Hahn for Mayor 2005

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LA WEEKLY PROFILE: MAYOR HAHN

Wednesday February 16, 2005

Hahn Solo

by ROBERT GREENE

It’s high noon on a bright January day at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, the most famous intersection in the most media-savvy city in the world. For the dozens, then hundreds, of earnest tourists looking for the Chinese Theater, creative types lugging their guitar cases and business-suited office workers streaming outside on their lunch break, this is the center of the universe. This is the headquarters of fame.

In the power seat of this intersection, at a restaurant table in a picture window on Hollywood Boulevard, gazing out at the passing crowd, is the man who runs this town. It is the mayor. James K. Hahn. Leader of the creative capital of the globe, the most important city on the western edge of the continent. For an hour, the clusters of people hustle over the star-studded sidewalk outside. Some glance in the restaurant window, where Mayor Hahn nibbles on a sandwich, but they quickly move down the boulevard, hoping, perhaps, to spy someone famous.

That’s the thing about being mayor of Los Angeles. Politics, especially city politics, is such a low priority in the city of glitz that even the guy in charge is unnoticed and unknown. In San Francisco, Gavin Newsom is a celebrity who draws cheers when he walks through the Castro district or into North Beach. Chicago’s Richard Daley, like the leaders of Syria and the United States, stepped into his father’s job and has his picture in shops and cafés all over town. Even New Yorkers who wouldn’t recognize Michael Bloomberg would get excited, or chummy, or angry, if he was pointed out to them.

But Mayor Jim Hahn was made for Los Angeles. Not for L.A., mind you — that state of mind where fame is king, the poolside parties last until dawn and the cosmic freeway rolls on toward eternity — but for Los Angeles, city of backyards, traffic advisories and mini-malls. He is the mayor you expected to see on Dragnet. Quiet, grave, poor at speechmaking, devoid of spark or zip, with a desk at City Hall for the last 20 years. He’s a working stiff who can’t understand why the city’s 311 information phone system (“One call to City Hall does it all”) doesn’t generate a front-page story in the paper.