The Edelman Legacy: Quiet but Effective : Career: The retiring supervisor, often overshadowed by more colorful colleagues, led efforts to form a county AIDS program and to protect consumers and children.

Despite the prestige of governing the most populous county in the nation, veteran County Supervisor Ed Edelman has been the Rodney Dangerfield of Los Angeles politics--often complaining he has never gotten the respect he deserves.

During his quarter-century in public office, Edelman led efforts to establish a county AIDS program and create separate departments to protect consumers and abused and neglected children. The Edmund D. Edelman Children’s Courthouse in Monterey Park bears his name because of his efforts. And Edelman, a cellist, has been a champion of the arts.

But Edelman, the senior member of the board with 19 years of service who almost never raises his voice in public, has never been one to draw attention to himself.

The onetime professional labor mediator has been the most cautious of all politicians--a mild-mannered hater of controversy who would rather arbitrate than fight.

Edelman, an unabashedly dyed-in-the-wool liberal, has always preferred to work behind the scenes to build a consensus. Three years ago, just hours before county nurses were poised to strike in a salary dispute, Edelman summoned both sides to his office for a closed-door meeting. Hours later, the strike was averted.

Throughout his political career, Edelman has been overshadowed by his more colorful and outspoken colleagues. First, it was the folksy Kenneth Hahn, then the muckraking Baxter Ward. Later, it was the new conservative majority of Mike Antonovich, Deane Dana and Pete Schabarum.

“I’ve never been a grandstander,” Edelman said Wednesday. “Getting the votes is what counts.”

After a decade of conservative rule and the retirement of Hahn, the 63-year-old Edelman became the senior member of a new liberal majority--only to be quickly eclipsed in news coverage by fiery newcomer Gloria Molina.

Ever since his first election--to the Los Angeles City Council in 1965--Edelman has championed liberal causes, often against public opinion.

He opposed the tax-slashing Proposition 13, which greatly reduced funding for county programs and weakened the supervisors’ powers. He advocated increased taxes to support health and welfare programs for the poor.

During the 1980s, he was often on the losing end of 3-2 roll calls. But through artful persuasion and old-fashioned political horse-trading, Edelman sponsored a long string of successful measures: an anti-AIDS discrimination law, a voluntary ban on the sale of cheap wine on Skid Row, and construction of a Hollywood courthouse.

Edelman lists among his accomplishments his initiation of a review of allegations of brutality in the Sheriff’s Department, which led to reforms. He also cites his efforts to win funding for improvements at the Hollywood Bowl and establish the county Commission for Women.

Critics have said that Edelman was often slow to speak out and inclined to spendtoo much time trying to build consensus.

And while his liberal colleague Hahn poured money into futile campaigns to defeat the conservative supervisors, Edelman warily stayed out of such contests.

The onetime American Civil Liberties Union Man of the Year was thrust into the most disquieting role of his political career in 1990, and one that cast him as a civil rights villain.

A federal judge ruled that Edelman and his colleagues intentionally discriminated against Latinos in drawing district supervisorial district boundaries in order to protect their own seats. After the ruling, Edelman’s colleagues attempted to settle the lawsuit by drawing a new map--one that placed the liberal Edelman in a new Latino-majority district.

But the judge later approved a different map that spared Edelman from a potential Latino challenge but removed him from his politically secure Westside district and put him in a more conservative district that included much of the San Fernando Valley district.

Edelman argued that he was portrayed unfairly as a villain and noted that he repeatedly sought to settle the suit by seeking to enlarge the board but was rebuffed by the board’s conservative majority.

When he announced Wednesday his decision not to seek reelection, his legacy was clearly on his mind.

“I’ve seen the programs that I’ve built over the years and worked so hard to establish be threatened by budget crunches,” he said. “The fiscal situation is dark . . . and I don’t know whether I want to subject myself to that kind of pain again for another four years.”

Profile: Ed Edelman * Born: Sept. 27, 1930

* Residence: West Los Angeles

* Education: UCLA, B.A. in 1954, cum laude; UCLA law school, J.D. in 1958.

* Career highlights: After graduating from law school, he served as a deputy legislative counsel in Sacramento, for a congressional subcommittee on labor and education, and for the National Labor Relations Board. He defeated Councilwoman Rosalind Wyman in the 1965 primary. After representing the city’s 5th Council District for nine years, Edelman defeated fellow City Councilman John Ferraro in a bitter supervisorial contest in 1974.

* Interests: Arts, reading, tennis and playing the cello.

* Family: Married with two adult children.

* Quote: “I’ve seen the programs that I’ve built over the years and worked so hard to establish be threatened by budget crunches. . . . The fiscal situation is dark . . . and I don’t know whether I want to subject myself to that kind of pain again for another four years.”