I told myself I wasn't going to do a pre-election laundry list of reasons to kick the doomed slacker out of City Hall.
I'd said it all before, and there's plenty of information online now to help people make up their own minds. But then I read something that just left me drop-jaw mystified:
The question for voters is whether any of the challengers would be an improvement over Hahn's familiar, low-key leadership. Our answer is no.
Let me say this bluntly and without equivocation: ANY of the challengers would be an improvement over whatever the hell it is that Hahn's been doing for the past four years, as it certainly can't be anything remotely considered "leadership ..."
The DB editors credit him (rightly) with hiring Bill Bratton to run the LAPD, but don't even mention the only other unquestionably right thing he did - lobbying against the Valley secession movement.
Instead, they base the endorsement solely in their own back yard - praising Hahn's tepid work to cut pollution and "balance economic interests with quality-of-life concerns" in neighborhoods around the Port of Los Angeles.
They back his megalomaniacal, ruinously costly LAX expansion plan while noting (in a masterpiece of understatement) that none of the neighbors much likes it.
And they note delicately of the way his name keeps surfacing in the numerous pay-to-play scandals, "evidence has yet to surface linking Hahn directly to any wrongdoing."
We see little evidence at this stage that voters should replace Hahn with one of his challengers. Indeed, let's be candid here. If it weren't for term limits being imposed on state lawmakers, some of Hahn's opponents would still be in Sacramento and would not have thought twice about trolling around in Los Angeles' fractious politics.
Of all the asinine, weak, ill-considered excuses for an informed opinion ... Sorry, let me backtrack here and back up my own opinions on the man:
I'm not endorsing any particular challenger over another this time around. But I strongly urge you to vote for any of the four major challengers instead of the incumbent.
Put aside for a minute the spectral Hahn presence that always seems to be hovering around the periphery of three separate investigations of campaign contribution irregularities. Look back at Hahn's record and stance, and ask yourself whether the Daily Breeze is even thinking about the city you live in:
As I've pointed out, Hahn backed striking supermarket workers last year, but didn't exactly put pressure on the managers in the months-long walkout to work toward a settlement.
He asked state water-keepers to block attempts by proponents of the Sunshine Canyon dump in Granada Hills to undermine laws to keep it clean.
He lost a large handful of appointees last spring - a better mayor with clearer vision could have kept the better ones from jumping ship.
He grudgingly agreed to join the Dec. 2 debate after remaining mum for weeks on why he wouldn't participate - and still gave no explanation. (Hell, Jim, even "family responsibilities" would have sounded better than "no comment scheduling conflict.")
He thinks of the Valley as "out there" instead of seeing it as a crucial portion of L.A.'s land mass and wildly diverse population.
He slapped a few streetlights and turn lanes up on barely 100 of the city's 4,000 intersections and called it a substantial improvement. Yet he missed the bulk of the MTA meetings where he should have been lobbying hard for a return to subway construction or at least light-rail initiatives that could ease the growing case of arterial congestion L.A. commuters are suffering.
Eight months late, Hahn threw his support behind a brave plan to cut business taxes - only after heavy lobbying by council members who drafted it to ease the loss of film dollars to runaway production, outsourcing and other entertainment industry leaks that Hahn had failed to even try to plug.
And finally, much as the broken-hearted voters of South Los Angeles would like to have denied it, he's just not Kenny Hahn, Junior.
Jim Hahn may be an intelligent, hard-working father whose roots are deep in L.A. and whose heart is in the right place.
But when it comes to what he's actually done for Los Angeles, Hahn's just a lazy, dull, pandering hack politician who can't seem to grasp that he's holding the reins of one of the world's great cities limply in his hands and giving them a weak little shake only when it looks as though his re-election might be in jeopardy.
Somebody - anybody - come to his defense here: If Jim Hahn has greater leadership skills, I just can't seem to "get" them.
Apparently, the two-thirds of Angelenos in the latest LA Times Poll who say they think Los Angeles needs to move in a new direction, agree with me.
Posted by: mack_reed on Tuesday, March 01, 2005 - 10:50 PM
