On the menu today: Los Angeles is days way from a mayoral primary that is likely to send a signal about how much the political center of gravity has shifted in recent years, and the local media out there are fuming that no criticism seems to stick to billionaire Rick Caruso. Meanwhile, remember monkeypox? And President Biden breaks new ground as he offers an inaccurate recollection of a recent conversation in written op-ed form.
Don’t Sleep on ‘Teflon Rick’ and the Los Angeles Mayor’s Race
Back on May 16, this newsletter pointed out that Rick Caruso, who is conservative by Los Angeles standards and who became a registered Democrat about 20 minutes ago, was a lock for the runoff and had a small chance of winning the race outright in the June 7 primary.
All of the polling puts Caruso and his top rival, Democratic congresswoman Karen Bass, in the low- to mid-30s in a nine-candidate race. (One poll put Caruso at 37 percent; if a mayoral candidate wins more than 50 percent, that candidate is declared the winner with no runoff.) Assuming the polling is accurate, Caruso and Bass will go to the November election neck-and-neck.
Now the rest of the national media are catching up:
The Associated Press, May 27: “Many voters in heavily Democratic Los Angeles are seething over rising crime and homelessness and that could prompt the city to take a turn to the political right for the first time in decades.”
Axios, May 29: “Los Angeles is one of America’s top Democratic power centers. But with crime up and homelessness out of control, voters there may just be restless enough to embrace a billionaire businessman and longtime former Republican who sits on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation board to be their next mayor.”
Caruso isn’t a slam-dunk. Los Angeles has a lot of Democrats who may well come to see him as a Trump-like Republican. Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg backs an independent committee, Communities United for Bass for LA Mayor 2022, running ads that explicitly make that comparison: “Just like Trump, he’s spending millions to buy his way into office.” (Because political campaigns in California are well-known for being frugal, you see.)
In the end, Bass may successfully paint Caruso as a Republican in Democratic clothing and ride the city’s traditional progressivist lean to victory in November. But just having a competitive mayoral runoff would be a dramatic change for the city. Until this cycle, L.A. held its mayoral elections in odd-numbered years, with low turnout and the favorite in the officially nonpartisan election usually winning in a rout. Incumbent Eric Garcetti won with more than 81 percent in 2017 and 54 percent in 2013; Antonio Villaraigosa won with 54 percent in 2009 (his closest rival had 26 percent) and with 58 percent in the runoff in 2005. One must wonder how many Angelenos tune out of local politics because they feel like their vote doesn’t make much of a difference.
But it feels like the Bass-Caruso race is breaking down in an insider–outsider, establishment–upstart dynamic. And as the national media observe, Angelenos have a lot of reasons to be fed up with the status quo. (The city’s mayor doesn’t have much influence on gas prices, but note that the average price for a gallon of gasoline in the Los Angeles-Long Beach metro area is $6.22 this morning.)
There seems to be a particularly wide gap between how the L.A. and California media see their state and how the average Los Angeleno or Californian sees it. Much of the L.A. media treat Bass as the natural and most-worthy successor to Garcetti and are enraged that Caruso is “Teflon Rick.” Los Angeles magazine fumes that, “To date, everything slung at the billionaire developer has slid off him, barely smudging his carefully orchestrated persona and platform. There are still two weeks until election day and anything can happen, but so far Caruso has been the Teflon candidate — nothing sticks to him.”
Look, I live on the other coast, so maybe I’m misreading everything. But maybe the fact that Caruso seems so “Teflon” is a sign that Angelenos aren’t that worried about Caruso’s past donations to Republican candidates or the claim that he’s a “lifelong Republican.” Maybe the average Angeleno is deeply frustrated with or angry about the state of the city and is gravitating to a candidate who makes a full-throated indictment of the city’s poorly performing government.
If you’re not happy with the current governance of L.A., you probably shouldn’t expect much change from a woman who has represented L.A. in Congress for the past eleven years and who represented L.A. in the state assembly for six years before that. You don’t rise to the top of California Democratic politics by taking on entrenched government bureaucracies and antagonizing the party’s traditional allies. Back when Bass was on Biden’s short-list for vice president, reporters noted that her record as a reformer was exaggerated:
“Karen Bass was a conventional politician. She didn’t challenge that system,” said Dan Walters, a dean of the Sacramento press corps who now writes for the nonprofit news site CalMatters. “But then, nobody else was challenging that system either. She inherited that system and didn’t change it. She was not a trailblazer. She was not tilting at windmills in any respect. She was a go-along-to-get-along politician.”
Does that sound like a woman who is going to shake up city hall and overhaul the city’s ineffective government?
If standard-issue Democratic progressivism worked, Los Angeles would be in much better shape than it is, with much less crime, much less homelessness, much less trash on the streets, and a much lower cost of living. It’s not just that Republicans think the standard-issue Democratic Party approach to urban problems doesn’t work anymore; it’s that a lot of Democrats think the standard-issue Democratic Party approach to urban problems doesn’t work anymore.
Hey, Remember Monkeypox?
I don’t think the public is well-served by a media diet that alternates between five-alarm-fire, flood-the-zone intense coverage of a topic, and then a quick shift to another topic, with little or no follow-up. Is Joe Rogan still saying controversial things? The only way to know is to listen to his podcast, because he’s no longer getting covered as if he’s the most dangerous man on the planet. Is Elon Musk still getting covered as if he’s the most dangerous man on the planet, or have we moved on?
About two weeks ago, discovery of a case of monkeypox in the U.S. set off a few days of near-panicked coverage. It did not help that President Biden, off the cuff, declared that, “It is something that everybody should be concerned about.” Meanwhile, this newsletter looked at past outbreaks and concluded: “How worried should you be about monkeypox? Not much, unless you’ve traveled to one of the countries where it is endemic, or you’ve had close contact with someone who has recently traveled to one of those countries.”
We’re a little more than two weeks after the first U.S. case, and as of yesterday, the U.S. is up to 19 cases of monkeypox, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC states that, “It’s not clear how the people were exposed to monkeypox, but early data suggest that gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men make up a high number of cases. However, anyone who has been in close contact with someone who has monkeypox is at risk.” So far, no Americans have died from monkeypox.
For the average American, there’s not quite zero risk of monkeypox infection, but it is very low. Keeping an eye out for new or strange rashes is always a good idea, but overall, monkeypox is not something you should be losing sleep over.
My guess is you haven’t heard much about monkeypox since that initial burst of coverage — there’s been a terrible school shooting, the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, inflation and gas prices are still high, and the juicy revelations of the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard trial came out. But I wonder how much American anxiety is generated by news coverage that effectively says, “LOOK OUT! THIS NEW TERRIBLE THING IS COMING, AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO,” and then that news story effectively disappears, with little explanation.
Biden Is Too Old, in a New Form . . .
In his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, President Biden wrote, “A dozen CEOs of America’s largest utility companies told me earlier this year that my plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bills by $500 and accelerate our transition from energy produced by autocrats.”
Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post — far from most conservatives’ favorite fact-checker — thoroughly hunted for the source of that claim, and concluded that Biden is mixing up his conversation with utility-company CEOs with a report from a research firm that contended that by 2030, “national average annual household energy costs” would be “roughly $500 lower than under current policy.”
Kessler notes that 2030 is eight years from now, and “annual household energy costs” (all the energy a household uses, including driving) are not the same as “annual household utility bills” (all the energy a household uses, which would include water, electricity, natural gas, etc.):
But most of the estimated savings, Larsen said, comes from the driving side of the equation. “Of the $495 in savings, $403 comes from mobility savings (spending less money on gasoline either because of more efficient cars or electric vehicles) and the remainder is home energy savings,” he wrote in an email.
Indeed, the report notes that, if the Biden climate plan were adopted, home electricity bills by 2030 would be between one dollar more and five dollars less than under current policy. That might pay for an extra ice cream cone over the summer.
But when we located the transcript of Biden’s conversation with utility executives on Feb. 9, we found no reference to $500 in utility savings. The figure was also not mentioned in the White House readout of the meeting.
The irony is that the Wall Street Journal op-ed was almost certainly ghostwritten. But to give credit to Biden’s communications staff, if that’s the case, his ghostwriter truly managed to capture Biden’s voice by offering an inaccurate, half-remembered anecdote in which someone tells him how great his idea is, key numbers are mixed up, and the effectiveness of said idea is exaggerated.
ADDENDUM: There are days when Twitter can be enraging, and then there are the days when some random guy thinks you’re an elected official who “voted no on the gas gouge bill” and tells you to do your job, and it’s just hilarious. I blame Senator Shoshana Weissmann, the Sloth Committee Chair representing East Virginia.