When She Who Would Be Mayor of Los Angeles sashayed through the doors of the West Angeles church’s Crystal Room this morning at 8:10, not only fashionably tardy but annoyingly late, I thought I was in the wrong joint. Where were the other models? Have they disguised the runway?
Doesn’t Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad’s monthly Urban Issues Breakfast Forum showcase newsmakers, not girls who get lost on their way home from the Senior Prom?
Arriving 10 minutes after she was to have begun speaking about her new favorite subject, government waste, City Controller Wendy Greuel executed a nosedive onto her pert kisser as a mayoralty candidate.
If this were a job interview, she would have been excused after identifying herself.
Meticulously coiffed – she must have arisen at 2:30 to shape her handsome two-tone locks ¬– the most offputting part of Ms. Greuel’s inappropriate appearance was her nearly off-the-shoulder prom dress.
For breakfast? At a church?
If she is a serious candidate, the sky is green.
Her 70 chatty minutes of empty meandering at the microphone were jammed with extraneous, frothy gossip. Fifty percent silly, 50 percent dull disaster.
She was more disappointing than one of Newt’s ex-wives or mine.
Gas Is How Much a Gallon?
Gassy as if she were being paid by the word, she roamed her modest lexicon like a professional nomad. Undisciplined as a rookie, she sounded like two windbag new mommies talking over each other in the backseat on the way to a My Kid Is Better Than Your Kid convention. If she had dared uncork the 54th reference to her 8-year-old son, a shriek would have been emitted from our podium-adjacent table, mine.
Undeniably attractive, even if she is 13 years older than Brad Pitt’s wife, probably likeable and potentially an effective orator, Ms. Greuel struck every wrong note, on cue, before a nevertheless appreciative audience of 200 enthusiasts.
One would need a hefty drink to trace the trajectory of her careening speech, another to define or summarize its crazy-quilt contents. Coherence is her sworn enemy.
She may have broken a world record by repeating every known Anglo-Saxon cliché, the best ones 20 times apiece.
Somewhere between stepping out of her car on Crenshaw Boulevard and entering the Crystal Room, her vaunted credibility was kidnapped, never to be recovered.
Pretty much a government-lifer at 50 years old, despite her expanding reputation for stiff-arming government excess, sloppiness and pure waste, she spoke like a distracted pedestrian bureaucrat who needs to be burped periodically.
Usually, No One Is Looking
In her favor is that gigantic colonies of Angelenos pay no attention to City Hall. On Election Day, they vote for the last person they saw on a television commercial, even if his name was Easter Bunny.
You would not have known any of this about Wendy Greuel, who is lionized in the daily media for her hyperactive City Controller’s office exposés of waste in scores of city offices. She performed this morning as if she has ADD. She couldn’t stay with one story, one subject, long enough to complete a thought. At no juncture did she sound substantive.
Only one resemblance does she bear to city leadership, in a superficial way: A dilettante could spend two days touring her hair and that of Mayor I Love Me. She thinks gravitas is something you walk on in a stone quarry.
Yet last Tuesday, she earned laudatory headlines once more in the Los Angeles Times:
“L.A.’s Grant Efforts Fall Short.
“Lack of oversight cost the city more than $125 million, Greuel wants Guidelines.
“In an audit of the city’s application processes for competitive grants from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Greuel found that the lack of a centralized body to oversee the city’s scattered departments led to a series of oversights that reduced the city’s share of the billions in funding awarded across the country.”
The former City Councilperson who kept making incessant, irrelevant references to persons in the crowd, appears to be worthy as the successor to the now-retired Queen of Exposés Laura Chick. Perhaps she should dispatch her driver to deliver her speeches, just like Pizza Man.
Can Anyone Give Me a Why?
After her cross-country 40-minute attempt at a speech, she fielded 11 questions in the next half-hour. The winner was: Why do you want to be mayor?
Blank-eyed, she responded, uninformatively:
“I am who I am because of the city of Los Angeles. My father was who he was because of the city of Los Angeles, of what we were able to have, a good public education, a great place to live, of creating a good small business that created jobs and allowed him to give me a good education and allow me to go to UCLA, to get job and to work for one of the best mayors we ever had, Tom Bradley. When you have been given so much, you must give back. I do have options. I could run for Controller and probably be reelected. People ask me, ‘Why would you give up your secure job?’ Because nothing comes easy, and if you believe the risk is worth it, you do it. I have the experience that can make L.A. work again. I can roll up my sleeves and do it. It’s about getting the job done. If you do the job you were elected to do, you can always go to the next job. I am going to be the best Controller ever, and work on these things to make sure. Then I am going to go and say, ‘I am going to do the best things I can to be the Mayor of Los Angeles.’”
Not a damp eye in the room. Or maybe an open one.
It is unimaginable that she should be allowed to govern.
