The L.A. mayoral candidate wants safe neighborhoods, clean streets, and functional public services. He’s betting that even left-leaning Angelenos agree.
Spencer Pratt had a good line ready for reporters as the results of yesterday’s mayoral primary in Los Angeles continued to indicate that he would advance to the runoff election against the incumbent, Karen Bass, in the fall.
“Obviously, God wanted five more months of me exposing all the failures of our mayor,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s gonna be a fun ride. I hope she’s ready.”
Many have compared Pratt to Donald Trump, including Trump himself. But whereas the L.A. mayoral candidate does throw sharp elbows and speaks plainly, even at the risk of offending delicate liberal sensibilities, the humility he displayed last night departs from the populist model Trump perfected.
In his own estimation, Pratt’s task is not to prepare himself for his inevitable ascendancy to the highest echelons of political power in the City of Angels. Rather, it is to use the limited and qualified trust the city’s primary voters bestowed on him to issue a sustained indictment of the Democratic Party’s maladministration of his city.
That is no small charge. Nor is it all just talk. By shattering the omertà that compels city officials to pretend they don’t see the crime, the disorder, the disrepair, the vagrancy, and the permissiveness all around them, he is providing others with license to do the same.
Pratt’s objectives are narrow and quotidian. He wants safe neighborhoods, clean streets, functional public services, and a city government that isn’t paralyzed by self-imposed sclerosis. Pratt’s betting that even ideologically left-leaning Angelenos agree.
In an oft-quoted 1993 speech, the author and sociologist Nathan Glazer offered an indictment of liberal overconfidence similar to the one Pratt is retailing today. Cities like New York, he observed, “stopped trying to do well the kinds of things a city can do, and started trying to do the kinds of things a city cannot do.”
Cities with institutional memory knew how to keep their infrastructure from collapsing. They knew how to fight crime and keep the streets safe. They knew how to accommodate taxpayers’ needs so as to attract more of them. But somewhere along the line, municipal officials and the voters who elect them got bored with the job description. Today, they’re focused on doing things that no one knows how to do. Cities now commit themselves to extirpating racial animus from the hearts of men, changing the weather, and, as Glazer observed, “solving the social and personal problems of people who, for whatever reason, are engaged in self-destructive behavior.”
I wrote about Glazer’s comments a little less than two years ago in the context of Karen Bass’s catastrophic tenure in the L.A. mayor’s office. Boy, does it hold up. Pratt took my admonition of Bass and the Democrats who preceded her and ran with it.
The success he is enjoying with his simple message of administrative competence has come as a shock to many, but no one should be surprised. First and foremost, people want their cities to work. We can solve the most intractable of humanity’s troubles later.