The Wrong Man for the Job
Why pro-labor Mayor V is right not to endorse Mark Ridley-Thomas
If you’re reading this on the freeway on your way to work, don’t be misled by the headline and skip the rest of the column unless you’re about to slam into a truck; on the other hand, the race for Second District county supervisor is important enough to risk a low-speed fender-bender – unless you’re in South L.A., where the chances of finding a hospital or a doctor are slim.
If you think I’m about to endorse Bernard Parks in the race to replace Yvonne “I killed King/Drew Medical Center” Burke, you’d be wrong. For starters, I don’t do endorsements unless someone orders me to. I despise them almost as much as I distrust creepy politicians like that scumbucket Fabian Núñez.
Voters are a lot like jurors: Give them enough evidence in day-to-day coverage and let them make up their own minds. Endorsements are a distraction from the permanent adversarial role that must exist between journalist and politician – no politician should ever see his or her name in an opinion piece and be happy. Plus, endorsements are relics produced more by power-mad minds like the one that built Hearst Castle than a desire to improve American-style democracy. By the way, when will big-city papers realize they must tear down the walls between editorial and news staffs if they are to become interesting again? The quaint structure survived when there were more legs on a barstool than ways for journalists to be heard, but now readers turn away from the big dailies or pick them up and fall asleep. Give us more context, analysis and, yes, opinion on Page 1 of the L.A. Times. I’m not sure circulation will increase, but the existing readership will rejoice at the deeper layers of information and what it means.
Back now to the race at hand. Too much is at stake to do anything but keep the competition going for as long as possible. The public suffers if it all ends next Tuesday, without a run-off, before the candidates specifically lay out how they will reopen the hospital needed by 1 million people and how they’ll reform the often secretive day-to-day operations of the Board of Supervisors. (What do the sitting supervisors do anyway? An editor somewhere should dispatch reporters to follow each of the five supervisors for one week and see what goes on and does not go on. Make sure the reporters are over 21 and resistant to power trips.)
With so much up for grabs, including an un-American-sounding 12-year seat (the realities of term limits and the power of incumbency), I’m betting on the crowded field of seven candidates forcing a November run-off. What’s the hurry to decide this race? The victor wouldn’t take over until January. Either way, run-off or not, we’re stuck with the moribund Burke for another six months. Can’t she at least start missing the weekly board meetings, or be ordered to stop issuing her meaningless presentations and proclamations? OK, I’ll tell her: Yvonne, shut up and go away or at least stop talking and wasting our time.
In any other time, Ridley-Thomas would be running away with this seat. He’s got the endorsement of the ever-powerful County Federation of Labor, and labor and its allies are spending $4 million in their bid to plant their soldier inside the Hall of Administration. But the stick in the mud is Mayor V. The County Fed, and its late leader, Miguel Contreras, made Villaraigosa what he is today. You’d think he might repay the favor and come out and back labor’s candidate in the first race in decades for an open seat on the most powerful board in California. But he can’t.
It goes back to the role that Ridley-Thomas played fighting the mayor’s failed reform efforts of L.A. Unified. In 2006, while Villaraigosa was in Sacramento twisting arms to force through his school takeover plan – which would later be ruled an unconstitutional stealing of power – Ridley-Thomas was busy trying to thwart it. As a member of the search committee for a new superintendent, he pushed the candidacy of the incompetent Admiral David Brewer III, the man with no educational background who’s now running what pretty much amounts to a criminal enterprise. We’ve faced this ugly truth before: an incoming school board loaded with mayor-backed candidates couldn’t fire Brewer because they’d be called racist. Now, two years later, not only is L.A. Unified still failing to educate students, administrators look the other way when assistant principals have sex with and impregnate students. Unbelievable. Not only is Brewer not in jail, but he still draws his obscene salary and perks of $381,000 a year.
Who in their right mind would vote for Ridley-Thomas and risk his showing the same lack of judgment when it comes to hiring the next head of the county’s Department of Health Services, or calling the shots at King/Harbor? Ridley-Thomas’s track record for bad choices goes on. Remember his L.A. Bridges, the so-called gang intervention program, that ended up funneling millions of dollars to gangbangers who refused to hang it up? The mayor, to his credit, pulled the plug on the wasteful, dangerous program last month.
I wouldn’t trust Ridley-Thomas to choose a puppy at the animal shelter. I’m all in favor of black empowerment. I support the much-maligned racial quotas for job hiring and college admissions. But the top health jobs in L.A. County government and the top education jobs in L.A. Unified are not training positions. The best person who can be found regardless of their race must be hired for those jobs. It doesn’t matter whether they’re Korean, Indian, Iranian or African-American. To the gunshot victim now clinging to life during the extra 12-minute ride between the closed ER at King/Drew and the nearest trauma center at California Medical Center, the crucial point is that the best candidate be hired to help rescue a huge chunk of the city from its third-world health care conditions.
Let’s hope no one emerges as the clear victor next Tuesday. The people of South L.A. and the champions of open government will win. It will give Ridley-Thomas and Parks more time to show us precisely how they will reopen the hospital. Let’s see them play as active a role as they can from the sidelines.
And the mayor will just have to live with the suspense until November. He has his own personal reasons for hoping Parks wins outright next week. In that case, an election for the open Eighth District seat on the City Council could be held as early as next March. And the mayor would love to see an ally win that seat. Assembly Speaker Karen Bass’s ambitions have been long-rumored. I heard her staffers openly talking about it at a recent public meeting. In addition to the mayor’s efforts to sew up control on the City Council, it makes sense for Bass’s long-range career goals. Term limits will force her out of the Assembly in two years.
If only someone could talk Bass into running for Mayor in 2009.
A Challenge to the Catholic Church
Hey, I read in the L.A. Times that god-fearing parishes from the ocean to the desert are pitching in millions of dollars to help pay the billions in verdicts and legal fees run up by all those priests who scandalously had sex with boys. I’m not a Catholic, and consider organized religion a form of organized crime, but I want to help out. If the diocese can see fit to banish to a terrible place the world’s most repugnant pedophile protector – Cardinal Roger Mahony – I’ll pledge to personally raise $100 million for church coffers. A variety of fundraising items come to mind, including an image of the bad cardinal caught in a sex act with District Attorney Steve Cooley. Maybe it’s a bit of PhotoShop trickery, maybe not. But how else to explain the D.A.’s utter silence on the investigation to bring the very indictable man in red robes to justice? Starting bids: $1 million.
Sends insults and ammo to BigAl@lasniper.com.
Published: 05/28/2008
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