Well, here we are. We made it. Congratulations Los Angeles. We survived the midterms and no, fascism was not sternly routed in the way that we wanted it to be, but it was also not exactly strengthened. But I’m not here to talk about the national side of things, that’s for smarter people. I want to talk about our decision-making here.
Congratulations on choosing a new mayor. even though there were really only two decisions I want to remind people that the choice wasn’t exactly a binary one. On the one side, we had an old establishment politician — a Karen Bass — who had campaigned on becoming the next mayor of Los Angeles because she felt that she actually understood what Los Angeles was about and could maybe…probably…do something about the myriad of problems the most important city west of the Mississippi river faces. The other side — a Rick Caruso — so chosen, so badly desired by people who love money, want to acquire more money and would like nothing more than to elect someone who knows how to acquire and retain money. Caruso, a bored billionaire who changed parties five days before the candidate filing deadline from Republican to Democrat, was the candidate of people who believed that wealth was equivalent to expertise. He’s the candidate of celebrities, paid endorsers, land development firms, and rural wealth that believes that finally after years of trying they would get a NIMBY like them who could “talk some sense” into those big lib city folks who keep telling them they have to build another building for which people live in at just below market prices. Good riddance, Rick. Go be rich. In losing the election, you lose nothing of real value except for your ability to enrich, nay, engorge yourself on the spoils of fiefdom.
This election should stand forever as a reminder that when given the opportunity to make a rational decision, Angelenos will always overthink it and pretend they did otherwise. From the very beginning, Bass was the better option, the only candidate with the pedigree and actual desire to govern. The candidate who had actually been in governance. The one who if you had to look at the two candidates and decide which one of them has most recently been on the inside of a grocery store would have been the easy pick. And we almost messed it up. We got hung up on her relatively soft answers to how she’s going to implement policy to begin addressing housing and homelessness. We got hung up on the whole Scientology thing. Yes, problematic. But LA is weird. And far be it from me to say in the age of choosing lesser evils that I would prefer my mayor be the guy that built the Grove over the woman with at least some experience who says she is no longer affiliated with the crackpot church of Xenu.
This keeps happening. This is the city in which indecision in voting is the proper form. Not because candidates are great. In 2013, Wendy Greuel had her entire mayoral campaign basically derailed by allegations of her calendar being filled with lavish dinners and lunches in efforts to boost her campaign. This became such a big talking point that there were talks of her having actually violated ethics commission guidelines for elections by having dinner, after hours, with campaign donors. Wendy, the City Controller at the time, spent more time having to defend her after-hours schedule than campaigning. And in the end, the vote was still close. Her runoff contender? Eric Garcetti. The jazz piano guy. But besides this, not voting for Greuel would have been an easy choice to make. She spent the majority of her real-time campaigning in the rural parts of LA, spending time with shadowy millionaire types, and making friends with business tycoons. In many ways, Wendy, the first woman to advance to a runoff in LA election history, was a prototype of Caruso and we should have seen it coming. Even in 2013, we let it get too close. Garcetti, despite all of his flaws (and would be flaws in the future), was a clear decision for what the city of Los Angeles looked like. He had a vision (Trains! The Super Bowl! The Olympics!), he was likable, he played jazz piano, and he trended well as an Angeleno. He looked like the kind of guy who could actually tell you the ingredients in a taco. And still, we acted like Wendy, who we have not seen or heard from since was a compatible choice to make.
Auntie Karen walks now into a buzzsaw of policy issues. Los Angeles is a mess. It’s a city in which one must be brave, stupid, or drunk to want to govern. Courage is required but still useless. She faces record-high homelessness. A housing shortage that is fast turning into a crisis. A city that can’t stop attracting talent to new careers and businesses while having no place for them to actually live. Covid is still a thing, decimating the rural parts of the city and always threatening to spiral out of control. Her city council is beset on all sides by racists. USC still exists. Dodger fans still leave in the 7th inning absolutely destroying the 101. Communities of color that for decades have been underfunded (intentionally), overpoliced, and systematically devalued to make way for developmental projects meant to serve overpaid Amazon employees from Kansas. There is a sense that the city is no longer for Angelenos, and changing this will require real leadership. The strongest weak mayor we can possibly have.
If she wants to fix this, if she wants to actually be the guy, she’ll have to start that advocacy work. Some of it might start with a review of the City Council (maybe even getting rid of it). Leveraging her institutional expertise to appointing actual managers to handle homelessness rather than hoping and praying that the public-private sector will at some point just figure it out. Appoint an independent commission overseeing city hall to reduce the amount of finger-pointing that turns districts on one another. Those would be a start. Oh, and obviously, more trains, please.
Way Past Policy 