Everybody Doesn’t Like the SMRRs, But…

   Everybody doesn’t like the Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights (SMRR). Since they entered the Santa Monica political arena 20-some years ago, the SMRRs have, at one time or another, alienated virtually everybody – including many onetime and current SMRR members.
   Still, they continue to dominate the arena, and the city, because they keep winning elections. Except for two years in the mid-80s, SMRR has held the majority of seats on the City Council since 1981 and currently enjoys a 5-2 margin.
   Now, as in every previous election year, people are organizing to oppose SMRR in the fall contest. The latest un-SMRR Group calls itself Santa Monicans for Responsive Government (SMRG). Among the organizers are incumbent non-SMRR Council members Herb Katz and Bob Holbrook and attorney Tom Larmore, who has spent much of the last year as point man in the continuing Chamber of Commerce and hotel owners’ assault on the City’s Living Wage ordinance.
   In past years, the un-SMRR groups have had several problems. First, none of them has been able to assemble a full slate of credible candidates to oppose SMRR. Second, their platforms have generally been against more things than they were for. Third, they lacked sufficient money to match or surpass SMRR’s campaign war chest.
   SMRG claims, rather emphatically, that it was created solely to keep people informed on local issues, and does not intend to run candidates in the fall election. But we doubt that anyone would be surprised if, in the coming months, it changed its mind and nominated a slate of City Council candidates.
   Whether it could recruit solid candidates or assemble a positive and appealing platform on which to run, it seems certain that it would have sufficient campaign funds, as the hotels are apparently willing to throw endless amounts of money into any effort to kill the Living Wage which will itself be on the fall ballot.
   However, anyone who credits SMRR’s long-running success at the polls solely to its big campaign budgets is engaged in the most wishful sort of thinking. SMRR wins elections because it backs credible candidates, builds strong platforms and runs very smart campaigns.
   And there is something else. The SMRRs have traditionally been painted as anti-business, but, in their time in City Hall, the SMRRs have done far more for business than all of their avowed pro-business predecessors managed to do. Indeed, the SMRRs ignited and have driven a non-stop business boom, which has turned Santa Monica into a major tourist mecca. At the same time, the SMRRs have enacted a long list of so-called liberal or progressive social and environmental programs and policies, beginning with rent control.
   It’s a neat and probably unique trick – being on all sides at once, wooing and winning the rich and the poor, the bosses and the workers, as well as resident liberals and progressives – who have never been offered a serious alternative to the SMRRs.
   It may be politically incorrect in the current over-heated climate for a business owner to trumpet his or her support for the SMRRs, but any smart businessperson knows that the SMRRs have done a whole lot more for Santa Monica business than the SMRGs. Indeed, in that context, the SMRGs come off as ideologues, while the SMRRs are the pragmatists, and though the business community may grumble and complain publicly, it is not apt to kill the goose that has laid all those lovely golden eggs.
   If SMRG or any like-minded group can’t capture the business community and, given the track records of their leaders, can’t win the hearts and minds of liberals/progressives, workers or older people on fixed incomes, where would its electoral support come from? Principally from those people who are perpetually angry at City Hall –- for real or imagined mistakes, slights, insults. But, however visible and vocal such people may be at City Council meetings, they constitute only a small portion of the city’s electorate.
   To win in the fall, an un-SMRR group would have to put together a slate of attractive, knowledgeable candidates and develop a platform that offers real and innovative solutions to the city’s real problems – but, of course, the SMRRs hold the patent on that formula.
   Along with countless voters, the Mirror would welcome a real contest – in which credible, savvy and committed candidates know the issues and debate them fully and substantively, as well as listening hard to residents. But unless the SMRGs or some other un-SMRR group can break out of the mold made by their failed predecessors, it would appear that the SMRRs’ most formidable opponent in the fall will not be a slate of candidates, but an initiative – VERITAS, which is specifically designed to break SMRRs’ grip on the body politic.
   And, here and now, it has a better shot at succeeding than any un-SMRR candidate. The problem is, if VERITAS is approved, it may mortally wound SMRR, but it would also make a shambles of our political process. To approve VERITAS in order to get rid of SMRR is akin to stabbing ourselves in our collective back because there’s an itch there we can’t quite reach.
   A rising wave of profound discontent is rolling through Santa Monica now and if the SMRRs and un-SMRRs don’t acknowledge it and respond to it in a serious and positive way, by nominating worthy candidates and debating the primary issues substantively and openly, then a majority of voters may — out of frustration and desperation – opt to trash the process itself by voting for VERITAS, and never mind the consequences.