How the Long Beach councilwoman is trying to blend a personal crisis into her political trajectory

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY

By the end of the very first day that Long Beach City Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal revealed her 12-year marriage would be ending, she was recasting herself as a vulnerable single mother.

“Now that I’m going to be a mom, alone, living with a child, I now feel differently,” said Lowenthal last Thursday evening. She spoke softly and earnestly, in a voice that felt like the thin, blue light that was fading away as the sun set behind the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles. “Because people do know where you live. They do just drop by from wherever. And now I think a little differently.”

That makes sense, and there are a lot of single mothers—hell, people, period—who most certainly identify. And that makes even more sense if you’re a fast-rising and astute politician whose just-broken marriage looks like it might be a compound fracture, splintering not only your immediate family but possibly also severing ties with in-laws who constitute one of the most powerful political families in Southern California.

For now, Suja Lowenthal is married to Superior Court Judge Daniel Lowenthal, the oldest son of State Senator Alan Lowenthal and his ex-wife, Long Beach City Councilwoman Bonnie Lowenthal. The four have never lost an election, running up a 17-0 record since 1992. Bonnie is likely to make it 18-0 in November’s run for the 54th State Assembly District seat.

That’s a lot of connections to lose, considering Suja has plans to run for higher office; future races aren’t going to be as easy as the one she just won for re-election to the Long Beach City Council, where she was unopposed. And that’s why she was in LA, standing in a courtyard of the palatial Department of Water and Power complex, recasting herself as a single mother mere hours after she revealed she was getting divorced.

Inside, she had just delivered a speech to the Asian Pacific American Legislative Staff network (APALS), a group that nurtures politicians and their aides from those ethnic groups. Translation: it was a large room filled with hundreds of potentially helpful current and aspiring politicians, staff members and activists. Moments before, Lowenthal had brought them to their feet with a rousing rendition of what she told them was “the long, somewhat varying, enriching journey I traveled before I became a public servant”: her immigration from India at age seven, and her subsequent climb to a position of leadership and consequence.

Outside, however, Lowenthal offered much quieter articulation to worries about the insecurities of raising a young boy alone. Her comments weren’t completely out of nowhere. We’d sort of been talking about her personal circumstances. Unable to get my phone calls to Lowenthal’s council office returned for days, I’d shown up unannounced at the APALS reception to ask her specific questions about the possible impact of her private life on her public actions: whether her relationships with two men—one of which prompted her husband to file for divorce—were ongoing when she cast votes in favor of issues those men had before the city council. Lowenthal insisted they weren’t, that she had never cast a vote on anything but the merits of the issue.

So our conversation had moved on to other subjects, such as her take on Mayor Bob Foster’s proposed infrastructure bond and her opinion on her mother-in-law’s proposed ethics ordinance for Long Beach. The latter would require the city’s lobbyists to register and report their contacts with council members. I mentioned that one of the lobbyists’ counterproposals to the ethics ordinance was that council members could simply publish their appointment calendars.

That’s when Lowenthal introduced her concerns about the risks of single motherhood.

“I don’t want people to know where Avi is,” she said, mentioning her son by name. “I don’t want them to know that he goes to 49er Camp at X-hour, you know? All of that is on my calendar now—my son’s doctor appointments, dentist appointments—so that my staff is aware that if I’m not available it’s because I’m doing that. So that’s a concern I have.”

Not to worry too much, however: Lowenthal was already devising a possible solution.

“What I may do differently,” she said, “is I may take those things out.”

All this fretting presumes that Suja Lowenthal will be a mom, alone, living with a child. When Daniel Lowenthal filed for divorce on July 3, he petitioned for sole legal and physical custody of their son, and also asked that he not have to pay spousal support. For now, however, Suja is not on her own. As she left LA at the end of the first day that she revealed her marriage would be ending, she drove to her home in the Rose Park historical area of Long Beach, a home she still shares with her soon-to-be-ex-husband.

The bad news that daybreak had dropped on the doorstep—or as close to the porch as the Press-Telegram delivery guy could fling it—left Long Beach residents feeling . . . well, see, that’s the thing: there wasn’t anything close to consensus about how to react to the July 10 newspaper report that Suja Lowenthal’s marriage was headed for divorce. How to react publicly, anyway.

No doubt nearly everybody had some reflexive response. There was something freshly all-American about the pairing of this young and attractive power couple—Sujatha Joseph, the immigrant girl from India, who’d parlayed higher education and even-higher ambition to become a fashion-plate city councilwoman, and Daniel Lowenthal, the good Jewish son of Long Beach’s most prominent political family, who’d become a skater-shoed Superior Court judge. And, of course, Avi, their adorable five-year-old boy.

However, few people knew exactly how to give voice to their reaction—what curiosities were fair to indulge, what issues were relevant to consider, what was lurid or low or otherwise off limits: What was appropriate? The challenge was to refine all these gut-level chemicals into a proper and useful opinion. And to do so, it’s as if everybody convened their personal strategists in some internal situation room, where emotions were vetted, ideal moral codes balanced against human fallibility and the line that separates the public and private lives of our elected officials examined to see where it’s thick, where it’s thin, where it’s blurred and where it doesn’t exist at all.

But it’s not as though the public were the only ones dissecting, distilling and strategizing. Suja Lowenthal was doing it, too. Maybe not so much, anymore, on July 10. By then, she had her story straight. Lowenthal had had more than a month to prepare as it became clearer and clearer to her that this moment was coming. Selected members of her political support circle met to mull over the circumstances of her marital issues and the possible consequences to her political career, and to devise and agree upon a strategy.

Basically, they were mulling over our reactions—the ones we had when we heard the news, the ones we’re having now, but most importantly the ones we’ll be carrying with us when we go to the polls the next time Suja Lowenthal runs for office.

Meanwhile, there were the rumors—allegations that Lowenthal had had close friendships with other men. By the time the story broke, there had been so many rumors, and they came from such a multiplicity of well-placed sources, that lots of inhabitants of City Hall and patrons of its off-site lunch room, Smooth’s Grill on Pine Avenue, described the breakdown of the Lowenthals’ marriage as the worst-kept secret in town. Somehow, that made the bad news seem even sadder.

Those rumors seemed to suggest a potential conflict-of-interest between the Second District councilwoman and two men—John Rouse, president of Yellow Cab, and Rich Brandt, president of the Long Beach Firefighters Association—who rely on city council approval for their contracts with Long Beach. The District had been researching the votes she had cast on those contracts. Lowenthal had voted in favor of both of them. Somehow, that made the sad news seem even worse:

• On Aug. 14, 2007, Suja Lowenthal seconded Third District Councilman Gary DeLong’s motion to approve the Yellow Cab Cooperative’s request for an increase to $2.45 per flag drop and $2.45 per mile and $26.53 per hour waiting time. The motion passed 9-0.

• On May 6 of this year, Suja Lowenthal voted with an 8-1 majority to approve a five-year contract with the Long Beach Firefighters Association that carries the potential of pay raises up to 27 percent by 2013. On July 8, I phoned Lowenthal’s office to ask her about these votes. The councilwoman’s media coordinator, Jemie Sae Koo, answered the phone, took my message and promised to relay it to Lowenthal. Nobody ever called back.

Two days later, in a telephone interview with Press-Telegram reporter John Canalis, Lowenthal revealed that divorce papers had been filed. “I am saddened by the failure of my marriage, but determined to go through this very painful process that allows my son to know that he has a terrific mother and a terrific father,” she told Canalis. Lowenthal pledged that her constituents would not have to share her pain, that she had her priorities in order and the strength to see them through. “Nothing would distract me from my duties, and my No. 1 duty is to be my son’s mother,” she told Canalis. “As a public servant, nothing has distracted me before, and I won’t be distracted now.”

But Lowenthal would not tell Canalis why the marriage was ending, insisting she has always hidden the details of her personal life. She did explain why she would be keeping the Lowenthal name—“It’s my son’s name; it’s my name”—but stressed she would be entertaining no further questions. “It’s not something I will be discussing,” Lowenthal said, telling Canalis that her husband wouldn’t have anything to say, either.

But her husband was out of town when Lowenthal made those comments. After filing for divorce on July 3, Daniel Lowenthal had gone to Hawaii for a few days with their son. Only when he returned did he read what his wife had said, what the world had read, before she claimed her right to privacy.

What kind of privacy do we owe our public officials? Should there be a general standard or should we consider privacy on a case-by-case basis? Either way, what kind of privacy do we owe the Lowenthals?

Is a divorce off limits when the marriage created connections that factored into the election? Is a child-custody battle between once-loving spouses taboo when the now-spurned spouse and child were part of the campaign strategy?

When Suja ran for office in 2006, one of her most effective pieces of political literature was a mailer that included a charming photo of her family. They were dressed casually, in long-sleeved T-shirts and jeans, and they cuddled together on a green, trimmed lawn. Suja showed us the smiling faces of her husband and her son because they were supposed to infer reasons to vote for her.

Now, as that husband has filed for divorce, requested sole custody of that son and pleaded that he not have to pay alimony, are we supposed to ignore the collapse of those not-so-subliminal campaign suggestions and not factor the new circumstances of her private life into our assessment of her as a public figure?

And speaking of that mailer, it was paid for by the Firefighters Association Political Action Committee, and that group’s endorsement of Lowenthal’s candidacy was signed by the union president, Rich Brandt.

Yep, that Rich Brandt.

When the Press-Telegram story broke, I phoned Lowenthal’s office yet again. Suja was out, said the receptionist, and Sae Koo was, too. Chief of staff Broc Coward came to the phone. I told him I’d been trying to get hold of the councilwoman to ask about her votes on the Yellow Cab contracts.

“About the rate increase?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You mean the 9-0 vote?” he asked, this time with a pointed chuckle—his unspoken point seeming to be that a unanimous vote appeared like a rather minute issue to investigate.

“Yep,” I answered, taking another unspoken point from his question—that Lowenthal and her staff were aware of the touchy situation, too, and had crafted their response to the inquiry they knew was coming: a unanimous vote reduces the impact of a potentially conflicted vote.

I left a message for Brandt at the Firefighters Association and for Rouse at the office of Yellow Cab to ask about their connections to Lowenthal. Brandt did not return those calls by press time. Rouse’s representative, Carl Kemp, called back. “On this issue [of Lowenthal’s relationship with Rouse and her vote on contract], I’m going to be the spokesman,” Kemp explained, then went on about Yellow Cab’s upstanding corporate citizenship. Kemp had done his homework and he, too, had a ready explanation: the council vote on the Yellow Cab contract was unanimous. Any relationship between Rouse and Lowenthal was therefore irrelevant.

But the vote count doesn’t matter in conflict-of-interest cases. My question was whether Lowenthal’s relationship with Rouse or Brandt or both constituted conflicts-of-interest when she voted to approve contracts they sought for their organizations.

So far, I couldn’t get Lowenthal’s answer to that. But I’d coincidentally heard about the APALS reception that morning at a press conference where Mayor Foster presented his infrastructure bond. One of Foster’s aides, Stacy Toda, told me about it, emphasized I was welcome—and mentioned that Lowenthal would be giving a speech.

When the councilwoman arrived, with Sae Koo in tow, I was waiting—seated near the front with a tape recorder.

Suja Lowenthal entered the room with a force both radiant and magnetic. Her eyes were bright and glistening, and her perfect smile exuded warmth and sincerity. Adorned in a black jacket-and-crop-pants ensemble, she fairly glided across the floor. The audience was mesmerized. The MC’s introduction gushed, calling Suja a rising star. No one could doubt it.

Lowenthal’s 15-minute address was mostly autobiographical, with periodic detours to offer a life lesson or articulate a philosophy she had either applied to her life or derived from her experiences. It was meant to inspire the young political interns. It did. They listened with rapt attention. They laughed and clapped at all the right places.

But Suja’s words may also offer a little insight into the experiences that are forging her reaction to her current predicament—as she faces the trauma of an uprooted family, complete with the impact on the relationship between her and her five-year-old son. Lowenthal talked a lot about her son, comparing his experiences with hers at that age. She talked a lot about her mother, too, comparing their trajectories.

“My mother came to this country when I was five years old, and she made a very heartbreaking decision,” said Suja. “She left a five-year-old child behind [in India], knowing it would probably be years before she saw me, in order to ensure that my future would be secure . . . . But it was a risk worth taking, a painful road worth going down.”

Suja explained that she was separated from her mother for two years. “It was a real two years, not an imaginary two years where you are contacting each other every day [with phone calls, texts, e-mail and video],” she said. “It was very, very real. But her fortitude and her courage and all the tears that she cried not to be with her only child has changed my son’s destiny . . . . It has given him an opportunity to see himself becoming anything in this great nation. She made the right decision.”

Lowenthal made a plea for that kind of altruism. She said it informs her philosophy as an elected official, which she repeatedly insisted is really a public servant.

“Public service isn’t about winning elections and being in elected office and being a boss and being all those great things that are entrusted to you,” she said. “It really is to be obligated to the person sitting next to you, this community you live in, this society you contribute to—and that is the operative word: you are contributing to society.”

Yet as she closed her address, Lowenthal foreshadowed the kind of speech she might be giving someday in a campaign for higher office, when she tries to move on from Second District council member. “The Second District is a city within a city,” she said, referring to the district’s variety of ethnicities, income levels, businesses and the Port of Long Beach. “The Second District is reflective of all that, and I have the privilege of working on issues that all of you are working on . . . I want you to open a [APALS] chapter in Long Beach. I need you in Long Beach.”

Suja had left the podium, but the audience was still cheering as she made eye contact with me and silently mouthed the question, “Do you want to talk?” I nodded and we agreed to meet in the courtyard, where it was quiet. On the way she excused herself for a moment—“Can I use the loo?” she asked—and took Sae Koo inside with her.

They came out into the courtyard together, but Sae Koo walked a respectful distance away to allow me to conduct my interview. I switched on the tape recorder:

I want to be totally respectful to your privacy and personal life, and just on a couple of issues—
“It’s a hurtful time. My husband and I filed for divorce.”

I read it in the Press-Telegram this morning. I guess that’s important on two fronts. One, because the Lowenthals are a traditionally strong political family, [and] anything that happens [to them] perhaps has a consequence to the city. But maybe the more important thing—I’ll just go straight to it—is whether or not your personal relationship with Mr. John Rouse—J.R.—whether you were having that relationship at the time you were voting on changes to the city’s contract with Yellow Cab—whether or not that personal relationship was happening at the same time you were casting votes for a rate increase.
“John is a friend; I have many friends. Let me assure you that I have never cast a vote based on anything other than the merits of the issue. That is the Mr. Rouse you’re talking about, right? There are several. You said J.R., right? John’s a friend; I have many friends.”

You’ve probably heard the rumors, as much as anybody else.
“Actually, if I could just continue with what I just said about I’ve never cast a vote other than based on the merits of the issue: No amount of rumoring will change that. No amount of rumoring changes that.”

It’s uncomfortable to ask.
“I know. I know. I’m sorry. Sorry you have to ask. But I appreciate that you do ask. I do. You’re entitled to ask me anything that relates to my official capacity. You’re doing your job.”

Okay, then I’ll ask about one other one, Rich Brandt, and whether or not—
“Rich is a friend; I have many friends. And the firefighters, just like the police, these are our public servants, engaged in public safety. We have 1,500 public safety officers. Rich Brandt is the head of one side of public safety. Steve James is the head of the other. Council members are friends with people who have an impact on the public servants that serve our city.”

So nothing in your relationships with those men would constitute in any kind of way a compromised position, a conflict of interest, in terms of votes you cast on those contracts?
“I think I’ve answered that.”

And here’s the upshot: she’s right. Maybe Lowenthal didn’t know it. Or maybe, under the delicate circumstances, she really wasn’t in a position to explain it. But it turns out that it is not against state law for public officials to cast votes on issues involving people with whom they’re intimately involved.

I finally got that answer from Robert Stern, current president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Governmental Studies, and an author of California’s Political Reform Act of 1975. “It’s only a crime if the vote financially benefits the politician or a member of the immediate family,” said Stern.

Long Beach doesn’t have any ordinances dealing with conflict-of-interest. “We use the state laws,” said assistant city attorney Heather Mahood, “and those are all about money, money, money, money. Officials can vote on issues related to girlfriends, boyfriends, uncles and brothers, as long as the official doesn’t make more than $250 on the deal.”

Stunning?

“The legal definition of a conflict-of-interest is pretty narrow,” acknowledges Stern. “But of course, politics is more than legal definitions. And the ethical considerations are very broad.”

Tags: Long Beach, Long Beach City Council, politics, suja lowenthal