The choices for mayor of Los Angeles aren\u2019t ideal. But someone\u2019s going to be mayor.<\/p>\n
Who should it be?<\/p>\n
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass\u2019 time as mayor can be best summed up by that interview of her staring vacantly<\/a> out into the void after the Palisades fire. Her judgment in personnel decisions can likewise probably be summed up by Brian K. Williams, her deputy mayor who pleaded guilty<\/a> to calling in a fake bomb threat to City Hall. And reports that she directed the watering down<\/a> of the post-Palisades report (which she denies) and that her press team has used disappearing WhatsApp<\/a> messages to communicate are totally on-brand for her.<\/p>\n On the homelessness front, Bass has presided over what can only be described as failure. In fact, homelessness counts ticked back up<\/a> this year 3.4%, nearly triple the rate of the county-wide increase. That she resisted<\/a> Controller Kenneth Mejia\u2019s efforts to audit her homelessness program Inside Safe again speaks to her contempt for accountability and transparency.<\/p>\n For all of these failures, and more, she\u2019s still seemingly the more conservative choice in this race.<\/p>\n One reason is her set of supporters. The city\u2019s business groups and the police union have backed her. But the first has Stockholm Syndrome and the latter of course is backing Bass because she delivered $1 billion<\/a> in raises and benefit enhancements to them. On the other hand, there\u2019s a plausible case it\u2019s better to have a mayor who has the ear of businesses and the police rather than far-left activists.<\/p>\n Another reason Bass is the more conservative choice is simply that she\u2019s already the mayor and Angelenos can more or less know what to expect from her. Decline within certain bounds. She\u2019ll sign away the store to the police union and whoever else she needs short-term political help from. Basically. But the city hasn\u2019t gone completely broke, yet. That counts for something.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s Nithya Raman, the council member best known for being the first self-described democratic socialist on the Los Angeles City Council. The self-proclaimed supporter of \u201cbig government intervention<\/a>\u201d says she doesn\u2019t have government grocery stores on the agenda and that what she wants to do is make government work for the people.<\/p>\n In an interview earlier this year with the editorial board of this paper, she seemed willing to criticize the city\u2019s prioritizing of special interest groups (like the police union) and projects (like the convention center expansion) over the practical needs of Los Angeles. The fact that the vast majority of special interests in the city, especially public employee unions, are backing Bass over Raman is a point in Raman\u2019s favor. If she\u2019s elected, she won\u2019t owe them anything.<\/p>\n Raman says a lot of perfectly sensible things when it comes to housing policy; unlike many on the left, she recognizes the need for market-rate housing and has called for reforms to LA\u2019s self-defeating transfer taxes that (surprise!) have ended up hurting the housing market. Indeed, her housing plan<\/a> is infinitely better than Bass\u2019 resistance to allowing more housing to get built in more parts of the city.<\/p>\n But for every reasonable thing she says, she has a lot of really bad takes and her status as a democratic socialist endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America-LA should make most people queasy.<\/p>\n The police union put out an ad<\/a> highlighting her opposition to prohibiting encampments within 500 feet of schools. While she\u2019s right that the mere clearing of encampments is insufficient, it\u2019s also the case that parents and community members aren\u2019t wrong to want encampments away from schools. No doubt, to many ordinary people, her stand makes her look like an out-of-touch ideologue.<\/p>\n Ditto her appearance on the podcast of far-left extremist Hasan Piker, where she agreed that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Asked on Tuesday September 29 about it at the Jewish Los Angeles Mayoral Forum<\/a>, she was twice asked how she defines \u201cgenocide,\u201d but talked around it by saying she used it because unnamed experts used the term.<\/p>\n Use of a loaded word should probably come with a serviceable definition. Then again, she\u2019s running for a municipal post, and her international policy views are mostly irrelevant to the day-to-day things she\u2019d be doing. And on the other hand, Raman was censured<\/a> in 2024 by DSA-LA for having accepted support from Democrats for Israel-LA. The horror.<\/p>\n Perhaps the strongest argument for Raman is that she\u2019s not Bass. But the reverse is also the strongest argument for Bass.<\/p>\n Should Bass win re-election, we basically know how things will go. It\u2019ll just be more of the same, with Bass delivering more money for the special interests that got her re-elected and dragging her feet on state mandates for more housing. Whatever progress is made on any front will be in spite of whatever Bass or the City Council are doing.<\/p>\n Should Raman win, I wouldn\u2019t expect Maoist struggle sessions in the apparently renamed Pershing Square. As someone who is not-Bass and more ideas-driven, Raman might be able to channel her political capital to some constructive ends.\u00a0 If she sticks to being a \u201csewer socialist\u201d who focuses on getting municipal government to work better rather than dreaming up new ways for government to meddle in everything, that\u2019s practically better than being a mayor who oversaw the burning down of whole neighborhoods.<\/p>\n