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I’m a big fan of Jon Regardie, executive editor and columnist for the Los Angeles Downtown News, but I don’t agree with his recent column criticizing former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
The perceptive Regardie made some good points. And he gave Villaraigosa and his supporters something to worry about as the ex-mayor decides whether to run for the Senate next year. I’ll get to that, but first Regardie’s analysis of Villaraigosa’s two terms as mayor.
“The fact that some people are seriously discussing a Villaraigosa candidacy is wacky,” Regardie wrote. “It raises the possibility that they suffered an NFL style concussion and developed collective amnesia. I mean, how else to explain the idea that such an underperforming mayor might be a worthy heir to Boxer, one of the most important California politicians of the last 50 years.”
Regardie gives Villaraigosa credit for his greatest achievement as mayor, leading the fight for Measure R, the 2008 ballot proposal that increased the sales tax by a half cent for 30 years and will raise $40 billion for transit projects. He adds that the mayor had a few smaller successes but will be remembered as “kind of a political one-hit wonder” who “should have had a least a half a dozen big wins.”
Actually, that one hit—the transit ballot measure---was a game changing homerun, even more important than the one Dodger Kirk Gibson hit in the 1988 World Series. It resulted in transit lines being started or completed on the Westside, South Los Angeles, downtown Los Angeles, East L.A. and deep into the San Gabriel Valley. It took a lot of guts for Villaraigosa to raise money for the tax-increase campaign and be its public face as we were entering the Great Recession. That victory was supplemented by Villaraigosa’s deal, laboriously worked out with Boxer, to use the local tax revenues to leverage billions more in federal dollars to finish the lines.
It was also gutty of Villaraigosa to try to improve neglected schools in poor minority areas, an effort mocked by Regardie. Villaraigosa challenged the school district and the teachers union in that fight, following the example of former Mayor Richard Riordan, who also took on the school board and the union. They both understood that the mayor of Los Angeles has a special obligation to speak up for kids and parents in the city.
Villaraigosa will have to deal with some points raised by Regardie. Girl friends and the ex mayor giving the impression of a playboy lifestyle may be the most damaging. I teach a politics class at the Pasadena Senior Center. I asked my students what they didn’t like about Villaraigosa. They didn’t respond to the broad question but when I got specific and mentioned lifestyle and girl friends, they nodded. He’s going to have to convince people that he’s a serious person. But if he can do that and run on his accomplishments, he would be in pretty good shape for a Senate race against fellow Democrat Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris.
