Putting an L.A. Spin on Councilman's Swearing-In

By Patt Morrison

July 1, 2003 12 AM PT

What are there, something like 10 million cars on the road in L.A. every day?

And what odds do you suppose they’d give in Vegas that you could actually be five or six miles from home and see someone you know in the car in front of you?

But there he was -- Councilman Tom LaBonge, heading down San Fernando Road in some bland American sedan, waving at me like I was sailing away on the QE2.

I was less surprised to see him. People swear he can navigate every foot of asphalt in town, that there’s not a cracked sidewalk or a dying tree he doesn’t know about. He has leaned out of his car at a stoplight and scooped trash out of the street, and led lost tourists out of Griffith Park. The City Council may cast votes on human rights or free trade, but Tom LaBonge thinks government begins and pretty much ends at home.

So when LaBonge called me a few weeks later, I thought he was going to tell me that he’d seen to it that the pothole I call Lake San Fernando Road had been fixed.

Instead, he asked me to swear him in to his first full term on the Los Angeles City Council, a ceremony scheduled for Monday afternoon.

What is this, I thought? Swearings-in are for black robes and “your honors.” I incline more to pink silk, and more to swearing than swearing-in. I thought of the panicked scramble on Nov. 22 in Dallas 40 years ago, to find a real judge to swear in LBJ as president as JFK lay dead in the back of Air Force One. I thought of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, in his robes with the Gilbert-and-Sullivan gold stripes, swearing in the Senate for Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. I thought of Calvin Coolidge, sworn in as president by kerosene lamplight in his father’s living room -- by his father, who was at least a notary public. To my public, I’m just notorious.

And what’s the drill, anyway? It’s L.A. -- do I have to bring a Bible, or does the Thomas Guide count? Does he raise his right hand? Do I? And do we high-five afterward?

No, no, said LaBonge. Anybody can do it. (That’s L.A. for you, casual about the big things, obsessive about the little ones. LaBonge could probably have sworn himself in, looking into a mirror.)

There was one small hitch in the get-along: Nobody had a copy of the oath. So we improvised, and I concluded by telling LaBonge, “By the authority vested in me by you, I now pronounce you still a councilman.” (He was already legally a councilman, no matter what I said or failed to say.)

And besides, he said, you love L.A. as much as I do. Well, he had me there. I’m a soft target for this big, messy, gorgeous, ghastly rattletrap back lot of a city. I believe there are two kinds of Angelenos: those lucky enough to be born here, like LaBonge, and smart enough to move here, like me.

So Monday, I did it. I swore him in. He raised the correct hand. I did, too. I guess it’s official. And this morning, on my way to work, I’m going to check to see whether that pothole’s been fixed.

Even if it’s just a newly elected city clerk in a little burg in flyover America, the kind of place I come from, there’s something grand and solemn about the notion of a swearing-in.

When you think about how that power has been transferred for thousands of years -- by sword point and bullets -- it’s pretty amazing, the way it happens here. I was a few dozen yards away in January 1993 when Bill Clinton was sworn in on the Capitol steps, and I wrote then about how “the massed powers of the country pledged once again to set aside their divisions and bind their passions to 35 spoken words that transfer the whole rich, armored might of the United States from one pair of hands to another.”

(This pretty Parson Weems ideal took a beating in January 2001, after the chaos of the 2000 election, when thousands of demonstrators lined the grand inaugural avenues of Washington chanting “Hail to the Thief.” And in L.A., in 1973, Mayor Sam Yorty refused to attend the swearing-in of the man who beat him, Tom Bradley, and flounced off on a cruise instead.)

The launching pad for LaBonge’s first full term was the clearing alongside the merry-go-round in Griffith Park. Bill Bratton took his wife, Rikki Klieman, for a spin there on his 55th birthday last year. The story goes that Walt Disney came up with the idea for Disneyland while his daughters whirled around on the Griffith Park carousel. In 1970, gays held a “kiss-in” protest as the horses spun.

The choice made me smile because Beltway journalist Jack Anderson called his political column “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” Merry-go-rounds twirl and twirl and never get anywhere, and maybe that pretty much summed up politics for him.

But not for LaBonge. He is a flat-out Pollyanna pol, an Eagle Scout with a merit badge in L.A., a one-man Chamber of Commerce. After the Northridge earthquake, when the city strapped a black retaining band around City Hall, he wanted it exchanged for something cheerier, maybe in blue. Only a man who sees his hometown through rose-colored Ray-Bans could propose to his wife along the romantic concrete banks of the Los Angeles River. (She said yes.)

This isn’t to say that he’s immune to wheeling and dealing; he’s spent more than half his life in City Hall, with Bradley, with John Ferraro, with Dick Riordan. He knows how it’s done.

We’ve disagreed before, LaBonge and I, and we will again. Now that I’ve sworn him in, I’ll probably find reason to swear at him, and he at me. For starters, Mr. Council Member, you served Pink’s hot dogs at the swearing-in, and I’m a vegetarian, and I vote.

I shouldn’t be surprised: Turns out Pink’s has vegan dogs. These politicians, they have an answer for everything.

Bring it on, Big Tom.

Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays.

Putting an L.A. Spin on Councilman’s Swearing-In

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