Even as the counting was starting in Council Chambers, one of the city’s most prominent politicians doped the race this way:
Mr. Silbiger would be the only clear-cut winner. There would be a “dogfight” between the other two challengers and between the opposing forces on Measure V, which would controversially update the City Charter.
He misfired, as it turned out, on two out of the three.
Peace in Our Time?
After about a dozen years as a neighborhood activist whose reputation reached to City Hall, the cerebral Mr. Malsin brings the tone of a peacemaker to the dais.
More combative, based on his first term, Mr. Silbiger has been a gallant fighter — often a lonely one — for liberal causes.
The election shook up established alliances of the last four years on the City Council. They have been frequently criticized for noisily carping at each other, not merely disagreeing.
With a rhythm of regularity, they have fought so bitterly that harmony seemed to be the main enemy.
Mr. Malsin, who bills himself as a master in the delicate, elusive art of compromise, will replace the fiery retiring Mayor Albert Vera. That alone may usher in a more peaceful era.
Not that it sounded that way at Mr. Silbiger’s headquarters. He and his loyal backers are refreshed and ready to renew even more rigorously the challenges they issued during Mr. Silbiger’s first term.
School Board President Saundra Davis hailed his victory as a “great advance” for the cause of Progressive politics in Culver City. With her at the helm of the School Board and Mr. Silbiger the prospective Mayor, “we Progressives can get some things done,” Ms. Davis predicted.
“I am so, so happy,” she enthused.
The Aging Process
Ms. Davis publicly thanked Mr. Silbiger and his wife, Barbara Honig, for encouraging her to enter politics almost five years ago.
No question that Mr. Silbiger, in a way, had age on his side. His eighty-seven-year-old mother Alice and ninety-year-old Adele Siegel thrilled the jubilant crowd wuth their best wishes for their favorite politician long past their bedtime. Not to be forgotten, Blair Hills activists Mim and Hank Shapiro, who will be married sixty years in June, were at the front of the audience.
With the City Council’s most familiar voting bloc — Mr. Vera and Councilperson Carol Gross — reduced by fifty percent, it could be replaced by a new alliance projected to include the veterans Steve Rose and Alan Corlin along with Mr. Malsin.
Mr. Rose and Mr. Corlin often but not always vote together. Their strongly held political philosophies are a study in contrasts.
It was no accident that Mr. Corlin and Mr. Rose served as very active co-chairs of the Malsin campaign. The two Council members see the newcomer as an ally. Pointedly, they did not back Mr. Silbiger, with whom they routinely disagree.
How Will He Fit in?
Just how the Planning Commissioner, who became known as the thinking man’s candidate, will fit into their bloc is not apparent in the first hours after the election.
There was no question who and what the typically small turnout of Culver City voters — twenty-one percent — preferred.
Like Mr. Silbiger and Mr. Malsin, who vigorously endorsed Measure V, the Charter Reform proposition leaped ahead when the absentee ballots opened the counting, and maintained a steady pace all evening. The Yes on V vote was 2443,54.1 percent, a nearly four hundred-vote margin. The No on V vote was 2067, 45.8 percent.
This means that beginning in ’08, the positions of City Clerk and City Treasurer will morph from elective to appointive.
Christopher Armenta, running unopposed, won a new term yesterday as the City Clerk.
As a result of Measure V’s victory, any day now,Chief Administrative Officer Jerry Fulwood is expected to seamlessly transition into the community’s first City Manager, likely without fanfare.
An Alexander-Fulwood Meeting
In the next several days, City Treasurer Crystal Alexander, a huge supporter of Measure V, will meet with Mr. Fulwood to talk about finances.
While she has been widely expected to compete — if not directly move into — the Treasurer’s chair when it becomes appointive, Ms. Alexander declined to give an affirmative answer.
“Things can change in two years,” she said.
Once Frances Talbott-White of the League of Women Voters began announcing the vote count a little after 8 p.m. in the lightly populated Council Chambers, suspense was minimal until the results became obvious by 9:30.
Ms. Talbott-White said that one hundred and ninety-five ballots remained uncounted, “probably not enough to affect the outcome.”
At the end of a quiet, formful and peaceful three-month campaign, voters declared unequivocally that experience counted more than perhaps any other factor.
Mr. Silbiger, scheduled to be elected Mayor on Monday, April 24, if the Council’s rotation plan holds, was the leading votegetter with 2943, 38.9 percent.
At 2758 votes, Mr. Malsin, a first-time contender, was a bare one hundred and eighty-five votes back, with 36.4 percent.
Mehaul O’Leary, who quickly concluded his lack of a City Hall resume did him in, was a distant third with 1863 votes, 24.6 percent.
As soon as the results were clear, Mr. Malsin drove to Silbiger headquarters, at the rockin’ Club Tropical in East Culver City, to congratulate the Vice Mayor on his re-election.
Similarly, in a spirit of camaraderie, Mr. O’Leary, who acknowledged feeling “disheartened,” went to Pacifico’s restaurant, Downtown, to congratulate the beaming Mr. Malsin.
The Causes Were Transparent
Mr. O’Leary’s defeat will not require powerhouse soul-searching. He believes he knows exactly what went wrong and what he needs to do. “I have not been in the political arena (prior to the campaign), and I don’t have a track record,” he said after former Mayor Jozelle Smith and City Historian Julie Lugo Cerra offered him sage words of consolation.
Some were interpreting the outcome as a repudiation of Mayor Vera.
For the community’s most charismatic politician of the last two decades, Election Day was a disappointing denouement to a long career.
Both horses that he rode in this race lost by substantial margins.
For Mr. Vera, the larger setback may have been Measure V. He ardently campaigned to resist Charter Reform on the grounds that voters were unfairly denied a chance to express their opinion of individual portions of the lengthy proposition.
Mr. Vera’s much ballyhooed endorsement of the third-place finisher Mr. O’Leary was worth an indeterminate number of votes. Whatever the final number is, though, it will be far fewer than the O’Leary camp had projected.
Traditionally Mr. Vera is the city’s champion votegetter. Ever since his uneven retirement strategy became accepted, his valued endorsement had been sought.
As of last night, the worth of a Vera endorsement remained unsettled.
However many voters the Vera name channeled to Mr. O’Leary,the total was well short of what the Irishman’s camp had projected. It appears that Vera loyalists may have distributed their votes among all three candidates.
Standing quietly in the back of the room at the equally quiescent Elks Club,just as Mr. O’Leary’s loss was confirmed, the resolute Mr. Vera said “absolutely” he will run for the City Council in ’08.
