David Garth, NY consultant who helped elect Tom Bradley, was 84

David Garth, a small, pugnacious political consultant who said that in a campaign Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck, was known for helping to elect John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg as the mayors of New York. In Los Angeles his greatest victory was in crafting the 1973 victory of Tom Bradley, who came back from a bitter, racially tinged defeat four years earlier to beat the incumbent mayor Sam Yorty. From the NYT obit on Garth:

His signature style combined fierce competitiveness, combustible energy and relentless loyalty. Indeed, he was the model for the media hustler in Robert Redford’s film “The Candidate.” (Mr. Redford wanted Mr. Garth to play the role himself; when he declined, a volcanic Allen Garfield was cast instead.)…

In the Bradley mayoral campaign in Los Angeles, he directly confronted voters’ fears that Mr. Bradley, who was black, would favor black people. As [Jeff] Greenfield later wrote:

“The last time I ran for mayor, I lost,” Mr. Bradley said, straight into the camera. ‘Maybe some of you worried that I’d favor one group over another. In the first place, I couldn’t win that way; Los Angeles has the smallest black population of any big city in America.’ ”

The rest of the ad went on to say that he would not want to win by appealing to racial sentiments, and he offered calming words about different groups working together. But the heart of the ad was its first message: I understand your fears, and it would not serve me politically to stoke them. What made this so unusual was that it flew smack in the face of one of the central tenets of political ad-making: Thou shalt not speak directly of politics, because this is inside baseball and voters do not like it.

That 1973 election was the last Los Angeles city election in which more than 50 percent of voters cast ballots. In 1973, the turnout was 64 percent. It was 76 percent in 1969, when Yorty played on racial fears to block Bradley from being elected. So if you really want more people to vote in LA, I guess the message is you have to scare people.