Half a Mayor for Half the City
One's been a social justice careerist; the other a commercial dynamo. Karen Bass and Rick Caruso are half-complete candidates – for Mayor of their own halves of LA
The two candidates for Mayor of the city of Los Angeles, we must acknowledge, are fully mature: Rick Caruso is 63 until January; Karen Bass turned 69 October 3rd. If these ages, presented to an LA whose median age is 35.9 years, tell you anything about our present city, it’s that to get to be a mayoral candidate, you can’t rely on youthful charm alone.
But even at this late point of the open seat race for hegemony of the world’s most polyglot city, I care less about this choice than you might think. As is yours, I’m sure, my enthusiasm for the LA that I have known these past 65 years is presently at its most diminished point ever. For, as with our past two presidential elections, one candidate represents a certain disaster, and the other an incalculable risk, neither one capable of delivering much to an entire city. No, each is presently only capable of being Mayor to half of it.
Karen Bass, a career agitator+legistator whose campaign consists of promising more of the same on nearly every failed policy that helped blight the blighted half of LA, is the certain disaster. But here is no clear-cut choice for taking the riskier proposition: Rick Caruso, the deeply-invested, home-grown mall developer is a man of many conflicting, nearly schizoid guiding principles – just the kind of schizoid guiding principles it takes to become a billionaire and a highly successful commercial developer – is an incalculable risk even for his own half of LA, the commercial half, for as many reasons as I can find telling disappointments in Bass’s past.
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It is Karen Bass’s past that is the policy train wreck among the two. It’s been the kind of train wreck you’d expect of someone with perpetually unrepentant socialist roots, who watched communism and then socialism fail and who’s held on anyway; it’s the kind of policy wreck that has helped three generations of such low-yield, high-effort programs culminate in a city that now treats criminals like homeowners and homeowners like criminals. When she was being vetted as a potential Vice President only two years ago, it was learned that she wasn’t merely a whimsical, young Fidel Castro acolyte with a schoolgirl affectation for socialism; rather, in fact, she seems to have remained infatuated with Castro for even a longer time than socialist councilmember Nithya Raman has been alive. Though it soon became well known that she first traveled to Fidel’s Cuba in 1973, it turned out to be no mere onetime youthful flirtation. This paragraph from The Atlantic piece is chilling:
Bass’s interest in Cuba kept up after she became a member of the California assembly. She went to the country again in 2005, on a trip organized by the California lobbyist Darius Anderson and paid for out of her campaign account, according to campaign-finance records kept by the California secretary of state. She’s returned several times since being elected to the U.S. House in 2010. She visited Alan Gross, the USAID contractor whom Cuba accused of being a spy, during his five years in prison, and joined then–Secretary of State John Kerry when he went to Havana to raise the American flag over the reestablished U.S. embassy in 2015. President Barack Obama invited Bass—by then a key supporter of normalizing relations with Cuba—to join the presidential delegation during his historic trip in 2016. From there, she tweeted a sepia-toned photo of herself from her Venceremos Brigade trip, in sunglasses with a bandanna on her head.
Those aren’t humanitarian visits, of which many, including friends of mine, have made over the past forty years; no, those were the visits of a perpetual acolyte. She was ultimately obliged to renounce them; Biden chose another candidate who checked his right boxes anyway. But whether strutting a Castroite bandana or a closely-cropped Afro, Bass has been a social justice/community activist warrior whose only life experience has come through organizing, which took her to the State Assembly, which subsequently took her to the Congress of the United States. But she was no Mother Teresa, walking the talk – no, a honeybee for gathering up the nectar of social justice philanthrophy, she has made the personal junket her m.o. In fact, and far beyond her well-known freebie degree from USC, one of her trips to Castro’s Cuba was funded by Democratic mover Darius Anderson, the Sacto lobbyist who also runs Sonoma’s (hunter-friendly!) Wing and Barrel Ranch.
Despite Bass’s national profile, to read her LA Times interview – and I invite you to pour over both candidates’ interviews, especially if you are looking for reasons to sell – is to read a life chronicle of crusading for minimally effective, high-effort community programs and Congressional actions that the commercial half of Los Angeles has never heard of. GRYD (Gang Reduction and Youth Development). Her own Community Coalition. Her own Congressional bill, the George Floyd Justice In Policing Act – which neither the Times nor Bass note hasn’t happened and isn’t likely to happen. Regarding Vision Zero – a conceptual advocacy bone thrown to urban bicycle lobbyists, who represent less than one percent of us, and which even the Times acknowledges as a failure – Bass insists hasn’t worked only because, in her estimation, it hasn’t been fully funded. If there’s a program that makes claims for being the cure-all to a remote corner of the city that all can see is increasingly ailing, Bass has been there to offer support for it.
In her social justice cocoon, from which she occasionally emerges like a butterfly to court our most radical chic philanthropists (she has even done so to her opponent), Bass remains unaware of vast swaths of the middle-management apparatus of the city, even in her own specialty area, the philanthropy apparatus. She says she would even like to launch a development department: “[T]he mayor’s office doesn’t have a development department,” she says. “I want to create a development department and hire staff that do nothing but look for money.”
Like a good socialist, she’s going where the money is, as she always has. But such a statement seems a slap in the face to Garcetti’s Mayor’s Fund, which has already done the kind of work Bass is proposing. I suppose it’s a matter of scale; I suppose Bass expects, once elected, that people like her opponent will blow as much money on her special projects fund as Caruso is willing blow on advertising.
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“An artist is a man who can hold two fundamentally opposing views in his head and still function,” F. Scott Fitzgerald tellingly wrote somewhere of the schizo creative. Make no mistake, Rick Caruso is a construction artist, effortlessly holding fundamentally opposing views in his head. Unlike Bass, everybody knows something he’s built. Never mind that this Democrat’s name is on the donor wall of the Reagan Library, and that he now gladly calls himself a Democrat after forty years of Republican identity. And never mind that he has always been pro-choice, even while building USC’s Caruso Catholic Center. (Gone are the days, I suppose, when then-Archbishop Mahony would banish Dick Riordan from Communion merely for not wedding Nancy in the Church of Rome.) Or that his $100 million yacht is named for a poem most beloved of a man who spent twenty-seven years in a tiny jail cell. These kinds of contradictions are only too typical to Caruso, who has many more such schizoid personality qualities.
Take but one of them: he loves talking to a crowd, yet doesn’t like engaging in ordinary one-on-one conversation very much, even with extraordinary people such as professors, or economists, or poets. How then does he actually learn things? By getting involved enough to build them. He’s the Winchester Mystery Candidate. It’s hard to enchant him; like Mick Jagger or Bill Clinton, Caruso always prefers not only to be in a crowd (his yacht easily hosts 20 in its nine cabins), he likes to be the indispensable rock-solid center of it, playing host to all the other puny but vital spokes that comprise his enormous wheel of fortune.
He’s shown this many times as a developer: he has made skeptical middle-class community crowds in Glendale, Fairfax District, and Pacific Palisades feel like they’re talking to someone who understands their neighborhood as well as they do. But he has little desire to go one-on-one, unless it’s to tell someone what to do – and going one-on-one with a city Department chief is critical to the function of being a Mayor.
Caruso’s affinity for being the center of the wheel was a good thing for the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times, which once again hadn’t done much homework before interviewing him, already sold on the socialista. (Were they even aware he had not only served the city on the Police Commission but also as a young DWP commissioner for Bradley – and again, later, for Riordan? It seems relevant for a newspaper with DWP derangement syndrome to note and evaluate such things . . . )
Just take a look at the graphic quality of the transcript alone and you’ll note that, like any actual politician in a crowded room, Caruso is perfectly comfortable dishing 500 word answers to the puniest questions.
But there are some reveals in that transcript that show Caruso thinks what almost nobody else in LA other than Rick Caruso thinks. This is especially what makes him the enormous risk. Here’s one: for some reason, he thinks that the Mayor should appoint the City Attorney. I can’t remember the last time I heard of anyone who thought that. What if he actually devoted time and energy to that? Even street vending permits are a more pressing issue for the city. This is the kind of an idea a billionaire who is used to getting his way might have. There are a hundred ways to improve the ancient charter that controls LA’s eighteen elected political offices – for instance, increasing the absurdly under-representative Council districts in this city of purportedly spectacular diversity by a factor of four or even five – but you can’t find very many people who think that this is one of them.
And here’s another that nobody other than a highly successful developer could think: in addressing how he’ll build 30,000 temporary housing units, he highly touts Fort Bliss as an example of what can be done. Encourages the board to get to know it, in fact.
Fort Bliss happened to expand recently, enough to accommodate 30,000 troops – note Caruso’s magic number.
“Many compared the Fort Bliss Expansion Program to building a small city from the ground up,” the contractor boasts at their website. “The $4.8 billion program encompassed 4,500 acres of greenfield development, 130 projects, and 300 facilities, totaling 11 million square feet of new buildings.” Well, it certainly is an exciting idea, building the dispossessed a Hotel Terminus in the scraggly vacant lots down by Harbor Gateway side of the river – and even at the cost of Fort Bliss, which is nearly five times what we presently have available for building homeless housing, it would pencil out to $160,000 a person, far below our city’s present design/build costs for homeless housing structures. By the way, those Fort Bliss costs are 2005-2010 costs – to-day’s price would likely be more than double. All else that’s missing are the salaries and benefits of five hundred new administrators.
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The broader point here is this: if you combined the persistence, the zeal of these two career fanatics, you’d get a complete Mayor, one half tackling the social failings of the programs that aspire to help our most downtrodden, the other half polishing the sunshine-drenched if schizoid fruits of our fabulous business community. But we’re obliged to choose one, not two.
I wouldn’t mind seeing one getting elected and forfeiting one half of their all-important commission appointments to the other. (Even if I don’t have any confidence that Bass knows the city departments well enough to make effective, apolitical commission appointments – even if I don’t have any confidence that Caruso is flexible enough to concede that he needs vast amounts of help making such appointments.) But that’s never going to happen in this polarized political environment, where we must choose between one half a candidate for one half of the city, or another half a candidate for the other.
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J. Carroll Clark is the nom de plume of a California motorist, painter of watercolors, and, in this incarnation, longtime LA political and cultural scribe you used to read when legacy media were readable.