Comments@THE GUSS REPORT-Is there a crisis management doctor in the house?
It will go down in the annals of embarrassing American pop culture moments, along with hideously bad first pitches at Major League Baseball games, botched National Anthems and Howard Dean's infamous meltdown that murdered his presidential campaign.
At-minimum, it will be a talk radio sound bite that outlasts LA lawmaker Kevin de León himself.
At Tuesday's LA City Council meeting, President Nury Martinez tapped the recently elected de León, a politician of several decades and former President pro tem of the California State Senate, to lead the legislative body in the Pledge of Allegiance. What transpired turned de León into an immediate internet joke, the subject of countless mocking headlines and the final story of news broadcasts from coast-to-coast.
Perhaps de León will seek cover by abandoning his fake name in favor of his real one, Kevin Leon, which he altered a la Antonio Villar becoming Antonio Villaraigosa for a squeeze of ethnic pizzazz to his political career.
While De León deserves a mulligan, comparisons to Villaraigosa are inevitable, like when the former Mayor hilariously botched a verbal vote at the 2012 DNC convention. Unfortunately, Villaraigosa did that at the end of his mayoral career, while De León made his kindergarten-level blunder pursuing one, and LA has had it up to here with stumbling goobers in elected office.
It would also be a good time for De León to drop his other too-cool-for-school antics like voting on agenda items with a simple "yes" or "aye" rather than his obnoxiously elongated "aaaayeeeeeeee."
De León, who allegedly used an associate's home address as his own when he ran for City Council, understandably tried to use his gaffe to raise funds for a local non-profit, but that just garnered more social media mocking.
The best advice we can offer Mr. Leon / De León is this: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, was runner-up for the 2020 Los Angeles Press Club journalism award for Best 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.) Image: New York Post. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
