Comments@THE GUSS REPORT-There are silver linings to be found in local politics.
The newest ones include California Governor Gavin Newsom's likely recall and LA Mayor Eric Garcetti being wisely left behind by the Biden Administration for a cabinet position.
Let's cheer for these outcomes, just like the vacuous cheerleading done for Newsom and Garcetti over their careers by the continuously struggling Los Angeles Times. Whatever your civic issues, their collective downfall has a delicious schadenfreude flavor to it.
Twin towers of tumult, Newsom and Garcetti are creations of our gullibility to local media, which relies mainly on the Times. The paper, which is smaller in length, width, and content than ever before, took two big fish from the small political ponds of San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, and kept advancing them for no reason other than their identity politics and personal malleability.
Ask yourself, what problem has either ever taken on and did such a great job fixing that other cities and states emulate? Heck, skip the emulate part and ask what has either ever accomplished to make everyone's life better?
The Times remains deluded that Newsom ever had presidential chops. Does the outlet funded by billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong believe he could beat President Donald Trump or any number of mainstream Republicans with a résumé that only includes current-day California, San Francisco, and a vineyard?
Newsom doesn't even have a chance of winning re-election as governor. His infamous din-din at The French Laundry is only the final straw.
Similarly, the Times kept advancing Garcetti over the past two decades because he has a cushy suburban pedigree with its Harvard-Westlake white privilege, eastside nerdy hipsterism and a deep fondness for identity politics. Plus, he's the son of Gil Garcetti, who history books will remember solely as single-handedly blowing the O.J. Simpson murder trial before it ever started by choosing to have it in downtown LA rather than in the proper, but crumbling, Santa Monica courthouse.
In a fantasy football kind of way, wouldn't you love to see whether the late, great Johnnie Cochran would have been a better Mayor of LA than Eric Garcetti just as he was a vastly superior attorney than Gil Garcetti?
Of course, he would have been better.
The younger Garcetti doesn't relish his likely future on corporate boards and college classrooms. That relegates him to the status of his predecessor Antonio Villaraigosa, and Garcetti has long seen himself as far superior to him and that.
In an odd, uncomfortable way, I am finally glad that Eric Garcetti is Mayor of LA. He isn't going to make the city any better between now and the merciful end of his squandered time in office, but all doors are closed off from his escaping his outcomes. Besides, his interim replacement would be LA City Council president Nury Martinez who, despite being a former LAUSD school board member, still uses the non-word “crisisis” as the plural of the word crisis.
Whatever remains of Garcetti’s time in office is all on him and will serve as a reminder to the rest of us of the perils of voting for people not on accomplishments but on the familiarity of the last name, the irrelevant demographic boxes they check and listening to what the Times recommends.
The ink in the history books is quickly drying on Newsom and Garcetti. To borrow the former's comment from years ago, both are toast, "whether ya like it or not!"
(Daniel Guss, MBA, was runner-up for the 2020 Los Angeles Press Club journalism award for Best Online Political Commentary and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star News, Los Angeles Downtown News, and the Los Angeles Times in its Sports, Opinion and Entertainment sections and Sunday Magazine, among other publishers. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Photo: Courtesy, the Mayor’s Office via LA Magazine. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
