Looking left, right and center with Long Beach’s next political star

PHOTO by JOHN GILHOOLEY

We know how Robert Garcia got here, and by “here” we mean just about anywhere you look in Long Beach, but especially downtown—and eternally, it seems, perched on the verge of officially announcing he’s running for city council. We know a lot about all that, and we’ll tell you about it in a minute.

But we’re not so sure if knowing how Robert Garcia got here is the same as knowing where he’s coming from. Sure, Garcia has explained it in detail—we’re going to tell you about that, too—but, well, you know.

It’s the eternal dilemma of democracy: Somebody announces they would like our vote—which Robert Garcia really is finally going to do, any day now—and we straddle our impulses to idealistically embrace one individual’s vision and commitment to improving the world . . . or to cynically watch out so we don’t get suckered.

Garcia looks, sounds and acts like a pretty-damn-close-to-perfect candidate. He’s 30 years old, intelligent, handsome, well-spoken and unfailingly friendly. The naturalized son of Peruvian immigrants, he went on to become student body president at Long Beach State. He has grassroots cred among community groups—the kind that will walk precincts—and some of the fattest wallets in the city—the kind that fund the most successful campaigns—will open the moment he announces his candidacy.

But of course, Garcia is not perfect. He couldn’t be. Could he?

That’s the problem that compounds the dilemma: We’re seeking somebody who doesn’t exist. We’re looking for someone who will vote the way we want, always in accord with our highest universal principles and realest-world personal benefit—but someone who, most definitely, is not us. We don’t have the time. When we think about it a little, we don’t have the expertise, either. And when we really think about it, we’re not so absolutely sure that if we got into the mix of politics—its negotiations, its expediencies, its temptations—we’d always have the integrity to cast votes that match our highfalutin principles.

But Robert Garcia does exist. And he’s going to run for city council. Really, he is. Any day now. Watch for it. Remember where you read it first.

On Aug. 13, 2007, Press-Telegram columnist John Canalis wrote a profile of Robert Garcia that mostly consisted of Garcia’s mind-boggling schedule of commitments—work, education, charity, media and community. But Canalis also mentioned rumors that Garcia might seek the First District city council seat Bonnie Lowenthal still held at the time. The story even included a wishing-out-loud quote from Bonnie’s daughter-in-law, Second District council member Suja Lowenthal, who said, “I would love to see him as a colleague.”

Garcia smiled, shrugged, said he was flattered—but most pointedly did not say he was ruling it out. That’s been the drill ever since. Over time, the implication of what Garcia has not said has become so clear that when he actually does say it—announces he’s running for the First District council seat—the reaction might not be wild cheering so much as a loud, flat, “Duhhh.”

What’s with the word games?

“I’m trying to be as respectful to the process as I can,” Garcia said in September, while Bonnie Lowenthal was campaigning for the 37th district seat in the state assembly. “Right now, there is no open seat. On Nov. 4, if Bonnie wins—and clearly, I’m supporting Bonnie—I can start getting out there and making public declarations.”

Yet at an Election Night party on Pine Avenue—as the euphoria of Barack Obama’s historic ascension to the U.S. presidency was downshifting into the job-well-done congratulations on Bonnie Lowenthal’s as-expected promotion to the California state assembly—Garcia wouldn’t completely let go of the worst-kept secret in Long Beach politics. On the eve, literally and finally, of his inevitable candidacy, Garcia still didn’t feel comfortable talking about how things would change for him the next day.

“I’ll go to work,” he joked weakly, referring to his new job as interim dean of student affairs at Long Beach City College.

Yeah? Not buying it.

“Look, this is Bonnie’s night,” Garcia blurted with a little exasperation. His tone transmitted a personal reverence for etiquette that is obvious even in the clean precision of his own dress and grooming—from the casual formality of his hard-pressed shirt-slacks-and-blazer ensembles to the meticulous cut of his hair, sideburns and eyebrows. “You don’t want to distract from someone else’s celebration. You want to want to have respect for the process.”

As he sips a cup of coffee at a sidewalk table outside Creama Café on a sunny morning, just about everybody strolling down Pine Avenue stops to say hello to Robert Garcia. The guy out walking a couple of pit bull/boxer mix dogs. The woman from the residents association. The teenagers carrying a small can with a black-and-white photo taped to it, asking for money so they can bury their mother. The city worker emptying the trash. The mixed-up out-of-towner, who wants to know which way to Anaheim Street. That’s pretty much everybody—not including the people in the nearly empty buses—in just over an hour on Long Beach’s central downtown street.

“Even though it’s dead, quite frankly, when you go up and down the street there are a lot of great things happening,” Garcia offers. “I’m an optimist. I wouldn’t have spent my life savings on a condo down here if I wasn’t. People who have purchased in all these buildings—the Walker, the Kress, Temple Lofts, whatever—have bought because they believe it’s going to get better.”

But Garcia hasn’t left those investments to chance—although that might be a better strategy for revitalizing downtown than whatever Long Beach leaders have been doing for the last 20 years. After moving in, Garcia organized the North Pine Neighborhood Alliance, a residents group that, among other things, pressures officials to change their forever-going-nowhere approach to retail recruitment.

“The city’s plan for downtown has totally failed,” says Garcia. “We all agree with that. There is no argument on the other side. Look at all the empty storefronts.

“We keep arguing for a shift in the city’s total reliance on what they call the ‘home-run theory.’ They’ve been going after big retailers like Trader Joe’s, H&M Clothing, Old Navy, Bed Bath & Beyond—the home run—believing that landing one will bring the rest. But we haven’t hit any home runs. So how about some doubles or triples?”

Gunning for major retailers is great, says Garcia, but how about picking off some easier targets in the meantime?

“Let’s go after the independent moms-and-pops, the dry cleaner, the grocery,” he says. “Let’s go after local businesses that are doing well in other areas of the city. We can start building corridors of opportunity up Pine and beyond. There are little markets in the Willmore area, little corners, little pockets of business that could be renovated and brought back to life.”

Garcia goes on a roll for a while, kind of uncharacteristically rattling off opinions on all kinds of issues: his support for a reconfiguration study of the Long Beach Breakwater; the “disaster in architecture” that is the Pike at Rainbow Harbor; the “shortsightedness” of buying out Acres of Books; his disgust with the city’s “unused, dirty, trashed beach”; his support for the big raises recently given to police and firefighters; the importance of putting public health over the expansion of the Port of Long Beach; his belief that the city must be “very aggressive” with the harbor commissioners; his dream of making green sustainability a city policy.

But when Garcia emerges from his reverie, he worries he may have said too much—or at least said it the wrong way.

“One thing I don’t like about politics is the negativity,” he says. “I guess by nature I’m someone who . . . .” He searches for the words. “I’m always trying to do things for the right reasons, so when someone thinks I’m doing something against them, like, it gets me. You know?

“I think sometimes, quite frankly, the current city council is too negative. I think there’s a lot of disrespect that happens on that city council, and a lot of petty fighting that I just think people are tired of. And that’s not me. That won’t be me. Believe me.”

While he is speaking, Garcia doesn’t seem to realize he is talking like somebody who has officially announced he’s running for city council. He smiles widely as he realizes he’s been gotcha’d, and that he’s done it to himself. But he doesn’t give in.

When local Democratic Party delegates gathered at a union hall in Gardena last spring for their Pre-Primary Endorsement Conference—determining which candidates would receive the party endorsement—the guy up front tabulating the ballots was Robert Garcia. He’s very much a Democrat.

Party affiliation isn’t supposed to matter on the city council, which is officially a non-partisan office. But that doesn’t stop party affiliation from mattering quite a bit. Long Beach is a heavily Democratic city, and even more so in the First District, which stretches from the port, up the Los Angeles River and east through much of downtown.

So it may be important—and it is at least interesting—that Garcia once was very much a Republican, until barely two years ago. He worked at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda. He founded the Long Beach Young Republicans Club.

“I met Robert back in 2000, during the first George W. Bush campaign—he was youth chairman for the Bush campaign in Los Angeles County,” says Randy Terrell, a campaign consultant who recently headed the victorious No on Measure I effort. “I got to know Robert at the Long Beach Young Republicans meetings and stuff like that. He’s a good guy.”

Garcia worked on the staff of former Third District city council member Frank Colonna, a Republican. When Colonna ran for mayor against Bob Foster in mid-2006, Garcia managed his campaign. If Colonna had won, Garcia was in line for a prominent position in the mayor’s office. But Colonna lost.

Soon, Garcia wasn’t a Republican. When Canalis wrote that Press-Telegram profile in mid-2007, Garcia was registered independent. By late winter this year, he was counting delegate votes for the Democrats.

“It was kind of shocking,” says Terrell. “Yeah, a lot of those guys were really disappointed in me,” Garcia acknowledges. “But they knew I’d always been pretty liberal. They’ve always known I’m gay, how important I think gay marriage is, that I am pro-choice, that I’ve always been kind of an environmentalist.”

Garcia says it was Ronald Reagan who influenced him to become Republican—specifically, the amnesty for immigrants that Reagan granted in 1986. Garcia was a child and had been in the United States for barely a year, but says he absorbed the appreciation that many Latinos felt for Reagan when they were put on a path to citizenship.

“Becoming Republican was a pretty easy decision for me—for everyone in my family,” he says. “It’s not a unique story. Lots of Latinos became Republicans then.”

Garcia says the Republican party’s attitude about homosexuality is what ultimately pushed him toward the Democrats.

“You get to a point where you realize you need to be in a different place,” he says.

“That makes sense,” Terrell acknowledges.

But it’s hard to believe that someone with Garcia’s astute instincts wasn’t also assessing his place in the local political landscape.

“I think Robert is genuinely concerned for his community, very motivated to make change in a positive way,” says Terrell. “But as a Republican he would not be able to be elected in the First District.”

Garcia won’t go there.

“People can always choose to look at your life and create their own narrative for it,” says Garcia. “I know in my heart what I believe in and I know in my heart what I’m about, and I feel more politically comfortable in my own skin than I have ever felt in my life.”

The energy was intense—positive but purposeful—as thousands of people began to fill the parking lot at Hamburger Mary’s on the night of Nov. 7. They were chanting and singing and carrying signs as they completed a two-mile pilgrimage along Broadway to protest the passage of Proposition 8, which outlawed same-sex marriage in California. The throng soon overflowed the parking lot, spilling into the intersection of Broadway and Alamitos. On a raised platform, a man with a microphone—Sergio Carillo, an official in the local Democratic party—began to introduce one of the featured speakers: Robert Garcia.

It’s this kind of connection with the community—with so many communities—that has some people convinced Garcia could win a race for the First District council seat purely on the strength of the good name he’s built through his good works.

He probably won’t take that chance, though. Some of the city’s best-connected lobbyists—Mike Murchison and Carl Kemp—are lined up behind him, ready with campaign cash and already dishing out lavish praise.

“I am supporting Robert,” Murchison wrote in an e-mail. “He’s bright, well-spoken, has represented his neighborhood association at a high level and has a balanced approach.”

Kemp met Garcia when both were in student government at Long Beach State.

“He’s a winner and he does it by building consensus,” says Kemp. “Everybody seems to like him, but he is also a man of principle who can stand his ground. He proves that you can get things done without being an asshole.”

Randy Gordon, the CEO of the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce, emphasizes that his organization has not yet endorsed Garcia, but he is very impressed.

“We might not agree on everything, but my gut feeling is that he would be somewhat pro-business,” says Gordon. “He’s not going to be perfect—I mean, he’s not going to be (Second District council member) Gary DeLong—but I think we could work with him.”

Maybe there really is room for everybody inside Robert Garcia’s head, and maybe it’s cynical to wonder whether all this talk of consensus is just another feel good way of selling nothingness.

“No, you’re right to wonder,” says Dr. Robert Maxson, the former president of Long Beach State, who has kept in touch with Garcia since they were both at the university. “But you’re not being fooled. Robert’s got a backbone. I don’t think he’d get weak-kneed. With Robert Garcia, what you see is what you get.”

Whatever that is, the crowd outside Hamburger Mary’s began to cheer as Garcia climbed atop the speaker’s platform and Carillo finished his introduction.

“He’s not going to tell you this, himself,” Carillo said, “but Robert Garcia is going to be running for the First District seat on the city council!”

Garcia shook his head no and made a motion with his arms, as if trying to wave the words away, but he was smiling as he reached for the microphone.

Tags: bonnie lowenthal, city council, Long Beach, Mike Murchison, politics, Robert Garcia