Last Tuesday afternoon during the County Board of Supervisors meeting, Bernard Parks and I walked through a doorway almost simultaneously. As we spoke, a photographer neither of us knew, drifted around.
I started to back away, saying, ‘Shoot him. He’s the candidate.” While the photographer demurred and insisted “Just one,” Mr. Parks, the former Police Chief, hurriedly explained my reluctance. “He is wanted in 20 states,” he cracked.
So Mr. Parks has a sense of humor.
Isn’t This the Time to Push and Punch?
Down to the last seven days of a bitter fight with state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Culver City) for the chair held by Yvonne Brathwaite Burke on the Board of Supervisors, I still believe the 64-year-old Mr. Parks is the portrait of a resistant, fundamentally uncomfortable, politician.
In every public scenario where I have studied him in this campaign, Mr. Parks has reminded me of the way I felt the second time I met the parents of one ex-wife who left her footprints on my life. I think it was her heel. After the first meeting, her parents barred me from their house. Being resourceful, if not clever, we met elsewhere.
Even though every signal screams otherwise, Mr. Parks insists that he is at ease inside of his skin running for a high-profile office in this city where the media is almost too busy with Sarah’s habits as an eighth-grader to notice dangling details like local elections.
Pardon Me
On Sunday morning, he slipped into his pew at the Prosperity Missionary Baptist Church in South Los Angeles as if he were new in town . His race with Sen. Ridley-Thomas looks competitive, especially in the absence of reliable public polling. In such a controlled setting as the filled church sanctuary, you would have expected someone to break into “When the Saints Go Marchin’ in,” and for a hot candidate to capitalize on a captive audience.” Far from it, Mr. Parks’ entry went practically un-noted, which, I believe, suited Mr. Parks’ privatized personality.
You are in a presumably tight race practically on the eve of the election.
Sound the trumpets?
Blow the whistles and tell the world?
Not Mr. Parks. That is not his way.
If Sen. Ridley-Thomas, the consummate politician, had stepped into church, the neighborhood would have perked its ears and stood to cheer.
Eye contact is another difficulty for Mr. Parks, and I am sorry to report that.
More importantly, I think he is a nice man, a decent man.
This is the third time in five years he has run for office since failing to get his contract renewed for a second term as Chief of the LAPD — for the City Council, for Mayor and now for Supervisor.
Was there a fit among them?
What Could Have Been
When he left the LAPD in ’02, he was positioned, at the age of 58, to start collecting 90 percent of his salary, as his pension, for the rest of his life, which, reasonably, would extend for 35 to 40 more years. He says friends convinced him to run for the City Council. But he hadn’t even warmed the chair before the mayoralty election came along.
His relationship with Ms. Brathwaite Burke has no doubt stoked and boosted his campaign for Supervisor, but it has not made him appear any more at ease out on the hustings.
Where would he rather be? I can picture him sitting in a tall, mahogany, book-linedhome library, reading Sherlock Holmes to grandchildren or friends.
Mr. Parks issuave and shy —an appealing combination, but not for a politician. He resembles a man of leisure rather than a fire-breathing, hard-driving politician who is as at- home on stage as he is in the kitchen with his family.
