This was the bodybuilder against the concave-chested scarecrow.

More precisely, the scholarly student who has studied every day of the term against the 11th hour student who started cramming an hour before finals.

It was temptingly close to champion vs. challenger, even though both candidates are going for an office neither has held —Yvonne Brathwaite Burke’s 16-year grip on a chair on the County Board of Supervisors.

Perhaps it was not quite master against student.

Whole Spectrum in Contrast

But that was pretty close to the pairing last evening when the confident state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Culver City) and the outgunned Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks locked into a tense — and telling — debate before about 250 partisans at the Westside Jewish Community Center.

Sen. Ridley-Thomas reminded some of the whip-smart kid in school who knows how to spell every word in the English language. He is impossible to stump.

The debate sponsored by the Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters was sprinkled, not necessarily larded, with questions on the environment.

The juiciest part of the evening may have been when the 64-year-old fired police chief and the 53-year-old practically lifetime politician needled each other about perceived shortcomings.

Hand-to-hand combat is the senator’s game.

Tracking Down an Opinion

Even though the enigmatic Mr. Parks sometimes seemed as if he had strolled into a prizefight ring attired in a business suit, he held his own in swinging back. He chased Sen. Ridley-Thomas back and forth across the floor on whether the senator had written an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times saying that King-Drew Hospital should be closed because of years’ long inefficiencies and more abysmal failures.

The senator challenged the former police chief to prove his claim or apologize to everybody in the room.

At such nudge-nudge junctures, their debate looked like a typical Monday night scene out of a City Council meeting in Culver City.

Don’t Invite ‘ems

If the two candidates are together in a room, it should be on opposite sides, or at least with barbed wire in between.

The senator gave the best, fastest, most rounded, some would say informed, answers.

When the party of one part is instinctively animated and the party of the second part barely moves his lips — he could have been a ventriloquist —the distinctions are headline-size.

Displaying the kind of unwrinkled adroitness that precedes his reputation, Sen. Ridley-Thomas was the pipe-smoking yachtsman sailing the High Seas, often appearing to control the rhythms, the atmosphere, the mood, the tenor in the studio setting.

Consent Decree Haunts

He needled — actually hammered — Mr. Parks about the infamous consent decree imposed on the LAPD during Mr. Parks’ troubled, abbreviated tenure. His trademark looseness cleverly fended off the unbreakably staid Mr. Parks.

After 60 minutes, it scarcely was necessary to tote up the judges’ cards, so decisive was the superiority of the senator.

Loose, feisty, broadly knowledgeable and unrelentingly aggressive trumped stone-faced reserve.

This was just the outcome Mr. Parks’ camp had feared, that flash would drown out their man’s muted manner. What they may have overlooked was that Sen. Ridley-Thomas’s flashiness is massaged by and underpinned with wide-roaming imagination and induplicable eyewitness evidence of every conceivable scenario.

Sorting Out Differences

He is a trained scholar, and it shows.

The detached Mr. Parks is not, and it shows.

More closely, he resembles a straight-backed, strait-laced business owner who stands in the rear of his store, hands crossed and clasped, silently overseeing, without expression, rather than soiling his hands in a clash.

Given the grace, courtliness, sense of immense discretion and ingrained restraint that flow so naturally through Mr. Parks, his backers issued a warning before the matchup with the far more rambunctious Sen. Ridley-Thomas:

The two bring such contrasting packages to the podium, said the Parks’ people, an observer should not confuse or conflate style with content.

Rough Transition

Sen. Ridley-Thomas reeled off razor-edged responses to all questions because, as a frequently elected official, he has lived through every scenario his three interrogators could think up.

Mr. Parks, a lifetime cop, only has been in politics for five years, a finger-snap of time in the senator’s career. Unlike his opponent, it is a safe bet that not a particle of dust has been close enough to flirt with Mr. Parks’ immaculate nails.

His transition from the sanctuary of law enforcement into the brass-knuckles arena of politics has been lined with bumps and pebbles. This, though, has not kept him from tirelessly campaigning for the most attractive office available at the moment.

Lining up

The retiring Ms. Burke has endorsed the sedate Mr. Parks — but it may take stronger horses to pull this candidate over the finish line on June 3.

All that the business-backed Mr. Parks and the union-promoted Sen. Ridley-Thomas have in common is that both are enthusiastic supporters of Sen. Barack Obama.
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