WALTER MOORE
Republican mayoral candidate on spending less, getting away from religion, and ‘cramming less people’ into L.A.
~ By STEVE APPLEFORD ~
Photo by Steve Appleford
alter Moore calls himself a “non-scary Republican,” which sounds like a necessary caveat in this mostly Democratic town. He is also the unknown candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, an attorney and political neophyte who has been left out of most high-profile events leading up to the March 8 election. But he’s put $100,000 of his own money into a campaign that began last summer, as he grew increasingly outraged over the incumbent’s multi-billion-dollar plan for rebuilding LAX. Moore, 45, a trial lawyer for 20 years, has also taken an unpaid eight-month leave from his legal practice to commit full-time to the campaign. He is serious about this.
He is also against rent control, for strict enforcement of immigration laws, and wants to slow growth (and density) in Los Angeles. And in recent months, Moore has managed to win a few endorsements, representing interests ranging from Citizens for a Humane Los Angeles to immigration gadfly Hal Netkin, whose alarming website extols Moore as “the only candidate” while calling Antonio Villaraigosa a “Mexican nationalist” and Richard Alarcón “a communist.”
A Princeton graduate, Moore first arrived in Los Angeles in 1984 and now lives in Westchester with his second wife (they were just married last weekend in Las Vegas). Of his Democratic opponents, he says, “I think of them all as being four Naders and a Gore. They’re all essentially the same candidate. They’re all liberal Democrats with special interests. They’re the Ralph Nader memorial circular firing squad.”
CityBeat: How have you been treated by the media?
Walter Moore: For the most part like some kook fringe candidate. What I’ve noticed is that in a town where “pay-to-play” is the No. 1 problem, they aggravate it by only paying attention to candidates once a candidate has a bunch of money. So after I put $100,000 of my own money in, suddenly I became much more newsworthy.
You call yourself a non-scary Republican.
I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-gay, and although I respect other people’s rights to go to temple or church, I myself don’t. The reason I’m Republican is that I think we need more limited government. The bigger government gets, the more opportunities it gives career politicians to do a reverse Robin Hood: Steal from the poor and give to the rich. Usually, you hear “Republican” in this town, it gives you the creeps; that’s all you need to know about the guy. And I understand that. My own mother, when she found out I was a Republican, said, “Where did I go wrong?”
You obviously feel a need to distance yourself from other kinds of Republicans.
A lot of Republicans are mixing up religion and government. And sometimes I don’t even recognize my party anymore. We used to be for limited government, and at least at the national level, we’ve been growing government bigger than ever. We used to be the party of fiscal responsibility, and we’ve run bigger deficits than ever with Republicans controlling Congress and the White House. That’s not the kind of Republican I am.
The last presidential election suggests a growing distance between so-called red states and blue states, so maybe it’s not easy being a Republican in California.
It isn’t, and it’s gotten ugly. People in both parties are routinely insulting the intelligence of the people in the other. Very intelligent, reasonable people can disagree on public policy. The people in office don’t care about ideology anymore. They just care about staying in office. They’re playing us voters against one another with the so-called Democrat and Republican differences. We have a lot more in common than we have dividing us, and they’re distracting all of us from what they’re doing.
What’s wrong with our current mayor?
He’s the walking, talking definition of pay-to-play career politician corruption. How else do you explain wanting to spend $11.5 billion to remodel an airport in such a way that when you’re done, you have three fewer gates? That is completely a pay-to-play reward for developers, for the engineers and others who “studied” this for years and got over $100 million, and for the labor unions. That’s more than K-Mart spent to buy every Sears store in the world – all the Kenmore washers, all the riding mowers, all the Kathy Lee nighties. We could have bought all of that for less than he wants to spend to remodel one airport. Other than that it’s a great idea.
I paid no attention to local politics until the Summer of 2003. But when I heard the mayor wanted to spend such a huge number that I looked into it, and I concluded that taxpayers were getting ripped off on an unbelievable scale. It made me angry.
You’re against rent control. Why?
Rent control doesn’t care what your income is. You have poor people who have rent-controlled apartments, you have rich people who have rent-controlled apartments. There are poor people who would love an apartment but can’t get into it because it’s rent-controlled and they’re never going to part with it until they die. Yes, let’s help poor people, but let’s do it by giving them assistance for their rent, expanding Section 8 housing, not by tying up the market with rent control.
What is your plan regarding transit?
When you’re in a hole and you want to get out of it, stop digging. When you want to stop traffic jams, stop adding people to our city. We have to prevent our city from turning into Tokyo or New York City. We have to stop increasing the density of housing. If you won’t build it they won’t come. There is no tremendous cure for the traffic jams, but we can avoid making it worse.
So you advocate slower growth.
At a minimum. I hate to use the word “growth” because it has all this positive connotation. Let’s stop cramming more people in. It can be done. Washington, D.C. is a low-rise city because they decided to not have anything as tall as the Capitol. Paris is preserved. I hate to call it “low growth” or “slow growth.” What it is is preserving the very features of this city that make us like living here in the first place.
Enforce immigration laws, because you’ve got a lot of people cramming three-four families into an apartment, you’ve got people cramming into garages. There’s 6.4 billion people in the world who would love to live here, but we can’t take them all. And a lot of them are here illegally.
Outspoken anti-immigration activist Hal Netkin has endorsed you, while calling Villaraigosa a “Mexican Nationalist” and Alarcón a “communist,” among others. Are you comfortable with him making those kinds of charges?
He’s a big supporter. I just speak for myself and I won’t presume to tell him what to do. Villaraigosa being a Mexican nationalist? He probably is. I don’t know, I don’t care. I would rather stick to the policy issue of whether we’re going to enforce our immigration laws or not. The message at my website is what I’m comfortable with, but I don’t try to dictate what other people say.
Moore will participate in a candidates debate broadcast February 15 on KABC-AM (790) at 7 a.m. His campaign website is
www.mayor4u.com01-27-05
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