Looking forward to Tuesday

CALL ME A ROMANTIC, but an election season almost universally eulogized as dull is making me feel hopeful.

Not because it feels so terribly different from other state campaign seasons. It isn’t. Like campaigns of the recent past, this one is characterized mostly by the specter of term limits, which has Assembly members scrambling to run for Senate seats and a crop of new candidates vying to fill the vacancies left behind.

Part of my hopefulness has nothing at all to do with next week’s election. I was raised on the idea that voting is black folks’ best shot at changing things -- a shot so crucial people died for my right to have it. I was also conditioned to believe that every visit to the polls was an opportunity to start fresh if things had gotten stale or the pursuit of social justice had slowed to a crawl.

Of course, that opportunity feels as if it’s been regularly thwarted since I cast my first ballot as an 18-year-old in 1980. But that hasn’t kept me home.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the years since, it’s that America is the land of opportunity, not fulfillment. Fulfillment is a lifelong endeavor, as any therapist will tell you.

I’m still working on it.

But this “status-quo election” has just enough possibility to make me believe that voting this time may actually qualify as a real opportunity. The grayness that’s hung over the Democratic Party like midmorning fog in L.A. is finally being broken by sunshine in at least of couple of spots -- starting with Phil Angelides.

Angelides, the state treasurer, is in a dead heat with state Controller Steve Westly in most polls. He is campaigning in the gubernatorial primary with a platform that includes possible tax increases for the wealthy -- a sentiment so radical these days that I’ve not heard it from a high-profile politico in California since before the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.

I know that Angelides is wealthy, like Westly, and that he’s cozy with Angelo Tsakopoulos, a powerful developer and fellow Greek American with discomfiting influence in state government. And Angelides and Westly have solicited money from the same corrupt source, convicted Chicago businessman Joseph Cari.

Still, if Angelides sticks to the progressive agenda that clearly sets him apart from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Westly and a whole pack of fatally moderate Democrats, I frankly don’t care who his friends are.

I know it’s a big if, and that the gap between campaigning and governing is often unbridgeable. But I’d rather start with an ideal and scale back than vote for no ideal at all.

I’ll take the devil I don’t know, thanks very much.

Another bit of election-season sunshine is not nearly as bright. But it might prove to be the caesura in the saga of black political leadership that’s been predictable and uninspiring for too long.

THE 48th and 51st Assembly districts, in Central and South L.A., respectively, have long been shoo-ins for black candidates. Thanks to changing demographics, they may not stay that way for long.

Blacks have dealt with a bad situation the way they’ve dealt with good ones -- by clinging to their political real estate at all cost, running candidates handpicked and personally funded by party elders like county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Rep. Maxine Waters.

But in the 48th, Burke loyalist Mike Davis has had to battle serious challenges from lawyer Anthony Willoughby and preacher Edward Turner -- relative unknowns.

Further south in the 51st, the face-off is between two longtime city councilmen, Curren Price of Inglewood and Steve Bradford of Gardena. The most significant difference is not ideology but context.

Price is part of the black Democratic machine that more or less runs Inglewood, a town with a majority black government and the biggest city in the district. Bradford, meanwhile, was the first African American elected to Gardena’s City Council in 1997. And though he once worked for Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald, he is not nearly as beholden to the machine as Price has been. Nor has he been caught up in the bribery and corruption scandals that have sent an alarming number of black elected officials in southeast L.A. to jail over the last several years.

Admittedly, liking a candidate for what he is not, rather than what he is, isn’t the best thing to hang hope on. It’s less an ideal than an ideal inverted.

But that’s more than a good enough reason to vote next week -- not that I ever need one.