This closing comment of a political career—Koretz lost a bid for city controller—might have seemed inappropriate. But in the council chamber, it drew a wildly positive reaction, with council staffers jumping up and down and Koretz’s colleagues standing to applaud. It was as if “F—k you” had replaced “Eureka” as the state motto.

That moment showed the depths of the mutual contempt between public officials and the people in our state. It also demonstrated just how one-sided the narrative about anger in the public square has become.

Political violence runs two ways. Public officials often incite anger, threats, and worse against everyday people. But media reports typically focus on violence committed by the people against public figures. California has no shortage of such cases: the attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in their San Francisco home; prosecutions of men who threatened to kill U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell and state Sen. Scott Weiner; and the Southern California man charged with the attempted murder of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Those high-profile attacks can’t be dismissed as anecdotal. Threats against members of Congress have increased tenfold in the last decade. Polling has shown that about one in five Americans believe that political violence is sometimes justified—numbers that approach the percentages of people in Northern Ireland who felt the same way during the Troubles. The social costs of threats and violence are mounting. Facing harassment, public health officials retired in record numbers during the pandemic.

News media have been especially attentive to such violence for two reasons—because we cover political figures, and because journalists themselves are frequent targets. Your columnist has become so accustomed to threatening emails, texts, and social media posts that I no longer give them a second thought.

But in California, politicians have done little to protect journalists or everyday citizens who participate in the public square. Instead, they’ve been trying to protect themselves.

Around the state, that’s involved more security for public officials. And in many cases, local politicians have seized the opportunity to put more distance between themselves and ordinary Californians. Many officials restrict access to their buildings and offices, while lobbying for state laws that will allow them to participate remotely in meetings without disclosing their location.

One new law, Senate Bill 1100, empowers the presiding member of a city council or other local legislative body to warn and then remove an individual judged—by the lawmakers themselves, of course—to be disruptive.

This law isn’t particularly novel. State laws already essentially bar citizens from meaningful participation in the negotiations and contracting that are central to governance. In public meetings, citizens are typically limited to short statements or questions—“three minutes at the microphone”—that elected officials aren’t required to answer. The new bill goes further in this authoritarian direction, encouraging those in power to kick dissidents out.

But, it won’t make local meetings any quieter or safer. To the contrary, frustrated citizens will likely try to get themselves removed from meetings to demonstrate the depths of their protest and perhaps create legal causes of action against local governments because of their exclusion.

The underlying lesson is that keeping the public away isn’t protection. It’s perilous, because it inspires contempt. You can only hide from angry constituents for so long.

Which is one reason why people are increasingly choosing to protest at their representatives’ homes. Officials of all stripes have pursued regulations to restrict such protests and protect their families and neighbors from the noise, nuisance, and confrontations that come with them.

The impulse is understandable, but the restrictions haven’t stopped protesting near officials’ homes in Los Angeles, which passed such a law.

And such legislation is nakedly one-sided, because politicians haven’t stopped knocking on our doors in search of votes.

Our leaders aren’t just victims of anger—they are often victimizers, inciting threats and violence against ordinary people. Since November 2020, hundreds of elections workers have quit because of harassment by election deniers, many of whom are officeholders themselves. Political rhetoric also coincides with a rise in hate crimes since 2014. At the same time, public officials have sanctioned violence against protestors, many for progressive causes; three states have passed laws providing legal immunity to people who drive cars into protests.

“Political leaders’ rhetoric is particularly influential in normalizing violence among their followers, inflaming already angry people, and focusing those inclined to violence on particular targets,” Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the January 6 Commission.

In this context, we citizens are retreating from civic life, and from one another. A fascinating new study, Democracy Lives in Darkness, by Emily Van Duyn of the University of Illinois, shows how Americans are doing more of their civic and political participation in small, secretive groups to avoid retribution from politicians and their fellow citizens.

That’s tragic. The most reliable way of combating political violence is to build better personal connections between politicians and people. We need more spaces for public officials and regular people to get to know each other personally, and to talk freely.

The best model I know for this is a South Pasadena city councilmember who, accompanied by his dog, takes frequent long walks through the city, checking on every block and stopping to chat with people along the way. There’s no need to protest a politician like that at his house—he’ll come to yours.

Unfortunately, next door to South Pasadena is the district of Los Angeles City Council member Kevin De León, a paragon of bad relations between politicians and people.

De León is in the news for refusing to resign after being caught on tape in a conversation full of racist and bigoted comments. Over the holidays, De León and an activist had a physical confrontation at a toy giveaway.

The context for this fight is poorly understood; the conflict between the councilmember and activists started years before the tape leak. De León and his staff maintain they have been doxed, harassed, and attacked by activist groups who oppose their policies of housing the homeless.

In other words, the pressure and anger De León is facing now is not new. Which may explain his refusal to resign.  Could he even be sure that his conflict with activists would end even if he quit? Ask yourself:  if you were in his place, would you give ground? Would you step down?

Or would you just say: f—k you?

The post The Mutual ‘F—k You’ Defines California Politics Today appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To get at the answer, a panel of democracy experts and L.A. political insiders discussed the history and future of L.A.’s embattled city council—and why, in this moment of pain and division, there’s a real opportunity to demand change in the way the city is run.

Moderator Janaya Williams, KCRW’s host of All Things Considered, started off the conversation by addressing the elephant (or, as she put it, the “two slightly racist elephants who will not stand down and resign”) in the room: councilmembers Kevin de León and Gilbert Cedillo. The legislators have ignored calls to step down following a leak of their conversation with the now-former council president Nury Martinez, where they were captured on tape using racist, crude, and homophobic language while conspiring to expand their political power.

“I was appalled at the remarks that I heard, embarrassed for the body that I serve on, and sad for Los Angeles,” said L.A. city councilmember Nithya Raman, who called on Cedillo and de León to step down before the scandal encourages “more pain and more division to form in the city.”

The leaked recording, she said, was all about power. But not, as her colleagues alleged, about consolidating Latino power; this was about consolidating their own, personal grip on L.A. “The more we focus on that, and the more we talk about how we can change processes in the city so that we don’t have a repeat of that kind of divisive conversation again, I think that to me is the way forward.”

Weingart Foundation president and CEO Miguel Santana agreed with Raman. This was a conversation about hoarding power, he said, something that he called “an L.A. tradition.”

“It wasn’t unique—it’s happened generation after generation, and in many ways, the city was founded on those principles,” he said. That’s because Los Angeles matured at a time when redlining—the systemic discriminatory practice of denying housing loan applications and other services based on race or ethnicity—was “the law of the land,” which meant that the majority of the city couldn’t buy property. Systems of governance at the time echoed this—“it was all about maintaining the privilege of some at the expense of others.”

Santana finds himself invigorated by the ways that Angelenos are reckoning with this reality in real-time today.

“It is very powerful to see all of Los Angeles react the way Los Angeles has,” he said. “To see the public testimony—20% of it being done in Spanish—to see folks say this isn’t the Los Angeles that I know, that I love, that I want us to be. And demanding that we do something dramatically different.”

But what should our new vision for Los Angeles be?

Public Access Democracy director Leonora Camner argued that we can’t just elect our way out of this situation. “Power is corrupting, even for people who have the best intentions.”

Instead, she suggests we think about the best ways to make a more democratic system. “There are a lot of exciting opportunities for us to do more experimentation and try out more innovative forms of government that really get to the heart of the problem,” she argued.

For instance, Camner said, we can think about using democratic lotteries that engage a representative cross-section of the community. “They elevate expertise more because people impartially listen to expert opinion when deliberating, without the worry of re-election,” she said.

This is something we already do with juries, and there’s a reason for that: “If you were on criminal trial and your fate was on the line, you’d never want that to be a political process,” she said. You’d want the process to be guided by facts and experts.

Why is it, California 100 executive director Karthick Ramakrishnan asked, that you can see innovation everywhere in California, but “not in the realm of democracy?” We can do so much more, he argued.  He cited innovations from around the world, like Japan’s intergenerational simulations, in which half of the participants represent citizens in, say, the year 2050, and the other half represent citizens in the present moment. The groups have to come together and make decisions that serve both parties.

Whether solutions are old or new, we need to look at them with fresh eyes and determine what kind of political system we want, he argued. “What are the things we want to optimize for and encourage? What are the harms we want to minimize?”

Raman, too, pointed to existing innovations at the state level, the county level, and across America. “The question is,” said the councilmember, “if there is an idea we can consolidate around and how would you make it happen?” Among other issues, Raman said she’s especially interested in creating a “truly independent” redistribution commission and expanding the size of the city council.

Before the night ended, Williams asked all the panelists what they think L.A. would look like under a truly representative government. Would a city council be part of that picture?

“Maybe we’ll continue to have a city council,” said Camner. “But I hope that we make sure there are more opportunities for Angelenos to directly serve in some of these decision-making roles.”

Ramakrishnan called on Angelenos to “ground ourselves in core values—innovation, resilience, inclusion, and equity. These need to go from slogans to being operationalized.”

Santana pointed to the current urgency: “We need to reimagine it now,” he said. “We need to rely on those who have spent their careers thinking about these issues. We should give ourselves some permission and grace to imagine something different.”

And speaking from her role as a councilmember, Raman said she is heartened by how so many elected officials are now saying, “take away the number of my constituents, reduce the control I have over my district.”

This, she said, is “a revolutionary moment.”

The post How Do You Solve a Problem Like L.A.’s City Council? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Molina, now 66, has made history before. She first burst onto the political scene in 1982 by upsetting the candidate of a powerful male-dominated Eastside machine for a seat on the California State Assembly. Through that victory in her first run for office, she became the very first Latina elected to the California Assembly.

Since then, she has amassed a long unbeaten streak in campaigns. In the process, she became the first Latina elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1987 and to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in 1991, a post she held for 23 years.

Those victories revealed not only her political talent, but something also about the cross-currents that shape the places she has represented: the unincorporated territory known as East Los Angeles, adjacent communities in Northeast and Southeast Los Angeles, and the west San Gabriel Valley. Communities in these areas are often dismissed as poor and monolithic, where statistics reveal high unemployment and underperforming schools. Molina, as a product of two movements (women’s and Chicano), spoke to the aspirations of these communities that, while once seen as existing on the margins, have come to represent an authentic heart of L.A.

Molina’s career trajectory also reflected not only political but also social progress in L.A. In her 1982 race for the Assembly, she beat the Eastside machine by defeating Richard Polanco, a strong candidate later elected to the Assembly, with backing from powerful political players such as Richard Alatorre and Art Torres, as well as Eastside power broker Lou Moret. After five years, she left the Assembly to run for an open seat on the Los Angeles City Council, once again dispatching the Eastside machine with her victory over Larry Gonzalez, a then trustee of the Los Angeles Unified School Board.

That victory, like her 1991 election to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, was made possible and fueled by the federal Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Department of Justice and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) filed suit against the City in 1985 and the County in 1988 charging that redrawn political district lines had diluted and fractured Latin voting strength. The districts she won were both newly created, Latino-majority districts drawn in response to the litigation.

The nature of her victory–against the machine and the establishment–shaped Molina and her reputation as a giant killer, machine buster, vibrant force for women, and finally as a carrier of grudges. On this last point, she came to be widely perceived as having a pointed, harsh, frequently unfriendly and sometimes vindictive governing style.

One of the most significant facts of political life for the past two decades in Los Angeles was that Molina and organized labor did not get along. Labor, after all, had heavily supported Art Torres. Molina never forgave nor forgot, providing a frequent third vote for much of her tenure against various labor concerns and demands. A Democrat, Molina grew ideologically moderate-to-conservative during her time on the board. Labor leaders, while not regretting having supported Torres, were clearly dismayed that Molina chose not to understand why labor had supported Torres, a long and trusted ally of the house of labor.

Her final act–deciding to challenge the 14th District City Council incumbent councilman José Huizar in the March 2015 city elections–stunned many people who had expected her to retire from politics after 32 years. But given her history, maybe this should not have been so stunning. While some have pointed out how hard it is for elected officials to give up power, she has said she still has fire in the belly. History has proven that she certainly loves to beat the odds.

And her timing might be right. L.A. has very few female political officeholders these days. On the City Council, only one of the 15 seats is held by a woman, Nury Martinez.

But there are risks to her legacy in making another run for political office. The concern of many–including those who have long supported her–is that if she loses, she will no longer be remembered just as a political giant slayer and role model for women of color. She could go down, as well, as someone who should have quit while on top and made room for the next generation of candidates and officeholders.

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The post Political Organizer Torie Osborn appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Garcetti has had a great first year in office, Osborn told a large audience at MOCA Grand Avenue. He’s aligning other city officials and politicians with his causes. He’s bringing in money from Washington, D.C. to revitalize the L.A. River and transform transportation. And he’s generating “ a sense of regionalism”—convening the cities of L.A. County, showing up for election night in Long Beach—that’s bringing cohesion to Southern California.

Gilliam agreed that Garcetti’s back-to-basics platform addresses L.A.’s broken administrative structure. But, he asked, does Garcetti have what business strategists call “a big hairy audacious goal” for the city? Los Angeles has “very large problems,” and we need to have some vision about how we solve them, said Gilliam. “Small ball” might not be an attractive answer to the populace.

Newton expressed admiration for Garcetti’s patience. However, he said, “once you have a functioning bureaucracy, it’s helpful to point it in a particular direction.” Even if they didn’t achieve them, Garcetti’s predecessors had audacious goals at the outset of their terms—hiring thousands of police officers (Mayor Richard Riordan), planting a million trees (Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa). “Maybe it makes sense to have a city that can achieve goals before rolling out goals,” said Newton. “But I don’t know what those goals are.”

Osborn contended that Garcetti is rebranding Los Angeles as a capital of innovation and inspiring an “explosion of civic engagement by young people.”

Gilliam said that might be true for young people in certain parts of the city, but not in South and East L.A., where education and affordable housing remain big issues.

KCRW news producer and the evening’s moderator, Saul Gonzalez, asked the panelists to speak to an oft-heard (though perhaps unfair) comparison between the first year performance of Garcetti and that of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Newton said that these mayors are different people with different predecessors. De Blasio is a “big idea, big ticket” mayor—and Garcetti’s never advertised himself as such. “There is a certain amount of Villaraigosa fatigue in this city,” said Newton. Our last mayor “was a very good starter and a very bad finisher.” It’s possible that Garcetti is a better finisher than a starter, he said.

Perhaps it’s too early to tell what Garcetti’s going to accomplish in every arena. But, said Gilliam, it’s fair to ask what he intends to do about the big issues citizens care about: combining economic development and affordable housing, increasing equity between the haves and have-nots, and preparing young people for the 21st-century job market. Having the Los Angeles River is better than not having a river, said Gilliam—but what big problem does it solve?

You have to look at this administration in context and in terms of timing, said Osborn. Although they don’t sound sexy, Garcetti’s back-to-basics accomplishments, his quest for transparency in government, and the work he’s done to align himself with the city council, controller, and attorney are all hugely important in this particular moment.

But, asked Gonzalez, has the “hipster stuff” that Garcetti has accomplished dealt with the fundamental challenges facing L.A.?

Osborn pointed to Garcetti’s work on veterans’ issues and immigration as evidence of his efforts to take on big challenges. But she also said that he has been “unbelievably disciplined and restrained” as he bides his time before making a big move.

Gilliam counseled against the mayor keeping his strategy a secret from the people of L.A., who are facing extraordinary economic challenges. “Where’s the sense of urgency?” he asked.

The sense of urgency for this mayor is perhaps different, said Gonzalez, than it was for mayors in the 1980s and 1990s, when more than 1,000 people were murdered in Los Angeles each year. “We haven’t even talked about public safety, which is kind of extraordinary,” said Gonzalez.

L.A.’s gains in public safety are the city’s most impressive achievement of the past few decades, said Newton. But the crises of the past “really focused the mind[s]” of the city’s leaders and forced them to articulate big ideas. Richard Riordan, for instance, was elected mayor in 1993 on a “tough enough to turn L.A. around” platform, just after the riots and the LAPD’s subsequent failure to respond.

How much of what Garcetti can accomplish is constrained by the structure of L.A. government?

The power vested in the mayor of New York City or San Francisco is “phenomenally different” than in L.A., where the mayor is constrained in part by the county government, said Osborn.

However, said Newton, some of it is personality. No one referred to Mayor Tom Bradley as weak; he “found ways to be powerful.”

L.A., added Gilliam, is a complex place. People in the West Valley don’t want the same things as people in Mid-Wilshire or Westchester. Which is why Garcetti could use a master narrative—“a big picture umbrella under which lots of things can fit.”

Osborn said that big vision is coming, and described Garcetti as a “rock star” waiting to put forward his big ideas.

“Rock stars are rock stars because they’re oversized,” said Gilliam. “Given the great tears in the civic fabric of this city, the mayor has to be someone who steps into the breach.”

In the audience question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked to articulate what they think Garcetti’s “moonshot” goal should be.

Education, said Gilliam—even if the mayor doesn’t control the schools, he has a “bully pulpit” from which to make a statement.

Osborn said: “It definitely has to do with the opportunity agenda: economic justice, economic equity.”

Economic development, said Newton.

The post Eric Garcetti<span class="colon">:</span> Rock Star or Bureaucrat? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There are real data now to help answer such a question. Relatively recent technologies—cable television, satellite radio, and social media—provide us with a not-too-unrealistic picture of how often people swear in public and what they say when they do. People now are capable of recording and being recorded at any time. Before these new forms of reporting, the media provided a fairly sanitized view of spoken English. Newspapers today still report swearing euphemistically, as in “N-word,” “F-bomb,” or “an eight-letter word for animal excrement,” instead of telling us what was really said. Fortunately, YouTube now offers people like me, who study language and profanity, a more accurate picture. By all accounts, those in public places were swearing in the past; we just weren’t able or equipped to record it.

Are widely reported acts of swearing by public figures like Garcetti’s typical or not? And are the rest of us any different—how frequently do regular people swear and what do we say?

Language scientists actually attempt to answer these questions. In one study reported in the journal Science, less than one percent of the words used by participants (who were outfitted with voice recorders over a period of time) were swear words. That doesn’t sound like very much, but if a person says 15,000 words per day, that’s about 80 to 90 fucks and shits during that time. (Of course, there’s considerable variability—some people don’t say any swear words and some say hundreds more).

When I was a visiting scholar in the psychology department at UCLA in the 1990s, my research team counted how frequently people used swear words in and around Los Angeles. I reported these data in Why We Curse and compared them to previous swearing estimates. It came as no surprise to me that fuck was the most frequently recorded swear word. Fuck and shit, which first entered the English lexicon in the 15th century, usually end up first and second in our observational research, having long ago surpassed more religious profanities such as damn and hell in popular usage.

More recently, we reported in The American Journal of Psychology that fuck and shit appeared consistently in the vocabularies of children between 1 and 12 years of age. Yes, preschoolers say fuck—most parents already know this, of course. And we shouldn’t worry about it. There is no social science evidence to suggest a swearword would harm a youngster physically or psychologically—even if she were watching a newscast of a respected politician swearing in public. The idea that children are harmed by hearing swearwords rests on the assumption that children are naïve about profanity, and our study suggests they are not.

So please, don’t be shocked by these swearword statistics, or by public people like professional athletes and politicians swearing in public. Politicians get caught swearing all the time. This was obvious in the 1970s when we read all those “expletive deleted” references in the transcripts of President Richard Nixon’s Oval Office tapes. In 2000, we caught then-candidate George W. Bush referring to New York Times reporter Adam Clymer as a “major league asshole.” In 2004, we heard Vice President Dick Cheney tell Vermont Senator Pat Leahy to “go fuck” himself on the floor of the U.S. Senate. In 2010, Vice President Joe Biden called the passage of President Obama’s healthcare legislation “a big fucking deal.” From Canada, transcripts reveal Toronto Mayor Rob Ford saying, “I’m so fucking sick of politics, dude.” I could go on with these gaffes. If you want more, take a look at Steve Anderson’s documentary, FUCK, which offers plenty of swearing by politicians (I appear toward the end of the film to describe children’s swearing).

I put Mayor Garcetti’s profane celebration of the Kings’ Stanley Cup in the Biden category. Whatever else you say about the mayor’s use of the term, it is not creative or original. In fact, Garcetti’s overt enthusiasm in this sports-centric context is oddly reminiscent of what happened in Quebec this March. Justin Trudeau, a liberal leader in Canada’s House of Commons, was speaking before a boxing match for a charity fund. Trudeau, who had boxed before, noted that one’s past and fortunes were not important in boxing: “None of that fucking matters,” he said.

If you haven’t seen the clips of Trudeau and Garcetti on YouTube, watch them. It’s obvious that these politicians (who are also both the sons of politicians) are talking to arena-filled, sports-minded audiences, but not to you and me sitting at home. In both cases the audiences at the arenas react enthusiastically with mirth; they laugh and applaud. Why not? These men were talking to predominantly male audiences about two wildly aggressive, testosterone-filled and adrenaline-soaked sports.

To sportsmen and sports enthusiasts, fuck is not a foreign word. Profanity in sports goes back a long time. In 1995, I was invited on NBC’s Today show to comment on what it meant when NBC Sports went in the locker room and recorded the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Greg Lloyd saying, “Let’s bring this damn thing [the conference trophy] back here next year along with the fucking Super Bowl.” By my count, the professional athletes who’ve been in trouble for swearing widely outnumber our politicians.

Yes, I swear when I play sports. Many years ago, I played hockey at Miami University (the same school attended by Alec Martinez, scorer of the Kings’ championship-winning goal). I still play hockey, and today I also play golf. When I play sports (especially golf) I say fuck because I make so many stupid mistakes. I also hear my mates yelling out a few shits, hells, and goddammits. Ours isn’t trash talking to put others down. Ours is emphatic emotional speech that accompanies moments of frustration, anger, surprise, and joy. So was Garcetti’s joyful, “This is a fuckin’ big day.”

But what happens when the viewer at home encounters these expletive-laced speeches on their TVs or the Internet? Some viewers take it personally, calling these guys degraders of morals and classless because they’re only thinking of the historically sexual meaning of the word fuck. Notice that both Garcetti and Trudeau (along with Bono at the Golden Globes) used fucking as an intensifier, not as a sexual obscenity. Most swear words are used connotatively (to convey emotion), not for their literal meaning, as in these examples. In the past, the Federal Communications Commission viewed every use of fuck as sexual. But the examples I’ve cited and others have nothing to do with sex—a point I’ve made as an expert witness in court.

The FCC waffles back and forth about what to do about Garcetti- and Trudeau-type “fleeting expletives,” which are spontaneous and difficult for broadcasters to control. Fox Sports apologized for Garcetti’s “inappropriate” speech, but it’s not clear if Fox will be fined by the FCC. (My best guess: probably not, since Obama’s commissioners are dovish on profanity). The FCC ruled less liberally during the Bush years when conservatives had more sway and swearing incidents were demonized by media watchdog groups such as the Parents Television Council. It’s interesting that these groups don’t complain similarly about alcohol ads in professional sports. Alcohol can kill you, but swearing won’t; swearing might even help you cope with life’s stressors, according to some recent research.

Of course, the offended will always be watching. Their exact numbers and characteristics are not entirely known, but media research reveals them as exhibiting personality characteristics that are conservative, religious, and sensitive to overt sexuality. They want to see broadcast standards made less lax. Older generations who are less understanding of technology may see more profanity and perceive that there is a change in language or societal habits, even when that is not the case or not the whole story. Swearing by people in positions of power has always been there; it just used to be better hidden. We have to learn to accept that we are now going to see, and hear, more Garcettis.

But there is good news. The day after any swearing incident—maybe you’ve noticed—nothing happens. No children have been harmed. No one has to be hospitalized, medicated, or admitted to a mental health facility or trauma center. Yes, some sensibilities may get joggled a little bit—but coping with slight deviations from the expected or moments of minor discomfort is part of life (and even a “teachable moment” if you’re a parent). No one, not even your mother, dies from hearing the word fuck.

The post Should I Give a Damn About the Mayor’s F-Bomb? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post Time For Your Check-Up, Mr. Mayor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In spring 1971, much of the mountains had been zoned for subdivisions by the developer-friendly Los Angeles City Council and Mayor Sam Yorty. The Los County Board of Supervisors did the same with the mountain land it controlled outside city boundaries.

The late Marvin Braude, then a Los Angeles city councilman representing West L.A., including parts of the mountains, was one of the few fighting the developers and their political allies. But it was tough to beat those powerful forces in a city where growth was part of the civic psyche.

A young lawyer, Joel Wachs, decided to run against the incumbent in the 2nd District, James B. Potter, a pro-development councilman supported by Yorty. The district reached from the mountains to the San Fernando Valley flatlands

I covered the race for the Los Angeles Times. Although I had reported presidential and governor elections for the Associated Press, my previous employer, I had never written about anything as local as a council election, and I was amazed how personal it became, with both the paper and I turning into central characters.

I went to the candidates’ forums where Wachs and the other candidates ganged up on Potter. I trudged through the district, going door-to-door interviewing voters, a workout on some of those steep mountain streets. This was in more innocent times when homeowners, unafraid, opened their front doors to reporters like me, and were glad to talk.

I found that voters in the flatlands didn’t know much about Potter, but those in the hillsides knew all about the mountain development issues and didn’t like the way Potter handled them. When I reported that, I found myself attacked by name in a local weekly and accused of prejudiced reporting.

Wachs, a former UCLA student body president, was well connected and had plenty of money for his campaign, starting off with $10,000 from his father, Archie, a wealthy retiree from the clothing business. Archie also stood outside Gelson’s and Ralphs, both markets patronized by politically active Jews, handing out brochures urging them to “Vote for My Son Joel.”

Wachs looked like a sure winner until the Friday before the election. That day, he came home with his campaign aides Harry Sloan and Mark Armbruster. In his mailbox he found a copy of the Record newspaper.

Over its masthead was the slogan, “One of the world’s great black newspapers.” On the front page was another slogan, “Good Neighbors Come in All Colors,” along with a story praising Wachs. It had been deliberately mailed throughout the predominantly white district.

Wachs and his aides panicked. Los Angeles, then as now, was a racially tense place. Memories of the 1965 Watts riot were fresh, as were those of the racist campaign run by Yorty when he defeated Tom Bradley, an African-American, in 1969, just four years after the riots. Yorty, with the help of a couple of inflammatory TV news anchors and talk show interviewers, stoked racial tensions and beat Bradley. Wachs feared the same thing would happen to him.

“We’ve blown the campaign,” said Wachs.

In the midst of the panic, a middle-aged man wearing expensive clothes and smoking a high-priced cigar walked into the Wachs headquarters. His name was Manning J. Post, and he had been fundraiser for the legendary state Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh. As I wrote of Post at the time, “he knows every angle.”

Post, who had been introduced to Wachs a few weeks before, looked at the near hysteria of the Wachs crew with disdain, “Kids,” he said. “Kids. What do they know?” He looked at a copy of the Record with the interest of a longtime student of smears. “That’s clever,” he said. “I haven’t seen anything like that since I left Chicago.”

Post calmed the Wachs supporters down. A phone bank went to work and by Monday had made 20,000 calls. One of the calls from Wachs headquarters was to me, from Wachs aides Armbruster and Sloan. They told me about the Record. What a story, I thought—an election eve smear. I’d better nail it down in a hurry.

They gave me the address of the paper and the U.S. Post Office bulk rate permit number. The Record office was on South Vermont Avenue, in a predominantly African-American part of town, miles from the 2nd District. I called the Record. It was a real newspaper, but this run was a special edition, a man on the phone told me, adding, “Some sort of committee paid for it.” I chased down the bulk permit number, which was held by a big political mail-advertising firm. The paper put my story on page one with the headline, “Opponent Says Potter Injected Racial Issue Into Vote Campaign.” It wasn’t covering a presidential campaign, I thought, but local politics were pretty exciting, a belief I’ve never been able to shake.

The counterattack warded off any damage the Record might have caused. Wachs was elected, thanks largely to the growing strength of environmentalists and slow-growth homeowners in the Santa Monica Mountains and adjoining parts of the San Fernando Valley. On the council, he joined Braude, by then an increasingly respected and effective environmentalist.

The political atmosphere changed. Grassroots organizations, once small and ineffective, became smarter. In those pre-computer days, women and men labored over skimpy paper campaign contribution reports and painstakingly tied politicians to those profiting from growth. Then they used the mail and newspapers to publicize their findings.

With grassroots support growing and the backing of Braude, Wachs, and other Westside politicians, the Santa Monica National Recreation Area was created in 1978 and the Santa Monica Mountain Conservancy two years later. Land that had been zoned for subdivisions was acquired by the conservancy under the aggressive leadership of Joe Edmiston, the executive director, and by the federal government.

The mountains were saved—not entirely, but enough for today’s Southland residents to roam among them and hike their length.

And that’s how a dirty trick helped give us a regional treasure.

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And if they’re actually leveling with you now.

The city of Los Angeles—where examples of the weakness of civic life are outnumbered only by examples of elite hand-wringing over the weakness of civic life—recently saw the release of just such a report, by a committee of 12 worthies (led by former U.S. Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor and former Deputy Mayor Austin Beutner) from the political, business, labor, and philanthropic worlds. Its central point: L.A. is too apathetic and passive about planning for the future.

Such reports aren’t new here. But what’s interesting about “A Time for Truth” is that it says more (sometimes unintentionally) about L.A. and California than previous exercises. “A Time for Truth” is relatively short by blue-ribbon commission standards—less than 50 pages, including notes—and it’s easy to read. Its most trenchant observations involve the failure of Los Angeles-area governments to collaborate in preserving economic engines that are important not only locally but also statewide.

The neighboring ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach could work together—as do the ports in New York and New Jersey (at least when Governor Christie’s people aren’t blocking traffic)—but instead compete against each other. L.A.’s governments have done very little to keep the big popcorn action movies that drive Hollywood economics from moving elsewhere. The cities of L.A., Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica maintain separate efforts to attract international tourists even though, as the report notes, “it would take a discerning tourist from China to spot the difference in sand while walking the sidewalk between Santa Monica and Venice or to realize she’s crossed into a different city when leaving her hotel in Beverly Hills to visit the Getty.”

But beyond such nuggets, “A Time for Truth” speaks loudest because of what is authors have left out. Indeed, the report’s own history is as telling as anything in it. In the heat of last year’s mayoral election, leading politicians and wise men declared the city’s problems too deep to be properly debated in an election. So L.A. City Council President Herb Wesson asked Kantor to put together a commission, called the Los Angeles 2020 Commission in a nod to the end of this decade, to take a long-term look. And it has done so, now that our elections are safely over, because L.A. elections, our civic elites seem to agree, must not be a “Time for Truth.”

The report is oddball. It treats L.A. as if its destiny were likely to be determined by the city government and finances, a weird stance in a place that has succeeded and prospered throughout its history more in spite of than because of thoughtful local governance. And the report’s obsession with the city budget is hard to understand when one recognizes that the Los Angeles metropolitan area has an annual GDP of just under $800 billion, while the city budget, at less than $8 billion, is just 1 percent of that. For context: Disney has annual revenues of $42 billion and a market capitalization of $127 billion.

The report also omits crucial context: City government in Los Angeles is destined to be dysfunctional because Los Angeles has the bad fortune to be located in California. And California has a famously centralized governing system that limits the ability of local officials to raise revenues and make long-term decisions. One irony of the report is that California’s governing centralization has been nurtured and protected by the very same business leaders (they like how centralization limits taxes) and labor elites (they like how centralization adds to their political power) that make up the 2020 Commission.

“A Time for Truth” is only the first of two reports the commission will produce. “A Time for Truth” has “defined the problem,” and the second report, expected shortly, will offer solutions. Defining the problem before proposing solutions sounds logical, but this methodology is backward and wrong. Complicated problems—like those of 21st century Los Angeles—can’t be easily defined; that’s what makes them complicated. And as anyone who has ever tried to figure out what’s wrong with her kitchen sink knows, the best way to understand a difficult problem is to try solutions first.

Perhaps because it doesn’t grapple with different ways to improve Los Angeles, “A Time for Truth” misses real problems. The biggest is how three trends—L.A.’s rapidly aging population, a large decline in the number of new immigrants arriving here, and our failure to have enough children—pose a threat to what was one of our greatest assets: our diversity. While we’re attracting fewer new humans, the rest of the country grows more diverse. Yet the report states, blissfully and mistakenly, that we remain the country’s most diverse place: “Our ethnic diversity provides a pool of human capital unmatched anywhere else in the country.” But the real truth is that census figures show we’ve fallen to third in ethnic diversity, behind Houston and New York City.

The most grating thing about the report is that it portrays Angelenos—a struggling, scrambling, hard-working bunch—as contentedly waiting around for something better to save us from our decline. “A Time for Truth,” sticks in the knife with a literary reference: “Like the hapless Mr. Micawber in Dickens’ David Copperfield, our wishful response to continued economic decline and impending fiscal crisis has become a habitual: ‘Something, my dear Copperfield, will turn up.’”

Such a reading of Charles Dickens is incomplete—and terribly unfair to Micawber and to Angelenos. Micawber was not hapless. He was a victim of powerful, foolish people in London, and did his best to cope with the injustices visited upon him, including being sent to debtors’ prison. But he persevered, emerged from prison, and, ignoring those who said he wouldn’t amount to much, eventually emigrated from England to Australia. There he became a successful businessman and respected city official.

The truth is, we could use more characters like him in Los Angeles.

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