[img]1610|left|Mr. Mike Feuer||no_popup[/img]The boys could have phoned this one in.
After feverish weeks of launching intensely personal bombs at each other in the hottest race with the chilliest relations in next month’s Los Angeles city elections, the surviving City Attorney candidates played nice last evening in Studio City.
Had to.
The narrow format called for frontrunner Mike Feuer, the challenger, and feisty Carmen Trutanich, the incumbent, to emulate diplomats instead of allowing them to follow their more combative nature in this highest stakes chase.
The final score: Yawn.
Scant hours after Mr. Feuer retorted to Trutanich camp accusations that “Mr. Trutanich has a long history of not telling the truth,” the gentlemen both took one step back, and courtliness monopolized the succinct show.
[img]1697|right|Mr. Carmen Trutanich||no_popup[/img]Debating, kind of, before a conglomeration of mostly homeowner groups, called the Hillside Federation, on the upper floor of a gussied up old-fashioned bowling alley on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, the forum looked like this:
Placing two prizefighters in a ring, telling them they could use everything except their hands, their feet, their heads.
The moderator, Charley Mims, warned them not to attack each other.
Left unsaid, don’t argue colorfully, the way you have been doing.
Who would have been paying attention up to here if they had not been scuffling for the past six months, acidly criticizing each other’s positions, questioning the quality and truthfulness of claimed achievements, the fungibility of their resumés and their sharply different routes to the city attorney’s office?
Strictly an inside-baseball evening, a parochial program for locals, of acutely diminished interest to non-hillside residents, including a visitor from the city.
For these reasons, the debate officially expired 34 minutes after a creaky launching.
