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| photo by Marta Evry |
The Mayor-Elect and aides walk through Union Station; one aide is especially deft at setting the new pace.
This was an exhausting Mayor's race, and I'm glad it's over--I can go back to criticizing Mayor Garcetti at last. But let's not make any mistake about it: the result is what the people wanted, and the people wanted change, and Garcetti, though as much a City Hall fixture as the fourth floor chandeliers, represented it and seems to be capable of it. The Eastside Latino Machine that was built on the weird fulcrum balancing adelante Latinos against Riordan/Broad interests is over, finito, toast--it was dead even last year but this election finally put the decedent in the ground.
I was at one time worried that Garcetti 2013 was too much like Obama 2008. In open seat elections, the game really changes, and you find out how, and maybe the tricks of five years ago were outdated now. But when Wendy Greuel turned out to run a campaign from 1992 it didn't matter much.
I don't know why Wendy Greuel tried to preserve the uneasy Latin Labor/Riordan Villaraigosa coalition, because it has been such a ruinous marriage for the city, making a mess of everything from schools to streets, but she has always been loyal to a fault and to the degree her loyalty kept her involved with John Shallman, she was obliged to wear everything like various dangling albatrosses. And even while they dangled, Carrick didn't hesitate to wrap her in the DWP either, which she ended up sporting like one of her leaden Brooks Brothers coral coats. (She didn't even dress like she was from LA, come to think of it.)
No man has ever spent more to bag less result in an LA election than Shallman in this one--she had the lead and spent her way out of it, and all her backers got caught with a pair of treys but kept committed to the staggering pot. You can't fault Greuel for not seeming imaginative; she is simply not an imaginative person, and LA senses it requires some kind of imagination right now to start reversing this insufferably long-ass decade of decline.
