Overshadowed by the accounts of Rudy Giuliani's successes in New York have been the achievements of the other big-city Republican mayor, Richard Riordan of Los Angeles. Having already reduced crime and overseen an economic rebirth in the city, Riordan scored his biggest victory yet last week -- 60 percent of voters approved his plan for a new city charter over the fierce opposition of the corrupt city council and organized labor. It replaces the 1925 charter, a phone-book-size product of the Progressive era that created a weak mayor's office beholden to the city council's whims.
Riordan's triumph did not end there. He also ended the teachers' unions' stranglehold on the school board in a city where only 53 percent of high school freshman end up graduating. Genethia Hayes, his handpicked candidate for the board, won a runoff election last week despite opposition from the unions and local demagogues like Rep. Maxine Waters. Her victory gives Riordan's reform contingent a working majority on the seven-member board -- a welcome sign to the beleaguered parents of the 700,000 students who attend Los Angeles public schools.
How did Riordan do it? By having the guts to take on the city's bureaucracy and labor unions. He also had the courage to defy conventional wisdom, which said that passage of the new charter would depend on high turnout in the mostly white San Fernando Valley. In fact, predominately Latino districts also approved the charter by unexpectedly wide margins. As Riordan's success reminds us, a little spine goes a long way.