Schmoozing in L.A. as the Clock Winds Down

Saturday night

From the Grove to Pink’s to Canter’s Deli, Antonio Villaraigosa tries to charm the city that loves playing hard to get.

Flowers and chocolates don’t work. Promises don’t work. But flattery does, and Antonio’s got moves the other candidates for mayor don’t have.

He’s looking at you, listening to you.

He’s a natural, talking up the city like it’s his and ours together.

“These are going to be the best hot dogs you ever had,” Villaraigosa announces from behind the grill at Pink’s on La Brea, where he put in a guest stint as short-order cook.

It’s late, and he’s exhausted after a 32-hour bus tour of Los Angeles. But through the steam you can see a guy who believes his time has arrived. He smells victory along with the onions, and not just in Tuesday’s election.

Hahn, Hertzberg, throw anyone at him in a runoff. He’s on a roll that no one can stop.

“You’ve got to govern this city as if it was a nation,” Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) says while Villaraigosa calls out to the dieters who ordered the tray of goopy chili dogs.

You’re not the mayor. You’re the president and chief executive, and your attitude ought to be:

“Who’s better than us?”

We might not get the jillion-dollar rail and subway makeover Villaraigosa called for, and we still don’t know what Tony Rapp can deliver after the first date. But we’ve seen what you get without swagger and crazy dreams: A few more left-turn lanes.

At Canter’s, while Villaraigosa schmoozes at every table, a 24-year-old waiter named Salvador Lopez digs out his cellphone and calls his wife in South Los Angeles.

You’re not going to believe who’s here, he tells her.

Villaraigosa!

Get a picture, she tells him.

Brown is the color of the air, the river, the city.

Why not the mayor?

“I think he’ll look out for us,” Lopez says, “but for everybody else too.”

Another waiter, 50ish Salvador Garcia, stands almost at attention.

“Excelente!” he says, telling me Villaraigosa has five votes in his family.

Antonio came from where they came from, Garcia says in Spanish.

“He has humility.”

Monday morning

The phone rings in the Echo Park home of Vince Meghrouni.

Meghrouni, a musician, is still snoring after a late-night gig until the call rousts him. He is not happy; he is about to get even more ticked off.

“He tells me he’s with the Jim Hahn campaign and asks me, you know, to get the chatty thing going, how the weather is.”

In two days, Meghrouni has had four calls for Hahn. Two live callers, two recordings. Now Meghrouni wonders why this moron is waking him up to ask about the weather.

“I ... ask him how the weather is where he is,” Meghrouni says. “Eight inches of snow, he tells me.”

And where might that be?

West Virginia.

“I didn’t know that people in the good state of West Virginia were that interested in the L.A. mayoral race,” Meghrouni says, and the flummoxed West Virginian hangs up.

Another campaign caller tells Meghrouni that Hahn cares about the children of Los Angeles, started an after-school program, and is now counting on Meghrouni’s vote.

“Where are you right now?” Meghrouni asks, getting wise.

“Sir, I’m at a location away from campaign headquarters.”

Yeah, about 3,000 miles away.

Meghrouni is insulted. Is this what Hahn raised all that campaign cash for, to have people in the hills of West Virginia make cold calls for a candidate they never met? Couldn’t Hahn at least have hired somebody in L.A.?

Meghrouni asks the caller if he’s for rent.

“I’m a telemarketer sir, yes, I market many different things.”

For Meghrouni, whose vote was up for grabs, that’s it.

See ya, Slim Jim.

Tuesday afternoon

“Lopez!”

SpongeBob Hertzberg is yelling from across Junior’s Deli in Westwood.

“Have some pickles!”

The city is one big delicatessen to Hertzberg. You can hug voters, you can carve up the school district on a napkin, you can eat to your heart’s content.

But I’m not here to see Hertzberg. I’m here to see the white-haired gent who’s been following him around.

Ex-Mayor Richard Riordan.

“Look at these beautiful women,” Riordan says to a table of three diners. “I’m sorry I’m married.”

He isn’t the smoothest guy who ever got into politics. He isn’t the smartest, either. And he wasn’t the most successful.

But Riordan was an activist mayor, for better or worse. He broke rules, spoke up for children, tried to commandeer L.A. city schools.

He made the job and the city his own, unlike the man who may be packing up his office in a few weeks.

If you’re trying to figure out whether you want to be the kind of mayor who fills potholes or the kind of mayor who reinvents the city, Riordan tells me, you aren’t cut out for the job.

“You can do both,” he says. The trick is to “surround yourself with the smartest people you can find and let them do things for you,” and to bring in money players like Eli Broad, who don’t mind getting their names on new buildings.

Riordan tells me some of this as I drive him from Junior’s Deli to another Hertzberg schmoozefest, this one in Century City.

It’s Los Angeles, he says before getting out. A mayor’s got to rise to the job, take risks.

Editing a line from Oscar Wilde, he says:

“Only a mediocre person is always at his best.”

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez