The 41st mayor of Los Angeles was responding to a question asked by moderator Saul Gonzalez, KQED correspondent and co-host of The California Report during a Zócalo event, “How Much Can Americans Expect of Our Leaders in Crisis?”

“There are crises everywhere we turn,” Gonzalez had said, nodding to a toxic election cycle, an economic downturn, racial unrest, and a pandemic. Putting aside the human cost for a moment, Gonzalez asked Villaraigosa, “Did you relish a good crisis?”

Yes, said Villaraigosa. “More than a few people have said things like, ‘I bet you’re glad you lost the governor’s race right now,’”—referring to his unsuccessful 2018 bid to become governor of California—or “‘I bet you’re glad you’re not mayor anymore.’” His response: “Obviously you don’t really know me.”

Gonzalez asked Villaraigosa to discuss a crisis he confronted during his eight years as mayor that he succeeded in solving. Villaraigosa cited the city’s public education crisis. “I was successful in working with a broad cross-section of reformers,” he said. “I can tell you that we made strides.”

Shifting to the present, Gonzalez asked how would Villaraigosa grade the way Gov. Gavin Newson is confronting crises on a state level and Mayor Eric Garcetti for Los Angeles?

“Both of them have really tough jobs,” said Villaraigosa. “Anybody in these times would be struggling. Both have done the best they could, and I respect them for it.”

What would you be doing now that they’re not, Gonzalez pressed.

Nodding back to public education, Villaraigosa said he’d be thinking about how to get kids back in the classroom. “We have to treat this like a crisis because too many of these kids don’t have internet, they don’t have a laptop or an iPad, and they’re losing more than a year,” he said.

Gonzalez pointed out that Villaraigosa also managed to create some crises for himself during his time in office. How did he handle that?

“My personal travails were certainly something I did to myself,” said Villaraigosa, referring to the breakup of his marriage. “Without question, nothing I did politically hurt me as much as that did. As I’ve said many times, it probably hurt me most with my kids. We’ve tried to get beyond all of that.”

As mayor, Gonzalez said, you also took positions that turned allies and friends into foes. “That’s what’s required” of leaders in crisis, said Villaraigosa. “We should expect that when they have to, they’ll take on their friends and the most powerful interests.”

Speaking to the presidential election, Villaraigosa talked about his initial support for Michael Bloomberg (“We probably worked together on more things than any two mayors in the country”), why he’s a “big Biden fan,” his long relationship with Kamala Harris (“We text”), and his concern over this Supreme Court: “This isn’t just a conservative Supreme Court,” he said. “This is a right-wing Supreme Court, who’s taken positions that are so out of kilter where most of America is, and that’s the problem.”

If there was a change in administration, Gonzalez asked, would you be ready to answer the call, if it came, to serve under it?

“I believe in public service. I always have,” Villaraigosa said. When prompted to name an ideal subject to tackle, though, he demurred. “I haven’t thought about it, frankly.”

In response to questions submitted by audience members, Villaraigosa reflected on his favorite failure, which was losing the election for mayor of Los Angeles in 2001. “It was my favorite, even though I lost it, because I ran with abandon,” he said.

During that campaign, Villaraigosa, a third-generation Angeleno on his mother’s side, remembered hearing again and again, “‘Go back to Mexico’” and being asked, “‘Are you just going to be a mayor for them?’”

“I didn’t get angry about it,” said Villaraigosa. “I learned it was important not to throw kerosene on a fire and not to be bitter.” His takeaway: “When you lose, lose big, be a big person. When you win, win small, be a big person. I learned a lot from that defeat.”

When he was elected mayor four years later, becoming the first Latino to take the position in 133 years, he said the reward was getting to serve Angelenos. “In many ways we’re the Ellis Island of the country now,” he said, citing the diversity of the city’s demographics. “I was proud to have a job like that.”

One of the last questions of the event circled back to the central question of the discussion: whether we’re expecting too much from our elected officials.

We have every right to expect a lot of them, but also of ourselves, said Villaraigosa. “In order for our democracy to work, we have to be involved,” he added. Citing political scientist Robert D. Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, he said, he’s long thought about the nation’s problems with civic engagement. “It’s not enough to sit there and complain about our elected leaders,” he said. “We’ve got to be the difference that we expect and we want for this country.”

The post Antonio Villaraigosa Sees Opportunity in Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is shaping up to be California’s question for 2018. Each of the two top contenders for governor is a former mayor of one of those cities, with each embodying certain grievances that Californians hold about their hometowns. And so their campaigns—and the many moneyed interests with a stake in the outcome—are already playing to resentments about these two places.

Gavin Newsom, like San Francisco, is derided as too wealthy, too white, too progressive, too cerebral, too cold, and so focused on a culturally liberal agenda that you might call him out of touch. Antonio Villaraigosa, like Los Angeles, is portrayed as too street, too Latino, too instinctual, too warm, and so unfocused in his economically liberal ideas that you might say he lacks a center.

Of course, it is awfully negative and unproductive to pose such a question about two of the world’s leading examples of urban settlement. But ours is an era when conversation has devolved into a never-ending cycle of accusation and recrimination. And so debate has become the act of prioritizing our hatreds.

The interesting news in this year’s California contest of city loathing is that there is a contest at all.

Since World War II, Los Angeles has been second-to-none in the amount of contempt it feels from other Californians. L.A. was the big bad colossus of California. The City of the Angels—with its smog and traffic and gangs and those dumb and phony Hollywood stars—represented everything the rest of the state was determined not to be. “Beat L.A.” has been such a unifying chant—it is heard in stadiums and arenas from Oakland to San Diego, from San Jose to Sacramento—that it’s a wonder it never replaced “Eureka” as the state motto.

In this context, no Los Angeles mayor, current or former, has ever won statewide office; not even Tom Bradley, the 20-year L.A. mayor who was arguably the most consequential California Democrat of the 20th century, could escape the albatross of being an Angeleno.

San Francisco, on the other hand, was a place that Californians, and most of the rest of the country, preferred to love. It was small and beautiful and charming—the perfect spot to spend a weekend away with your lover—and it kept to itself in those 49 square miles at the tip of its peninsula.

But over the last generation, the relative positions of the cities have changed. Los Angeles has weakened—especially since the early 1990s recession—while San Francisco has become unimaginably wealthy, glitzy, and more powerful.

In their landmark study, “The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons From San Francisco and Los Angeles,” UCLA’s Michael Storper and three other researchers showed that the Bay Area and Greater Los Angeles were economically similar in the early 1970s on measures of household income, innovation, investment, education, and creative jobs. But they have since diverged so that the Bay Area’s household incomes are 50 percent higher, and L.A. now lags in educational attainment and investment.

The study found that this wasn’t only about the growth of technology. The more open culture of San Francisco encouraged the exchange of ideas between scholars, entrepreneurs, and financiers that drives business and growth. L.A.’s top-down culture—of powerful studio heads and players who operate from behind high walls—translated into less intellectual ferment, and more investment steered to the old economy rather than the new.

But this new, advanced San Francisco Bay Area has stirred more resentment. It is too expensive for all but a few Californians to even contemplate living there. And its technology companies now reach into our lives more intimately—via social media and the sharing economy—disrupting our work and livelihoods.

San Francisco also has taken over the state’s politics. One of our U.S. senators, Dianne Feinstein, is a former San Francisco mayor, while the other, Kamala Harris, is a former San Francisco district attorney. Despite tightening polls, Newsom is the clear favorite to be our next governor. This power is not just the product of money or the intense San Francisco political competition that breeds competitive candidates; it also reflects a public that participates more. Though the Bay Area has more than a million fewer voters than Los Angeles County, in some recent state elections the Bay Area has recorded nearly 300,000 more votes.

San Francisco, once a symbol of open-mindedness, now faces the slur that it is unrepresentative—too white a place to represent a diverse state, and too narrow in its thinking. Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor who backed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, recently complained that “Silicon Valley is a one-party state” that only tolerates liberals. And he followed up his words by telling associates he would move his residence, his company Thiel Capital, and his foundation to Los Angeles, where institutions with views similar to his—like Breitbart News—have a base.

The gubernatorial campaign has a similar framing. Antonio people will tell you how grounded and real and moderate their man is, and how stuck-up and lefty Gavin is. Gavin people will tell you how much smarter and more visionary and future-oriented their man is, and how uninspired and undisciplined Antonio is.

Of course, in reality, the two men are remarkably similar—in ways that reflect what their cities have in common. Both are among America’s most progressive politicians, representing two of America’s most progressive places—though both have been friendly to business and development. Both are extraordinarily bright men who, perhaps because they struggled as students, sometimes betray insecurity about their intellectual faculties. Both endured personal scandals for which their cities have forgiven them. And, unlike President Trump and President Obama, who both scorn politics (albeit in very different ways), both gubernatorial candidates intuitively embrace politics to take risks and address difficult problems.

And both come from cities facing similar challenges: sky-high housing prices, unrelenting homelessness, outdated infrastructure, and unbalanced economies that don’t produce high enough working-class wages. Both cities have a power to create their own alternative realities—and spawn some pretty daft ideas. As an Angeleno, I give thanks for San Francisco, since it means there is one metropolis out there with people crazier than us.

Ideally, California would get a governor who has the best of both cities.

Newsom, having run San Francisco, has experience navigating freakishly Byzantine politics and governing in a narrow one-party place; that is what the state government in Sacramento has become. And Villaraigosa, having run a sprawling state-sized city with weak civic institutions, understands how and when to seize the attention of an apathetic public; the California public resembles Angelenos too much in this respect.

I wish Antonio had a little more of Gavin’s Bay Area jones for data. And I wish Gavin had more of Antonio’s L.A. groundedness and horse-sense. But what I most wish is that, during this year’s political fight between two cities, we don’t forget just how lucky California is to be home to both.

The post Fear and Loathing of L.A. and S.F. on the Campaign Trail appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’d think those facts alone would make me happy to see the mayor ride off into the sunset. But the opposite is true. I’m going to miss Mayor Villaraigosa. Not because of the name-calling or for any good government reasons (like most Angelenos, I don’t pay very close attention to the minutia of local politics), but because Antonio was fun to watch. And he was fun to watch for the same reasons he could insult me to my face: He couldn’t hide his rough edges. His impetuousness sometimes got the best of him. And, over the years, he transformed, visibly, into a smoother, better, more effective politician.

Now don’t get me wrong, the mayor and I have never particularly liked each other. Our relationship has been, by definition, adversarial. (Tagging along on a 2006 Asia trade mission, I was left off a bus in Beijing. When I asked the mayor why, he addressed both his aides and me in response: “Why did you leave my friend Gregory off the bus—even though he is an asshole?!”) I’ve been writing about Antonio for a variety of publications for nearly 20 years, and, hell, if I were him, I’d hate my guts. I first interviewed him in 1994, the day after he was elected to the California State Assembly. He was the subject of many of my Los Angeles Times columns as well as cover stories I wrote for the now-defunct California Journal magazine when he became speaker of the Assembly in 1998 and for Newsweek in 2005 when he was elected mayor of L.A.

I’ve written some nice things about him through the years. (When he complimented me on one such story, I, in a brusque effort to keep journalistic distance, told him, “This doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re an asshole.”) I’ve also written some things that could be considered downright harsh. All in all, I’d like to think I’ve kept the mayor on his toes. He has certainly kept me on mine.

In 1994, he was a rather parochial leftist ethnic advocate. Four years later he had turned himself into a pragmatic, politically savvy insider. By the time he first ran for mayor in 2001, he had morphed into an inspirational man for all people, an apt political figure for the amazingly diverse new L.A. Once he became mayor, the one-time union activist mastered the art of hobnobbing with the rich and powerful.

We all know Antonio Villaraigosa’s imperfections, but rarely do we acknowledge how his own hyper-awareness of his foibles drives his ambition and his evolution as a politician and a man. Love him or hate him, Antonio never stands still or leaves well enough alone.

None of this is to excuse those foibles, but simply to recognize that his well-recognized flaws are also the source of his striving.

In politics as in life, moral rectitude is overrated. And let’s be honest, it’s also a little boring. Somewhere on my refrigerator door, I have a red, white, and blue magnet I picked out at the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois. It’s emblazoned with one of Honest Abe’s best quotes: “It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”

Call me crazy, but I like to see some reflection of humanity in my elected officials. I preferred junk-food Bill Clinton over the vegan version. It comforts me to know that from time to time, No Drama Obama has a hankering for nicotine. When all is said and done, Mayor Villaraigosa’s less-than-angelic persona made him interesting, approachable, and ultimately, pretty damn entertaining.

One morning about a year ago, I was walking down Wilshire to my old office in Koreatown when a dark SUV slowed down and sidled up to the curb in front of me.

For a moment I thought I was either going to become an FBI detainee or the victim of a gangland shooting. But just before I could make a run for it, a beaming Antonio Villaraigosa popped his head out of the passenger window and cheerfully yelled out my name. For an instant, the spontaneous absence of pomp or circumstance made Los Angeles feel like a small town.

At his best, that’s what Villaraigosa did for L.A. Whether it was by throwing out the first pitch at a Dodger game, shaking hands with people boarding their bus on the Orange Line, or just stopping to say hello, he made us feel like we were all in it together. And that our town worked: He was the Roosevelt High grad done good whose very success was a reflection of L.A.’s social progress.

So, yes, I’m going to miss Mayor Villaraigosa. You could call him many things, but because he showed up, you could do it to his face.

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