He of the musical name, Conan Nolan, NBC4’s main political reporter and moderator of last evening’s televised live debate at Royce Hall, UCLA, doubtless lost count of how many times he had to ask the slippery Los Angeles mayoralty candidates:
“So your answer is a ‘yes’?”
Most candidates – notably except for Republican contender Kevin James, a lawyer – threw wet, sticky, evasive mud in their own frozen faces when confronted, horrors, with a question calling for a single-syllable conclusion.
How many ways can you create a slick escape route from a one-step question ending in… “are you for or against?”
Cleanliness Is a Casualty
When you have spent a decade in elected office and endured dozens of communal forums en route to the March 5 primary, it comes naturally for City Councilman Eric Garcetti and City Controller Wendy Greuel.
They must have spent all day Monday in a silo, practicing avoiding being cornered.
Their most familiar rhetorical position was emulating the nickname of their favorite hockey team, the Anaheim Ducks.
After their fugitive-like answers to Mr. Nolan and a three-person panel of economic and financial specialists, not even Houdini, dead, alive or at midfield, could have deduced a philosophy or what either will be like if he or she is elected Mayor Villaraigosa’s successor on May 21.
Their by-now shopworn, value-free answers, loaded with unimaginative detours, were harder to identify than an invisible, flesh-colored teething ring at the base of a nuclear waste dump.
A Bright Contrast
Alone, Mr. James’s consistent, succinct responses to an hour’s worth of open-ended queries sparkled like a miner’s lamp in a tunnel.
Those have been the two dependable, unbendable trends at every forum since last summer, regardless of venue or topic du jour.
Councilperson Jan Perry, the remaining frontline candidate, has swum obscurely in the middle of the playing field with her answers. She never has been as clear or remotely as responsive as Mr. James, but neither has she been as frustratingly foggy as Ms. Greuel and Mr. Garcetti.
The fifth candidate is as intriguing as anyone in the field, 29-year-old East Sider Emanuel Pleitez. He is a gifted, precocious high-tech executive who identifies President Obama and Mayior Villaraigosa in his work experience.
The conundrum confronting voters:
- Do you hire back a City Hall insider deeply complicit in today’s financial disasters but who may hold a map that shows a route toward at least gray-colored stability?
- Or do you go independent? Should they climb aboard the new horse of plain-speaking, direct-answering, conservative Mr. James? He may be the smartest, clearest mind in the field. However, he has no elected political experience. How meaningful is that blank line? Or is it?
The evening’s theme was “Jobs, Economic Recovery and Restoring Vitality to Los Angeles.”
Dig Deeper or Climb Out?
Since City Hall is saddled with a $216 million structural deficit that has been enabled by the policies of Ms. Greuel, Mr. Garcetti and Ms. Perry during the last 10 years, they were asked about solutions.
The evening’s opening question elicited typical responses:
If the proposed sales tax increase is rejected by voters, “do you consider the fiscal quality of the city a major problem? If so, what would you do to avoid bankruptcy?”
Implicit was a message about further, much further, pension reform.
Ms. Perry: “Bring our employees back to the table. We have to be honest with them, very forthright, and tell them this is about their long-term, our long-term survival. We need to form a partnership where they will be contributing more to their healthcare costs. There are several ways, but this is the most difficult, being honest with our employees…”
Mr. James: “Of course it is a serious problem. Can you believe we are sitting here in the second largest city in America, and we are talking about bankruptcy? This does not instill confidence and certainty in businesses looking to move to our great city. It causes alarm with our city employees and their families. It affects the city’s ability to provide services to you. We must bring all of our city family to the table at one time. That is going to take an independent candidate, someone who does not have too cozy of a relationship with the unions we have to negotiate with because they all have to be dealt with at arm’s length. This means pension reform and, yes, salary reform…”
Mr. Garcetti: “I am running for mayor because I have a proven track record of tackling our toughest issues, whether it’s a record budget deficit or the worst recession we have faced in our lifetime or whether it’s turning around some of our hardest hit neighborhoods years before that. I have a track record which has brought jobs back to the core of Los Angeles, not just talking about promises but delivering on them, saving our city hundreds of millions of dollars when I sat down face to face with our employees. This is a problem that we can solve together. You need the next mayor to have those qualities, someone who has led, someone who has done pension reform. We can’t tax or cut our way out of this…”
Ms. Greuel: “We need to break the cycle of crisis and cuts and layoffs. First, we need to look at jobs. Jobs equal revenue. Revenue equals services to the residents of Los Angeles. I am proud to have been the architect of a business tax reform in 2006…”
Mr. Pleitez: “This is a fundamental issue our city must address, and the next mayor should be prepared to address it and take on any union that gets in the way. Our politicians in the last decade made decisions in areas they didn’t understand. If I was up here, I wouldn’t be proud of cutting 5,000 positions. I would be proud of addressing pension reform. I am the only one who has worked in the private sector, and I have worked with economic policy at the highest level…”
Tonight’s Attraction
Tonight at 7:30, the five candidates will keep their road show in Westwood, moving down the street from the campus to sprawling Sinai Temple, the largest Westside bastion of Conservative Judaism.
Mr. Garcetti, who mentions his Judaism less often than his first girlfriend’s twin cousin’s eating disorder before they left Hungary in 1975, will blatantly wrap himself in a vividly colored Jewish blanket containing the words “I Am a Real Jew” in 72-point type.
Ms. Greuel, who is not Jewish but is married to a Jew, meticulously will tabulate how many times she has driven past synagogues in her life and derived unique feelings of enviable joy.
Ms. Perry, who is black, is the only other Jew in the field, as determined by Torah law. If form holds, she will mention it without a trace of Greuel-style grandstanding.
