Mother Nature has a funny way of reminding Californians of their fragile existence—“fragile” in the sense that a land of almost unparalleled beauty can be downright cruel at times.
Fire-devastated residents of Los Angeles already know this. Northern Californians got a nudge late last week when San Francisco experienced a mild earthquake whose aftershock just happened to be centered in the same spot as the famous temblor that flattened the city nearly 120 years ago.
The sorrows of Los Angeles will be the source of future columns in this space (I penned this piece for the Washington Free Beacon asking what may or may not come from governor Gavin Newsom’s demand for an “independent” investigation into the wildfires’ causes and containment). Instead, let’s broaden the conversation to include two other California cities and their choices in mayoral leadership.
By now, the travails of Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass are well documented, begininng with the unfortunate timing of her being in the African nation of Ghana when her city first went up in flames (eerily similar to the late governor Pat Brown vacationing in Greece at the time of 1965’s Watts Riots). So much for her campaign promise that, if handed the keys to the city, there would be no overseas wanderlust (“not only would I of course live here,” Bass pledged, “but I also would not travel internationally”).
Making matters worse for Bass since her return to California: shaky media performances during which she’s come across as evasive (refusing to answer why the city cut its firefighting budget) and tone-deaf (smirking and smiling her way through a video message to her constituents).
Angry Angelenos may ask: Don’t we deserve better crisis management? Then again, the same voters made a choice two years ago to go with Bass as their mayor rather than the developer Rick Caruso, whose Pacific Palisades holdings were in the fire’s path (Caruso, like Bass, also taking heat—in his case, for hiring private firefighters to spare his business properties).
What was the premise of Bass’s mayoral campaign? “I’ve spent my entire life bringing groups of people together in coalitions to solve complex problems and produce concrete change—especially in times of crisis,” she promised in her campaign kickoff speech in the fall of 2021. But a career arc of nearly twenty years in legislative posts (state and federal) plus time before that as a community activist doesn’t show Bass showing much in the way of leadership during crunch times.
Not that Los Angeles voters, back in 2022, could have foreseen the conflagration to come, but that year’s election was similar to a choice Los Angeles faced in 1993 when the electorate opted for Richard Riordan, a conservative businessman.
It was during the first year of Riordan’s tenure that Los Angeles suffered its last great natural disaster, the Northridge Earthquake, whose thirty-first anniversary occurs this week. Typical of seismic events that care little for human convenienve, the quake struck in the dead of night (4:31 a.m. local time, to be precie). Riordan’s response, as later recounted: “Unshowered, hair uncombed, but engaged, Riordan on that chaotic day immediately started a swift response that depended on cutting red tape to open up key transportation corridors and rebuilding collapsed stretches of freeway.”
Among Riordan’s admirers for taking quick action was the now-embattled Mayor Bass, who said the following upon his passing in April 2023: “In the wake of the Northridge earthquake, Mayor Riordan set the standard for emergency action. He reassured us and delivered a response with an intensity that still pushes us all to be faster and stronger amidst crisis.”
Fans of historical counterfactuals can ask: Would Los Angeles’s city government be much different had Caruso won that election? Speaking of counterfactuals: Bass, at one point, was on Joe Biden’s vice presidential short list. In an alternative universe, it’s her and not fellow Angeleno Kamala Harris (whose Brentwod property reportedly was nearly burglarized last weekend) trying to figure out if there’s a life after politics (a problem maybe facing her should a mayoral recall election materialize).
One option for the soon-to-be-former vice president, though it’s as likely as the man who defeated her last fall giving her a Presidential Medal of Freedom: returning to her native Oakland and running for mayor of that beleagured city.
Rest assured that Harris won’t seek the Oakland position (and her relatively low profile during LA’s misery suggests that maybe she’s not sold on a gubernatorial run in 2026). But a former Capitol Hill colleague of Harris is: former congresswoman Barbara Lee. The fourth-place finisher in last year’s US Senate primary is now a likely mayoral candidate, having filed the paperwork for the April 15 special election to replace the ousted mayor Sheng Thao, the loser in a recall election last fall.
It would be an understatement to say that a Lee mayorship is problematic. For starters, at age 78 and after decades of time in Washington, she has a scant record of meaty accomplishments—like Bass, little evidence of problem-solving. Lee’s lone signature moment as a member of Congress: in September 2001, she was the lone House vote against the use of military force in Afghanistan.
A second concern: Oakland’s history repeating itself.
Barbara Lee entered Congress in April 1998, having succeeded the late Ron Dellums. Lee once served as a Dellums Hill aide before returning to Oakland and winning office as a state legislator.
That’s the same Ron Dellums who, at age 71 and far removed from Congress, was elected mayor of Oakland in 2006. Here’s how one local publication summarized the net effect of the next four years: “Dellums left office … under a cloud of personal financial troubles and public attacks. The esteemed former congressman was widely viewed as an absentee leader, whose administration was accused of mismanaging federal funds and generally described as opaque and dysfunctional. He declined to run for a second term, and many who initially supported him characterized his tenure a disappointment.”
The question for Oakland voters: Should they choose Lee in April, is the city setting itelf up for the same scenario currently plaguing Los Angeles—a natural disaster requiring steely leadership but saddled with a septuagenarian mayor lacking in crisis-management skills?
That’s not a question being asked across the bay. Last week, while Los Angeles battled flames, San Francisco said goodbye to one embattled mayor while ushering in a successor who’s a departure from the city’s political status quo. Daniel Lurie’s inaugural was a contrast in weather (clear-blue smokeless skies in Northern California) and pedigree (a non-politician and Levi Strauss heir, the city’s first “outsider” mayor dating back to the Truman-Eisenhower age).
Lurie begins his term saying what one might expect of a nonconformist, with his inaugural address promising “a new era of accountability and change at City Hall.” But will he make good on his words?
Here, it’s worth revisiting another big city’s experiences with mayors who entered office lacking lengthy political resumes: New York City and the twenty-year run of Rudy Guiliani and Michael Bloomberg.
Guiliani wasn’t an “outsider” in the purest sense, having lost the 1989 mayoral race before landing the job four years later. But his tenure was the stuff of a “disrupter”—cracking down on panhandlers and drug dealers, limiting stays in homeless shelter to ninety days—and he lived up to his promised of tackling New York’s social woes.
As for Bloomberg, Giuliani’s successor and a billionaire businessman, the list of accomplishments is long. At the top of the list: leading an economic recovery after the 9/11 attacks and making city government more functional. Add to that a mix of arrogance and outsized ego that New Yorkers expect in a mayor (four decades ago, then-mayor Ed Koch stood at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie shouting: “I’m here. It’s me. It’s me.”).
Perhaps that’s the wise move for Lurie in the coming months: Making the rounds of his city, asking his constituents Koch’s trademark question: “How’m I doing?”
One wonders what the good citizens of Los Angeles would say to their mayor.
