LA POLITICS - Bicycle advocate Alex Thompson isn't one of those lazy, uninformed Angelenos you might have read about in The New York Times who doesn't vote.
In fact, he has already voted, having mailed in his absentee ballot last week.
He left the mayor's section — Eric Garcetti or Wendy Greuel? — blank.
"I just don't believe in making choices like that," he says, his voice laden with the sort of grimness one has after contracting a stomach virus. "The only positions they differ on are just taken for the purposes of trying to win the race."
Thompson doesn't see much difference between Greuel and Garcetti, two friendly, intelligent, nonthreatening City Hall functionaries who are both white, pro-union, liberal Democrats. Both have campaigned with a sort of election-season amnesia, ignoring their own records as two of the nation's highest-compensated politicians, instead explaining what they may — or, just as likely, may not — do once elected: balance the budget, pave the streets, fix the sidewalks, achieve a consensus between business and labor, and so on.
The media has been complicit in this conspiracy of forgetfulness as it monotonously covers each promise-filled press conference, debate, talking point, television ad and strategist-on-strategist spat.
The campaign at times resembles one of those 1980s sitcom where each episode stood perfectly on its own, without reference to the past.
Maybe that's why, in the March 7 primary, voters emitted a collective "meh." Voter turnout was 21 percent of those registered — a number that excludes, by the by, a vast population of eligible citizens who've never registered.
The numbers who vote to elect a new Los Angeles mayor on May 21 don't promise to be much higher.
"I don't know that I've ever seen a mayoral election in Los Angeles with so much disinterest," says Doug Epperhart, a San Pedro community activist and member of the city's Board of Neighborhood Commissioners. "There is no enthusiasm. I had a neighbor say to me, 'The only reason I'm voting for Wendy Greuel is because [City Councilman] Joe Buscaino endorsed Garcetti and I hate Joe Buscaino."
That perfectly captures what so many feel about two candidates with inoffensive yet less than stellar records who have spent much of the past decade awarding themselves and their colleagues gold stars for modest victories.
South Los Angeles community activist Shawn Simons sums the race up with even more bitterness. (Read the rest … including why Shawn is so bitter … here)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 36
Pub: May 3, 2013