regrets that the old days are gone."
