LEFTIST LEADERS BETRAY PUBLIC ON SECESSION.

Byline: CHRIS WEINKOPF

AMONG Los Angeles organizations that set themselves out as champions of immigrants, workers, minorities and the poor, almost all are fighting San Fernando Valley secession - even when the people they nominally represent strongly support it.

There are two reasons for the discrepancy: power and ideology.

According to the latest SurveyUSA poll, nearly half of the Valley's African-Americans back independence, but African-American leadership - former Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, state Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson, Rev. Cecil Murray of First AME Church and Rev. James Lawson of Holman United Methodist Church - is firmly opposed, as are leaders of the local chapters of the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Valley Latinos, who would constitute an electoral plurality in nine of the new city's 14 proposed city council seats, support secession at a higher rate (61 percent) than any other racial or ethnic group. But the Latin Business Association and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund are both fighting secession, as are most city and county Latino elected officials.

The story is largely the same among L.A.'s Asian-American groups, where there's some official support for secession, but it's the exception to the rule. The big guns, including the Japanese Chamber of Commerce, the Valley Korean American Association and the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, are all opposed.

Name the constituency, and it's a safe bet that on secession, the leaders are far more uniform in their opposition than is the public.

Unions, religious leaders and the League of Women Voters have all lined up behind Mayor James Hahn's effort to thwart cityhood even though many union members, people of faith and women support secession.

Nowhere is the gap between leadership and rank-and-file more pronounced than in the Democratic Party. Sizable majorities of Valley residents are Democrats and sizable majorities of Valley residents are secession supporters, suggesting much overlap between the two. Many of the candidates for Valley office are Democrats, as is Richard Katz, co-chairman of the San Fernando Valley Independence Committee.

Yet the Democratic Party is so hostile to cityhood that the Valley chapter refuses to back its own members in Valley campaign races. Jeffrey Daar, the organization's president, has said that local Democrats shouldn't even be running. In other words, Democrats should turn their back on democracy.

It's as though the people who purport to represent ordinary people have forgotten about those ordinary people themselves. Having become full- fledged members of the L.A. city establishment, they blanch at the prospect of the establishment's dismantling, their constituents be damned.

But more than just the lure of power is at work here. An equally significant component is ideology. Over the last half-century, groups that were ``liberal'' in the traditional sense, that is inclusive and committed to expanding opportunities for all, gradually bought into the false promises of leftist politics - an unflinching belief in bigger and more controlling government - that quite often produce the exact opposite results.

Thus, it's not unusual for organizations that claim to support minorities or the disadvantaged to back policies that minorities or the disadvantaged explicitly reject.

Most African-American advocacy groups, for example, consistently oppose school vouchers, even though most African-Americans regard school choice as their best bet for escaping failing, inner-city public schools. Latino organizations routinely defend bilingual education, even though most Latino parents desperately want their children to be taught in English. The Asian-American lobby is a reliable defender of racial preferences, even though preferences discriminate against Asian-Americans in college admissions.

Los Angeles city government is, at its heart, a creation of the left and a reflection of its manifold failures. It's a city that's soft on crime and tough on business, overindulgent of public-employee unions and accepting of educational failures. It's a city with the highest taxes in Southern California, but the promise of bigger government begetting better government goes perennially unfulfilled.

The left is ideologically bound to oppose secession because secession is the ultimate judgment of a failed city built on its failed ideas. Naturally, those organizations that have embraced leftist politics are equally bound to fight secession - and the very people they ostensibly represent - with all their might.