City Attorney Campaign
See also List of Los Angeles municipal election returns, 1981.
Ronka did not run for reelection in 1981 but was an unsuccessful candidate for city attorney instead. His political campaign caused a citywide furor with television ads saying that the councilman's opponent, City Controller Ira Reiner, had represented Leslie Van Houten, an associate of mass murderer Charles Manson, as her attorney in court. Another spot said Reiner was "private attorney (for the) Manson family." A campaign mailer claimed that Reiner had "solicited Manson as a client in order to draw press attention and make himself famous." (Reiner actually had served briefly as Van Houten's attorney but "was dismissed when he insisted on separating her defense from Manson's and going against Manson's wishes.") Ronka ordered the ads pulled, but the damage was done: Support fell away, and the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times withdrew its endorsement. Ronka survived the primary election in April but lost to Reiner in June, 231,540 to 133,205.
Read more about this topic: Bob Ronka
Famous quotes containing the words city, attorney and/or campaign:
“The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers’ hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)
“The winter is to a woman of fashion what, of yore, a campaign was to the soldiers of the Empire.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)