Checked out
The Daily News - never a fan of the city hall machine - offered a grim assessment of Mayor Villaraigosa in Sunday's lead editorial:"Just one year into his second term, with no big election or high-powered appointment to look forward to, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa seems to have run out of steam. He's acting like a lame-duck official - but with three years still to go. The passion and energy that propelled him into office, and turned his July 2005 inauguration into a celebration befitting a head of state, is all but gone at a time when the city is in crisis and needs it most."
"We are asking the mayor today," the DN appealed, "to recommit to the job and to Los Angeles. Whatever your personal feelings about Villaraigosa - whether you voted for him or not - he's the mayor for the next three years and we need him to re-engage and tackle the big issues still facing the city."
Good luck with that. There's little in the mayor's character or experience to suggest that he has - at this low point - the reservoirs of commitment and passion with which the process of remaking civic life in Los Angeles could be restarted. And remaking the governance of Los Angeles - not more trains or charter schools or even jobs - is the essential obligation that faces the mayor of Los Angeles.
In 2001, as Villaraigosa's initial mayoral campaign plodded through its early stages, I wrote in the Times:
From their résumés, it is hard for an outsider like me to see how (the) candidates can imaginatively project themselves into L.A.'s new political community, a place not fully realized but where they, presumably, intend to lead the city's residents. L.A.'s new leaders will have to master an unfamiliar city charter and endure the further winnowing effects of term limits while accommodating the last erasure of the city's old industrial economy . . . and overcoming the indifference of the city's new media economy . . . and confronting the disenfranchisement that motivates breakaway movements, school district deconstruction, and L.A.'s pervasive identity politics. . . . The future is happening here, as political, social, and economic change reinvents Los Angeles in exactly the way its mythology always claimed. But the image of the future is still unfinished. In this election season, the city's would-be leaders haven't offered much beyond past electability to fill in the blanks.
It's nearly a decade later, and still no one leads Los Angeles. And few of the blanks in the political landscape of the city have ever been filled in.
The temptation, as the DN implied, is to speak of Villaraigosa in the past tense already.
Villaraigosa had said that he intended to be the mayor of a denser city, a greener city, a transit-oriented city, a middle-class city, a working-class city, a politically progressive city, a business-oriented city, and a city where the mayor is in control of the educational system. There's a refigured narrative of Los Angeles somewhere in there, but it was always hard to discern.
Certainly too hard for the mayor. When Villarigosa asked Angeleños five years ago to "(d)ream with me of a Los Angeles that's the leading economic and cultural center in the world" we should have heard his emphasis on mere dreaming and wondered.
The image on this page was taken by flickr user srd515. It is used under a Creative Commons License.
