After studying the candidates for Mayor of Los Angeles in three recent debates – from Boyle Heights to Hollywood to Leo Baeck Temple yesterday morning in the Sepulveda Pass – they not only have moved progressively west but three of them have remained regressively the unimaginative same, regardless of setting.
From heavily Latino to dressed-up Hollywood to heavily Jewish, the notion of knowing your audience – and playing to them – is more ephemeral than real.
Five months before Election Day on March 5 to succeed the generally failed tenure of termed-out Mayor Villaraigosa, come back on March 4 and you likely will hear the identical messages.
Or maybe not.
We will pay attention in the interim, though, because politics and athletics are parallel: The chance is strong in between for unscheduled drama.
I Am Jewish and You’re Not
Although ostensible slight favorite Eric Garcetti, City Councilman and former Council President, and ostensible runnerup choice Wendy Greuel, the City Controller and former Council member, shamelessly played up their direct Jewish relations – his mother, her husband – the pre-established configurations of the race remained carved in Fred Flintstone bedrock.
Including 11-year veteran Jan Perry, who is termed out, the three present and former Council members’ most frequently claimed refrain in:
Yes, the city of Los Angeles is in a spot of fiscal trouble, but by golly, during my term, I did more than a body could have been expected to do for you people.
That leaves former federal prosecutor Kevin James, the outsider but the most consistently pragmatic respondent from debate to debate, to pose a logical inquiry that his three rivals cheerfully have ignored:
If you did such a terrific job, in three different terrific ways, why is Los Angeles in its worst ever financial crisis? And then he appends practical solutions.
We saw a replay at Leo Baeck before an enthused overflow crowd of 400.
Moderator Jackie Goldberg – an oldtime previous generation member of the School Board and state Assembly – asked a scant three questions to the candidates. Even the unembarrassable Big Bird, Bill Maher, would or should have been embarrassed by the responses from Garcetti-Greuel-Perry. Only Mr. James was direct and practical. Again. The three of them favored platitudes over pragmatism at least by a 7-to-1 margin.
Ms. Goldberg’s three questions were:
• What would they do about City Hall’s drowning budget crisis?
• What is the proper role of a mayor in relation to even drowning-er LAUSD, and how much political capital would they risk to steer the skidding Distirct back on course?
• How would they address the housing crisis, especially affordable units?
Starting with Reform
To the first, Mr. James said his immediate priorities would be to attack pension reform and salary reform of current employees, in that order.
Being an outsider is an undeniable disadvantage – but if you concentrate on the answers rather than the resumes, the dynamics of the race could/should be sharply altered.
In two of the three instances, Ms. Greuel who sounds ideal on paper, said with a straight face, “I do not only want to be mayor. I want to do mayor.”
I turned around to watch the audience. Not one person elbowed his neighbor and winked knowingly, “Smart, eh?”
In the third instant, Ms. Greuel, cloyingly, not to mention sickeningly, managed to squeeze in the 15th advertisement of her 9-year-old son. If the kid is as obnoxious as his mommy, this ain’t a pair you want near City Hall.
She did say that she would be a jobs czar, but that may have been more platitudinous because it was not accompanied by any framework, just an unadorned warning.
Mr. Garcetti is a tightly programmed robot. He majored in monotone and minored in repetition. If you ask him, how are you, he will tell you what he has singlehandedly achieved as the Councilman of the Century. Ask his wife’s name or the color of his car, and he still will list his accomplishments in the same order, same pitch, same metrics.
Ms. Perry said she has been responsible for 5,000 jobs and 90,000 affordable housing units. I am impressed. Douse the lights. Let’s go home. Nothing more is to be done except to dispatch Mayor Villarigosa and the City Council to hospice.
Further, City Hall, she swears, is operating with a skeletal staff. Emphatically, she said with another straight face, City Hall cannot afford to lay off one more body – or Los Angeles will fall into the Los Angeles River. Even in your sleep, can you imagine a government operating with a bare-bones staff when there are juicy millionaires and billionaires to be taxed to pay off their bloated salaries?
Mr. Garcetti, given to boastfulness, said that four years ago Los Angeles was projected to go bankrupt in five years. The main reason it has eluded bankruptcy, so far, he said, is that he skillfully, and out of public view, negotiated pension reform among current employees.
Ms. Greuel, ever going for the mommy crowd and for easy laughs, said that “budgets are not like fine wine. They do not get better with age.” The audience smiled.
Mr. James said the problem of bankruptcy has been building for years. “It does not happen overnight,” he said. “It stems from a series of bad decisions,” which splashed the blame on the supposedly blameless shoulders of all three rivals.
Although there was nothing personal about this or any other recent debate, Mr. James sought to blot out the boasts of Mr. Garcetti by asserting that even the Main Vault Watcher, the Chief Administrative Officer, says the city “is on the brink of bankruptcy.”
After which the four of them packed their valises and headed for a second debate in the afternoon.
