[img]1833|right|Ms. Brown||no_popup[/img]Turns out that on June 4, the formerly puzzled voters of Compton will be presented with far clearer options in the mayoral runoff than they had suspected.

• Former Mayor Omar Bradley, the favorite, a public figure in the community for 22 years, is almost as familiar to voters as a relative.
• The mystery surrounding this raw, inexperienced, lightly regarded but powerfully backed opponent, 31-year-old Aja (pronounced Asia) Brown, may have been solved 25 days out from the election.

She looks increasingly like a whimsical, featherweight candidate.

A fair question would be, is anyone home? No one is answering the door.

As a rookie who never has played in the bigger leagues of politics, you would think Ms. Brown eagerly would be roaming from street corner to street corner, declaiming at the top of her lungs a message that would at least remotely resonate with Compton voters.

Instead, she has reliably morphed into Ms. No Show.

In recent weeks, the demystified urban planner has:

• Called press conferences (at Compton City Hall), and then disappeared without an excuse.
• Agreed to interviews, and then vaporized.

So the question demanding an answer this afternoon is:

Why would the most muscular, glamourous political boys in downtown Los Angeles throw their fiscal and physical heft behind a Ms. Nobody, an empty candidate who prefers crouching behind a curtain to bolstering her skinny rep?

Until/unless she can demonstrate otherwise, the single logical answer is that she is the object of the boys’ incessant thirst to control another vulnerable, wind-blown politician.

This development should only strengthen Mr. Bradley’s once unlikely springboard for returning to the mayoralty office he held from 1993 to 2001.