Nithya Raman came into tonight\u2019s debate with a big problem: The last two times she faced off against Karen Bass, the mayor beat her. Badly.<\/p>\n
Before the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. in May, the councilmember hemmed and hawed and stumbled around as Bass answered questions with ease. During a debate with Bass and then-candidate Spencer Pratt at the Skirball Cultural Center later that same week, Raman offered constant word salads when her opponents and even the moderators weren\u2019t leaving her flustered.<\/p>\n
Tonight, Raman came ready to fight.<\/p>\n
Her voice was strong and steady in the first part of the debate as she kept her comments short and offered concrete answers to questions offered by moderator and Fox 11 reporter Phil Shuman. She kept unprovoked critiques against Bass to a minimum and didn\u2019t take the mayor\u2019s constant baiting, even though Bass was setting up lures like someone fishing off the Newport Beach Pier.<\/p>\n
The best example of the new Raman came when Bass pointed out that Raman had missed the second-most council meetings of all councilmembers during her time in office. When Raman said that she had missed meetings because of her responsibility to other governmental boards, Bass responded that other councilmembers had done the same yet \u201cthey find their way to work,\u201d drawing ooohs from the audience.<\/p>\n
Raman cracked that if she was such a bad councilmember, \u201cWhy did you appoint me to all these external boards?<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, we need to work at that,\u201d Bass said, before asking Raman if she was \u201cgetting ready to resign.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cExcuse me?\u201d Raman responded, and left it at that as Shuman moved on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nithya Raman came into tonight\u2019s debate with a big problem: The last two times she faced off against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[12858,173727,173729,173728,2624,2303,48,52,51,47,50,49,63,13825,80054,36877,45070,32081,43125,24881,4486],"class_list":["post-437965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-bass","tag-debate-stage","tag-democratic-socialist-current","tag-first-debate","tag-june","tag-l-a","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-mayor-karen-bass","tag-nithya-raman","tag-pratt","tag-primary-election","tag-raman","tag-spencer-pratt","tag-supporter","tag-vote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}