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The "Trust" Issue: Probing Villaraigosa's Weak Spots
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2124 Reads
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 "All of our heroes are bastards."
-- Camper van Beethoven
While it pains me to give any aid to Mayor Jim Hahn's chances at re-election - this being a race of only two alternatives - I have to confess to a growing sense of dread ignited by recent media reports that call attention to Antonio Villaraigosa's shortcomings.
After a solid Copley News piece busted him for getting $179,000 in donations from ... uhhh ... Florida, including extremely iffy 1,000-dollar donations from 19 gift-shop employees, Villaraigosa's campaign today rather chastely returned $47,000 in donations.
Ever-helpful Hahn operative Kam Kuwata suggested, with what one can only assume was barely-disguised glee, "I think they are trying to protect themselves from potential criminal activity ..."
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Here's the lede and nut grafs of the Copley News piece: Los Angeles politics might seem a world away for William Pineda, a business license sales analyst who lives in Plantation, Fla.
But Pineda and 18 of his colleagues at Travel Traders, a Miami-based company that operates hotel gift shops, are playing a key role in Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa's campaign for mayor.
Villaraigosa received $179,000 from Florida contributors as of April 5, the end of the city's most recent financial reporting period, with one of every six dollars coming from individuals affiliated with Travel Traders. Yet some of those contributors had difficulty explaining, or simply refused to say, why they gave $1,000 or more to a mayoral campaign 3,000 miles away. This report was followed shortly by the ethics-challenged Hahn enthusing, as if his administration weren't the target of three simultaneous corruption investigations, "There's a lot of questions here and I think the Ethics Commission should do an immediate investigation of these contributions to see if there are any violations, any money laundering or any violations of our city's ethics code."
Meanwhile, on the home front, Nick Pacheco, who fought Villaraigosa hard and allegedly dirty in the race for CD 14, praises his City Council performance with faint damnation in a QnA with Donnell Alexander in City Beat:
Do you think that Villaraigosa has done enough with the district?
City services are one of those things that, unless you’re on top of it every single day, unless you make that your priority, it’s really easy for things to get behind and fall through the cracks. So, [Pacheco’s administration] made an extra effort to really be connected to the other departments and work with the communities to learn how to access these services directly, so they can bypass the council office, if necessary. Here’s the way I would put it: All of the talent and skill and contacts that Antonio brings to the table, unfortunately, were not applied to Council District 14.
And why is that?
I can’t answer that. I can tell you from my observation I don’t think they were there. I don’t know why. All of Antonio’s talent, contacts, and abilities – if they were directly focused on the district, those projects would definitely not have been behind. And would have been finished pretty quickly.
The shaky ethical position from which the two mayoral candidates try to batter each other's trustworthiness just adds more gravity to the huge pull that so often keeps voters planted on their backsides on election day. "Politicians are all crooks. Why bother?"
Well, because one of them is going to wind up running Los Angeles - and the wise voter will affix clothespin firmly to nose, take up the Inka-Vote pen and choose the lesser of two evils. Do you want the one with "talent, contact and abilities"- and a shortage of focus in his current gig in hopes that a bigger position will inspire him? Or do you want the incumbent who's already proven himself completely unworthy to the task?
(Spotted at LAObserved)
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Thursday, April 28, 2005 - 09:43 PM
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