Riordan No Clinton in Front of Cameras : Television: The mayor-elect tends to address the camera as if facing the SEC. He’s awkward, humorless and tenuous.

We may not know much yet about Los Angeles Mayor-elect Richard Riordan, but we do know this: He won’t be playing the sax on “Arsenio.”

Political choices aside, it’s refreshing in this electronically hot-wired age to see someone elected mayor of the nation’s show-and-glitz-biz capital despite being somewhat of a television nerd. A multimillionaire businessman off camera, Riordan is largely unimpressive on camera, closer to Gerald R. Ford (or at least Chevy Chase’s parody of Ford) than to Bill Clinton.

As Clinton appears en route to proving in the White House, being a warm, woolly, glad-handing smoothie on TV and being an effective chief executive can be separate and distinct skills. For years, though, it’s been the common wisdom that only the telegenic were fit to prevail at the ballot box, that candidates lacking a Ph.D. in television cool were doomed to be hopelessly outclassed.

Riordan’s comfortable win over Michael Woo on Tuesday has helped put the kabosh on that. Left to his own devices on TV, this Dick is not very tricky.

It’s true that it was a more relaxed and assured Riordan who Wednesday took victory laps on the post-election speedway as, unpressured, he gave his first press conference as mayor-elect and spent much of the day pit-stopping at one photo opportunity after another. He even occasionally smiled and joked. Yet he still may have to pull himself together if he hopes to do much communicating with Angelenos through television.

As the mayoral campaign showed, Riordan is no Clinton, a TV natural able to publicly finesse his way through stress and smile confidently through hurricanes. With good reason, Riordan limited his live TV appearances and let his attack ads do most of his talking. Woo, no Mr. Silk himself on TV while desperately yapping at his opponent like a Yorkie, nevertheless eclipsed Riordan as a performer in their two televised debates. Woo’s shrill nastiness was a turnoff, but he was obviously more at ease with the medium.

More thudding and ponderous on TV even than the abominable stone man he’s succeeding, Tom Bradley, wealthy venture capitalist Riordan tends to address the camera as if facing investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission. He’s frozen, yet appears sauna sweaty. He’s awkward, humorless and tenuous, cautiously pausing between sentences the way someone halts at a busy intersection and looks both ways twice before crossing.

It was this Riordan, the nervous TV palooka, who greeted the nation on ABC early Wednesday as if reading from a prepared statement with a gun at his head:

I’m Dick Riordan.

Pause.

I’m the mayor of Los Angeles.

Pause.

Good morning, America!

You wouldn’t have been surprised to hear him say he was being held hostage by terrorists somewhere in the Bekaa Valley. Back in the box, Dick.

While Riordan stiffly gave network interviewers his business-friendly, L.A.-togetherness message via videotape on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” NBC’s “Today” and “CBS This Morning,” the local show that handily outdraws each of them in Los Angeles, was noticeably steaming. Well, sort of.

Perhaps he feared schmoozing with “Jennifer York in Skycam 5.” Perhaps he was sacked out after a long night. Or perhaps his handlers didn’t want to risk throwing Daniel to the clowns. For whatever reason, Riordan snubbed “The KTLA Morning News” Wednesday and, typically, the asylum’s inmates turned this perceived slight into a morning-long gag, using it as gruel for their banter.

Riordan owes them one, for it was Channel 5, along with KCAL-TV Channel 9, that gave live coverage to Riordan’s midmorning press conference Wednesday. Several of the “live” TV absences were especially noteworthy: KABC-TV Channel 7, KNBC-TV Channel 4 and KCBS-TV Channel 2 (which boasts “14 crews reporting live”) obviously felt that Riordan’s first meeting with the media as mayor-elect was not as newsworthy as the freeway car chases they frequently interrupt regular programming to cover live.

Opening its 11:30 a.m. Wednesday newscast, Channel 7 went to Marc Coogan “live with the news van at City Hall.” Live, an hour after the news conference.

Good morning to business as usual.