Second of three parts
Re “He Who Would be Mayor of Los Angeles”
Since the dominant media has mandated that Oratory and Likeability are the primary, if not only, qualifications for elective office rather than, say, ideas or experience, Austin Beutner is not likely to break out early or maybe ever in the Los Angeles mayoralty race.
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Unlike liberal look-soundalikes, Mr. Beutner is not Mr. Warmth. Nor will he be invited to set an audience afire with his unthunder-unlightning rhetoric. Unless crowds report to a Beutner speech for a novel reason, the old-fashioned notion of learning about his ideas.
Subtly wildly ambitious, he talks results instead of what government creatures adore, process. It’s the journey, man, the inclusive journey.
The shallow, idea-free Mayor I Love Me (Hire Me, Hire Me, Please) has devoted the entirety of his two empty terms to a fulltime worldwide Easter Egg hunt for his next job. Without being able to prove it, I guarantee that Mr. Beutner does not aspire to another office.
Born Free – but Late
Mr. Beutner, at 52, is a reincarnation of the exceedingly dry stoicist Calvin Coolidge, my favorite President, 90 years later.
He should have been in his prime in the 1920s and 1930s.
Radio was king in those days. You actually had to listen to what he said, not be distracted by his hairstyle, his breath, his wealth, his (ugh) membership in the 1 percent class, or the style of his shoelaces.
At a roundtable with reporters the other afternoon following the first major policy speech of his campaign — 14 months out — a liberal radio guy razzed Mr. Beutner, not congenially, about his anti-neon approach, his self-effacing, reserved personality. “We’re not casting a movie, are we?” he replied in a witty pushback that revealed a sly, perhaps underappreciated, sense of humor.
Mr. Beutner is a board room-type. The objective is outcome, not the journey.
Here is one of the saltiest government-is-manipulative takeaways from last Thursday’s Fixing Los Angeles talk:
“We want a bike-friendly city. What does the city deliver? A 35-year plan.
“It took Tolstoy one year to write ‘War and Peace,’ four years for physicists to assemble an atom bomb, eight years to answer JFK’s call to land a man on the moon and it took Dick Riordan three months to fix the 10 Freeway after the Northridge earthquake. Why is it going to take 35 years to make us bike-friendly?”
Think about it.
In unadorned language, he values and transparency and efficiency. He eschews paralyzed puppets of frozen-in-ice government. They speak in euphemisms. They languish behind closed doors, calculating how they and colleagues can confiscate more of the dumb peasants’ money and prolong their lifelong occupancy in office.
In the coming months, the left-wing, hate-motivated stooges at the Los Angeles Titanic — George Skelton, Jim Newton, Steve Lopez, Patt Morrison, Ronnie Brownstein, Meghan Daum, and the mean-spirited “reporting” staff — will be too busy demonizing Mr. Beutner’s wealth, his greed, his lack of government experience and his fire, to alternate either their underwear or their sox. Icky poo.
(To be continued)
