POLITICS IN THE CITY OF LOST ANGLES

Yes, it’s true. Democrats are superior to Republicans. When our politicians act like ignorant morons, we get rid of them rather than celebrate them.

President Biden joined a growing chorus on Tuesday calling for the resignation of three Democratic politicians in Los Angeles after a leaked audio recording revealed racist and disparaging remarks made by the City Council president in a meeting last year. Scores of angry protesters disrupted a council meeting today as the episode exposed painful racial fault lines in the City of Lost Angles. Presidential Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the language used on the tape “unacceptable” and “appalling.”

Nury Martinez stepped down as council president on Monday following the Los Angeles Times article revealing the recording and said this morning that she would take a leave of absence. But she stopped short of resigning from the council, despite calls for her and Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León to do so from Mayor Eric Garcetti, mayoral candidates Karen Bass and Rick Caruso, and many other prominent Democratic officials

Martinez has done as little as she had to do. She issued that cringeworthy apology (I'm absolutely certain she didn't write it herself), and she has "taken a leave of absence". Obviously the plan is to lay low till it blows over, thinking that the voters will soon forget and forgive. This doesn't surprise me with the flotsam and jetsam that rise to the surface of LA politics and float into office on the tide; the only difference between now and the days of Jake Gittes and Philip Marlowe are the clothing and hair styles, the cars, and the technology people carry around. Julius J. Epstein could still stop his car at the light on Sunset and Cherokee, look around at the people on the sidewalks, and come up with "Round up the usual suspects." (that's actually how he got the line)

What's interesting is the uber-climber Kevin De León (who I wouldn't vote for for dogcatcher, I just didn't know this was the reason I couldn't stand him), the apology he issued on Sunday is even more cringeworthy than Martinez's. "There were comments made in the context of this meeting that are wholly inappropriate; and I regret appearing to condone and even contribute to certain insensitive comments made about a colleague and his family in private. I've reached out to that colleague personally. On that day, I fell short of the expectations we set for our leaders -- and I will hold myself to a higher standard."

De León was formerly Speaker of the State Assembly. Given that they only have 12 years in the Leg now with term limits - either in the Assembly or Senate or both - you don’t get people with the skills of a Jesse Unruh (inventor of the modern state legislature) or my old boss Willie Brown (best operator of a modern state legislature). So being Speaker now is not really saying much about his skills beyond glad-handing people who know even less than he does about how to get the job done. It was the major reason I didn’t vote for him despite him being the “darling” of California progressive Democrats over Dianne Feinstein. I’ve never voted for Feinstein after the first time she ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1968, when I didn’t know anything about her other than she was running as a Democrat and was the first woman with a chance to win; I was later a paid-up member of the Die DiFi coalition when I worked in San Francisco politics, because her version of “Democrat” and mine were the opposite of each other. But this last time she ran, I voted for her on grounds I wanted someone representing California in Washington in the Time of Trump who knew how the system worked and where the bathrooms were, and those were tests that De León flunked spectacularly in my estimation. There was something else about him, that I couldn’t put my finger on, that confirmed my vote. I just didn’t know it was something this bad.

I used to like politics in California. Working for people like Bob Mendelsohn in San Francisco, or Willie Brown in Sacramento, coming to know Unruh when he came back to Sacramento as State Treasurer, you could feel like you were working for people who gave a damn. Even when Bob knuckled under to the State AFL-CIO who wanted to protect “all them jobs” that were supposed to happen (and never did) with the San Onofre nuclear power plant I actually had Bob ready to kill with his single vote as Chairman of the State Coastal Commission, I could convince myself we would do great things when he went to Sacramento as State Controller the following year (which in the event didn’t happen).

Years after I left that world, I got a kick out of reading in the Times about Willie Brown running circles around Jim Brulte when the Republicans finally won a one-vote majority in the Assembly in 1994 and Brown - who thought Brulte was a moron - proved himself right when he got the one Republican who hated Brulte’s guts enough to sacrifice his political career and vote with the Democrats to keep the Republicans out of power till the next special election, just because he knew who thought what in the house and Brulte never saw it coming till the vote happened. The fact that those of you not from California know who Willie Brown is, and those of you from California can’t remember who Brulte was, demonstrates who was who. And still is.

You don’t find that much anymore with Democratic politicians in California. Fortunately, I have the privilege of living in Brad Sherman’s district, so I have a good congressman. Not as widely known as Adam Schiff, but very solid.

As for Los Angeles politics, they’ve always been awful. And I hate to say it but the Martinez’s and Cedillo’s and De León’s aren’t the first Latinos to campaign as fire-eaters and turn out to be “less than expected.” I used to live in Richard Alatorre’s city council district over on the east side and the joke was every bit of bad decision-making you ran across, like construction projects that made things worse, was proof it only cost $1,600 to fuck up the neighborhood, that being the maximum donation one could make at the time to a L.A. City Councilman. Alatorre was corrupt as hell, but he stayed in office because he had the best constituent services staff in City Hall. You called them and asked for something to get fixed and they fixed it.

When Gloria Molina ran against him, I supported her. At first she was good, good enough I voted for her when she ran for the Board of Supervisors, but after her first term I was not such a supporter. That’s the way with Los Angeles politicians: you vote for them to get rid of the asshole who’s there, and then two cycles later you’re looking for someone to kick their ass out the door. In the 40+ years I have been here, there has yet to be a mayor who, when he left office, everyone wasn’t saying “Go!” Everybody wishes Good Guy Eric Garcetti would get his ass to India and not come back.

This stuff right now is different. Not that it didn’t exist before. I’m sure it has existed since the City of Lost Angles became the City of Lost Angles. In fact I can prove it has, when you look at Mayor Sam Yorty, a “Democrat” who could have run for Governor of Alabama without changing a thing. Or any of the mayors before him. Or even the sainted Tom Bradley, who came after him and signaled that “a change was gonna come.”

Politics here have become very parochial, or perhaps more obviously parochial than they always were. Especially with Democrats. I don’t know what the situation is with Republicans, since I haven’t met one here since Richard Riordan was mayor. They are around to be found - the two big megachurches in the SFV is proof of their existence, since “non-denominational” Southern Baptist megachurches and Democrats mix like oil and water. But they have such little effect on politics that Rick Caruso had to stop being one and register as a Democrat so he could run for mayor.

But the city is really the product of competing groups who now all play Zero-Sum Politics - a win for that other guy has to come as a loss to me. If you doubt this, all you have to do is pull up a political map of the city and look at the city council districts. We have shapes that boggle the mind! Drawn so that we white liberals in Encino get connected via Sherman Oaks and North Hollywood south of Ventura Boulevard and north of Mulholland Drive over to Hollywood - it looks like an unbalanced dumbbell, with our end “above the bar” and the other ‘below.” Outside of being mostly white Democrats, I am not sure what I have in common with the people over in Hollywood, a place too overcrowded with Yuppies for me to want to drive over there nowadays.

The other districts are drawn the same way. The word is “Gerrymandered.” And that is what the argument was about last year that got Martinez and Cedillo and De León so upset that they descended into racial animosity against the other “Democrats” in the city who wouldn’t give them “our share.”

It’s really no different from the “machines” that ran New York and Boston and Chicago and Cincinatti and Kansas City and you name the place back before all the good guys “reformed” things in the 1970s, so they could be the way they’d been, only with nobody running the show.

So much for progress. As I have said before, the difference between a California politician and a Hollywood studio president is all the damage the Hollywood guy can do is fuck up a movie or two.

I miss Jesse and Willie. They knew how to knock heads and get progress that was actually “progressive.” Unlike the collection of clucks today.

I honestly don’t know why anyone wants to try and govern Los Angeles. It’s like pissing into the wind. Things just go from bad to worse than you can believe, and then on from there. No matter who’s doing what. And all you get is covered with the smell of the urine.

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