Shuttling among the wildly different victory parties on Election Night provides a marvelously energizing snapshot of the celebrated diversity of the political personalities and cultures that enrich Los Angeles.
Except for a touring journalist, dare I say there were not any repeat faces in the crowd from:
- The cheering supporters of Curren Price inside the Paradise Baptist Church, 51st and Broadway, to
- The thinner, much lower key backers of rival Ana Cubas five minutes away on San Pedro Street, to
- The stylish, glasses-clinking, dressed-up, reserved ladies and gentlemen in a majestic Hancock Park home, confident of a Mike Feuer victory to
- The fiercely loyal backers of doomed Carmen Trutanich at noisy, overflowing Rocco’s Tavern in the Valley.
Telling, also, was the way the candidates themselves handled emerging developments.
[img]1717|left|Mr. Curren Price||no_popup[/img]Not surprisingly, the first smiling persons encountered at the 9:30 starting point at Paradise Baptist were the well-known Culver City activists Rebecca Rona Tuttle and husband Rick Tuttle – he was the Los Angeles City Controller from 1985, when Wendy Greuel still was a pup, to the turn of the century.
This was the evening Culver City lost its state senator.
With, shall we say strong, live samba music pounding in the southwest corner of the reception room, the Tuttles were among the first in the suit-and-tie throng to congratulate Mr. Price on doubling his $95,000 salary by shifting from the state Senate to the City Council.
The Tuttles, of course, did not actually say that. Only a journalist would be sufficiently brazen. No one asked, but the Los Angeles Council is the highest paid this side of Benghazi.
The Perle of the Evening
Moving easily among the crowd, posing for a different camera-wielder every dozen steps – now with Diane Watson, now with Mark Ridley-Thomas, who was having the best time of all – the perfectly pitched Mr. Price could be the Perle Mesta of his generation, the host with the most.
He won the primary over Ms. Cubas by 275 votes and two nights ago by 541 out of 9827 votes in the 9th Council District, but judging by the mood in the room, you would have sworn it was a landslide.
[img]1900|right|Ms. Ana Cubas||no_popup[/img]Down the dark, mainly deserted, late evening streets of South Los Angeles and around the corner awaited the open-air party for Ms. Cubas’s first campaign.
You never had the sense, though, this was going to produce a happy outcome. The candidate was quietly closeted with several advisors and friends in a rear room while out front Hispanic music wafted rather than roared through the room.
I parked illegally in the following block. A campaign aide assured me I should not fret about anything as pedestrian as a parking ticket. “Won’t happen,” he said. “In this area, the LAPD has much bigger fish to fry.”
Changing Cultures
[img]1610|left|Mr. Mike Feuer||no_popup[/img]And away we went, through the open streets of downtown, turning left on 6th Street, en route to the gleaming setting of upscale Hancock Park, home to many Orthodox Jews, where residences favorably compare in size to the pyramids.
Parking was no problem. Residents have driveways.
Unlike the Council race in South L.A., television trucks were poised at the curb because surely Mr. Feuer, holding a lead of runaway proportions, would be a prize to snare.
Having known Mr. Feuer, on this evening of perhaps career crowning achievement, he looked and conducted himself as he always, dressed and prepared to greet a king and queen.
All while modestly, discreetly keeping deeply under wraps, the state of his lingering pain from last December’s freeway off-ramp crash. He has ridden out the 5½ months with under-appreciated heroism.
At raucous Rocco’s, where Mr. Trutanich just was beginning his concession speech, if you just had flown in on the noon balloon from Saskatoon, you never could have guessed he had lost by a disappointing two dozen percentage points.
Classy politicians know when to conceal their true feelings, which is what brought them to office in the first place.
