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Bernard Parks’ people probably should have rented out his campaign headquarters on Election Night to an itinerant mortician passing through the Crenshaw District.
At least that way they could have salvaged candy store spending benefits from a hollow-sounding run for office that was brilliantly strategized except for being short on heart, short on funding, and lacking raw motivation.
My post-event hindsight, pervasive and persuasive, says that if Supervisor-elect Mark Ridley-Thomas had known it was going to be this easy, he could have taken the whole election season off and gone on holiday. Only one person in the race badly wanted to win the open seat on the County Board of Supervisors, and his surname contained four times as many syllables as the other guy’s.
From his well-polished shoe heels to his haircut, Supervisor-elect Ridley-Thomas inhales and exhales the founding principles of politics. He may not have been exactly running against a reincarnation of Barack Obama. Hold a mirror to the other guy’s mouth: Does it fog up?
Nice Is Not Enough
Permit me to repeat a core conviction that the former Police Chief impresses as an extremely nice man who deserves a much better fate. This was like watching your mother get hit in the face with a water balloon. It isn’t funny in any way. Who let Mr. Parks’ handlers in the front door?
When I strolled into Parks for Supervisor headquarters at 3734 Crenshaw at 8 o’clock, just as the polls were closing and Barack Obama was officially clinching the White House, I thought I had walked into a blind-man’s fire drill, 150 people in charge of — well, like the campaign, that was not quite clear. The early, terminal stages of helter-skelter. Who’s in charge? Everybody? you say. That explains the chaos.
My nostrils thought the Russians were in Fullerton. There was enough food to feed the most anorexic of my former wives and all of the people she offended during what I like to think of as the Dark Ages when we were together. She had a temper that would make John McCain resemble Mr. Obama,
Putting on a feedbag and hooking up with fellow Obama supporters on the biggest night of everybody’s life seemed to be what galvinzed almost all of the denizens at Parks for Supervisor. I stepped outside. Not for air, just to make sure the sign didn’t say this wasn a hotel lobby for the bored or the travel-weary.
Remind Me. What Was the Candidate’s Name?
If anybody throughout the sizable complex gave a flip about what was going to happen to Mr. Parks later in the evening, they masked it with their contagious glee over Mr. Obama’s triumph. In the 100 minutes I spent there, I only heard one other person mention Mr. Parks’name.
The principal distinction between Parks’ strange headquarters and Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s dazzling encampment at the classy Century Plaza Hotel — the difference between a winner and a loser — was that Mr. Parks’ people were fulltime nuts over Mr. Obama and the Ridley-Thomas crowd was laser-focused on how the voters had treated their guy, Mr. Ridley-Thomas.
Sometimes you don’t need a table full of political scientists to deduce why a race breaks so onesidedly.
