After a spring campaign marked by unrelieved criticism of his opponent for the County Board of Supervisors for alleged dishonesty of character and job performance, state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas declared this morning that he is turning up the heat immediately to warm the room for their November runoff election.
He called for Bernard Parks to emerge from the closet, to admit his true right-wing political identity.
“Bernard Parks has to disrobe as the candidate of the Republican Party,” the senator, a traditional labor-friendly liberal, said at a news conference in front of his twin-story Leimert Park home. “I am the candidate of the Democratic Party, unapologetically.”
The Ridley-Thomas campaign’s exposure of the fired LAPD police chief and his foibles will hardly stop there. The senator promised to tighten the screws, while hinting darkly about the amazing coincidence of parallels between the websites of the Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama and Mr. Parks.
“We will work this issue to the fullest extent,” the senator said. “Ultimately, I believe this will position us to win. Bernard Parks actually is a conservative, and that makes him out of step with the 2nd Supervisorial District.”
A master rhetorician who never has lost an election while winning three different offices in almost 20 years of public life, Sen. Ridley-Thomas, who is not tall, towers over opponents when tongues are the weapons of choice.
Revelations En Route?
One day after Sen. Ridley-Thomas defeated Mr. Parks, an L.A. City Councilman, 45% to 40% in the harshly contested primary election — leaving him well short of the 50%-plus-one threshold needed to avoid a runoff — the winner warned his opponent not to relax. He intends to shine klieg lights on allegedly shadowy areas of Mr. Parks’ present and recent past that are likely to make him squirm, the senator promised.
Far from disappointed with being forced to mount back-to-back campaigns to win the powerful Board of Supervisors seat, Sen. Ridley-Thomas said that with eight other candidates vying for the office, no matter how weak some were, the math made it nearly impossible to achieve 50 percent. “You can never fully predict who will get how many votes,” he said.
The senator pledged not to change anything during the 5-month finals, which started as soon as he awakened this morning.
He speaks with the conviction of a preacher reading to his congregation from the Bible on Sunday morning — but always without tipping his hand. He specializes in tantalizing language. He talks about what the campaign is going to do without being specific.
While not admitting to committing any mistakes during the primary, Sen. Ridley-Thomas said that “we will run harder, smarter, more effectively while broadening our already large coalition of supporters.”
Leading Off
To dig a stick a little deeper into Mr. Parks’ ribs, when the senator recites the list of his ,major backers, he never fails to start with law enforcement. This is calculated. Law enforcement was the bailiwick of Mr. Parks for 37 years, with LAPD, before he was canned by former Mayor Jim Hahn.
Playing with artful deftness to the crowd at last night’s post-election party at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel down by LAX, Sen. Ridley-Thomas couldn’t resist announcing to the hungry crowd that Mr. Parks’ successor, Police Chief William J. Bratton —slow, deliberate emphasis on each syllable — had just telephoned his congratulations on the primary triumph.
It was purely coincidental, of course, that Sen. Obama clinched the Democratic Presidential nomination on the same day that Sen. Ridley-Thomas knocked out Mr. Parks in the first of their two rounds. From a marketing standpoint, that correlates to winning the lottery.
From some of Sen. Ridley-Thomas’s flourishes, there was a residue of doubt about which candidate was riding the wings of the other.
Temptation That Is Not to be Resisted
Like an amoeba on steroids, the outsized Obama irony not only did not escape the senator’s unswerving vigilance, he practically converted the opportunity into an instant baseball bat, the better to whack Mr. Parks’ for his asserted shortcomings and assorted foibles.
Perhaps a dozen times during his half-hour meeting with reporters, Sen. Ridley-Thomas invoked Mr. Obama’s name. Each time he stressed his own prominent leadership role in the Obama California campaign and how the synergistic sparks that the two politicians magnetically cause will form a veritable Milky Way for them to dash up a stairway to the stars in Election Heaven next November.
For example:
“This is an extraordinary moment for me to help move an agenda forward,” Sen. Ridley-Thomas said, but it was not clear whether he was referring to the Democratic nominee’s version of change or his own.
