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Pop Eye: Dispatches from the Mayoral Glitz War
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3459 Reads
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 To run for L.A. mayor is to wage a dozen simultaneous wars:
You've got your turf war, your class war, your race war and your cash war.
Your policy war, your media war, your door-knocking war, your ideology war.
Your war of words, your war of ideas, your war of four-color glossy mailers and your war of the Web.
And then you have your glitz war - the one war that traditional news media seem to believe can turn a race's course as sharply as a federal indictment. At this moment, Antonio Villaraigosa seems to be winning the race war and the glitz war simultaneously: Magic Johnson endorsed him today, adding his beefy iconic weight to the three-week triple whammy of nods for Antonio from Maxine Waters, Yvonne Braithwaite Burke and Bernie Parks ...
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In a virtual smackdown of pan-urban symbolic semiotics, Magic made the endorsement at a 24-hour Fitness Club in Sherman Oaks (!), and gave the back of his hand to the incumbent he backed for election four years ago, the Times noted: Under (Mayor Jim) Hahn, Johnson said, "The city is not moving forward. Where are the jobs?"
"Don't get me wrong," Johnson said. "Mayor Hahn is a good guy. He just doesn't have the energy for the job." As my Mom's fond of saying, it's not what you're doing, it's what you look like you're doing.
Villaraigosa's managing to look very, very electable, with hot and cold running community-based endorsements, a victorious cash-war footing and what sports journalists used to call the big mo.
What does it really mean? Well, I've had my say (read: waxed f*cking tedious) about the paucity of real ideas in the smear-happy runoff campaign. It's all a depressing house of cards as far as I'm concerned - a battle of empty husks, one of whom has proven himself unfit to run the city, the other of whom has yet to prove himself to be anything substantial beyond a less-evil alternative to the incumbent.
So let's sample the blogosphere:
To read the passionate schoolyard smack being talked by commenters at Mayor Sam's Sister City, you'd think the Magic touch left Villaraigosa either a) doomed to obscurity or b) destined for victory: This is the final nail in the coffin.
# posted by Anonymous : 11:11 AM, April 11, 2005
MAGIC JOHNSON is the final name in someone's coffin.
AIDS-infected from his own stupid lifestyle choices MAGIC JOHNSON?
FAILED, lampooned and satired talk show host MAGIC JOHNSON is the final nail in someone's political coffin?
Can't complete and intelligible sentence even on cue cards MAGIC JOHNSON?
Spit out that gum before you walk down the street, doing both could be fatal!
# posted by Anonymous : 11:18 AM, April 11, 2005
WHAT, no Hertzberg. The ADV-lovers on the blog had their sources fail on them AGAIN??? (What's that an 81 percent error rate?)
# posted by Anonymous : 11:24 AM, April 11, 2005
WOW!
How are the Hahnisitas goihg to spin this.
This is huge.
# posted by Anonymous : 11:26 AM, April 11, 2005
"We don't know this guy (Tony), he's not one of us!" Magic Johnson, 2001 mayoral campaign event.
# posted by Anonymous : 11:33 AM, April 11, 2005 Jaime E. Olivares at NotiLosAngeles figures the racial calculus, pointing out that plenty of pundits are prepared to predict the outcome based upon increased Black or Latino turnout after the dismal numbers (sub-27%) of eligible voters who bothered to Inka-Vote in the general election.
Kevin Roderick observes it briefly and drily, weighing it against Hahn's weekend endorsement by Mervy Dymally.
The Angelino boils it down to the open question of whether a Black voter will vote Latino - an overly simplistic equation that nonetheless carries plenty of weight.
blogging.la, LAist and frequent mayoral opinionators MartiniRepublic have all given it a miss today.
And so, perhaps, should I have done. It's just an endorsement, just another celeb playing politics, just another community figurehead with perhaps more actual populist clout than any of us give him credit for, preaching to his choir, on behalf of the product.
Back in the real world, the Daily News' Rick Orlov gives a rundown today on all of Jim Hahn's broken promises according to his critics: • Failing to expand the LAPD by 1,000 officers as he pledged in 2001.
• Promising to have a full-time deputy mayor for the San Fernando Valley, and then leaving the position vacant after the first year.
• Delivering less than he promised on traffic solutions.
• Promising to fix streets, but resurfacing only half as much as five years ago.
• Vowing to forge a partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District to improve schools, then procrastinating for years.
• Failing to persuade the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to end its fight against a court order that required it to buy hundreds of new buses. Orlov goes on to quote sources who paint Hahn as a policy wonk whose love for the trees blinds him to the ill health of the forest: Fernando Guerra, chair of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said one of Hahn's strengths is also his weakness.
"He is a master of detail," Guerra said. "It doesn't really help him in governing, because he hasn't hired people who can deal with those things. Where it helps him is in campaigning. He is a hands-on guy who knows his stuff. You see him in debates and he has all the answers.
"That's where it's hard for voters to reconcile Hahn the mayor with Hahn the campaigner," Guerra said. Should you base your vote for Hahn or Villaraigosa on glitz or facts? Decisions, decisions.
And if it's A rather than B, what do you make of the nagging absence of Bob "Other Shoe" Hertzberg?
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Monday, April 11, 2005 - 10:25 PM
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