For the cozy covey of Angelenos who actually track the human traffic that enters and the monetary traffic that leaves City Hall, they will need to make a stupendous psychological adjustment if Austin Beutner is elected a year from March to succeed Mayor (I Don’t Do Nuthin’ for Hardly Nobody) Villaraigosa. There must be a God because Mayor I Love Me collides with term limits next year. Mayor ILM has visited every state and most countries except Pakistan answering Help Wanteds in the classifieds in a desperate chase for his next gig. Only the caboose in the phrase working for a living ever has appealed to him, however.
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The 52-year-old Mr. Beutner is in the news because, although he has been soft-shoeing for mayor for months, yesterday he delivered what was called his first major policy address, sponsored by Town Hall Los Angeles, downtown at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo.
He sounds like but does not resemble Mitt Romney in asserting imaginative, business-model solutions to awakening what he calls a moribund Los Angeles.
Even after speaking at 300 events in the lengthily winding trail to the mayor’s office, he isn’t entirely comfortable partnering with a microphone before a crowd of 150 in a compact, stadium-style setting. Afterward, at an off-stage roundtable shmooze with 20 reporters, he was relaxed.
He cracked that a bullet should be taken to the high-speed rail boondoggle. We only could afford it, he said, if money spurted from tree branches and we owned our own printing press. Otherwise, we should concentrate on mass transit at home.
Asked to criticize the mayor, for whom he worked an abbreviated 15 months as Jobs Czar, Mr. Beutner declined for the logical reason that the mayor is not on the ballot next year. So far only city Controller Wendy Gruel and City Councilman Eric Garcetti officially are in the race with him although aCounty Supervisor Zev Yarslovsky, a failed candidate from 20 years ago, is trying to get drafted.
How Would the Job Fit?
Mr. Beutner bespeaks modesty, making his quest for the mayor’s chair border on oxymoronic.
If he won’t compare himself against Mayor Villaraigosa, we will.
Of a similar age, they are as unalike in important categories as a whip-smart, ambitious man is from a gentleman who prefers the laissez faire way of life.
Medium tall, spare, almost slatternly of build, sandy-haired and fair of complexion — with nearly invisible eyebrows — his appearance is a metaphor for the real Austin Beutner, who prefers personal invisibility. He is a self-made gentleman of considerable wealth after 30 years in business and investment banking. Friendly enough, he possesses the personality bankers are obliged to own, quiet, not stealthy, but emphatically not intrusive.
How We Know He Is Clean
Contrarily, Mr. Villaraigosa, dark, ethnic, slick, dapper, button-down with a hidden mirror in the palm of each hand to verify his just-right smile, executes every act, including sneezing and glancing, with a flair. The Mayor demands to be noticed when he creases a doorway. Mr. Beutner, without movement or sound, demurs.
It never has been asserted that Mr. Villaraigosa’s life is imperiled by overwork though it has been said of the labor-centric Mr. Beutner. The mayor sees himself as George Clooney with a Latino sheen while Mr. Beutner never has seen himself.
The mayor has divorced his family twice and squires considerably younger girls to glitzy settings. Mr. Beutner, unscandal-scarred, lives unobserved with his wife and four children in the Palisades. We know he is living a clean life because he is markedly right of the mayor. This means if he sneezed through the wrong nostril on a winter’s day in 1977, it would have been on Page 1 of the Los Angeles Titanic.
(To be continued)
