Nov 10, 2008 04:45 PM
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Wed Feb 10
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Antonio Villaraigosa, the first Latino Mayor of Los Angeles, is a Democratic party darling. Lots of observers think he has a nice career ahead of him in California state politics or maybe even national office. He shows up on TV a lot, delivered the Spanish-language response to the 2006 State of the Union, and hey, there he is lined up with Larry Summers and Robert Reich in Obama's Economic Superfriends Advisors Meetup Party! Oh, good for him. God, let's hope that his role in the Obama Administration is limited to that photo-op, because his success thus far is due mostly to how much the LA press sucks and the fact that no one out east pays attention to left coast politics. Did you hear about his sexy Telemundo Affair?
Maybe you did, and forgot about it, or forgot the details, because who cares about what the mayor of Los Angeles does? The Los Angeles Times doesn't even care what the mayor of Los Angeles does! Their political reporters had the story of the end of Villaraigosa's marriage, and they put it on page B-4. They also, oddly, left out the reason for the split, which surely they could've found out with a couple minutes of reporting—Villaraigosa was sleeping with a hot political reporter from Telemundo!
The Times did get to the story eventually, but no one outside of LA noticed or really cared about Villaraigosa's infidelities. America is sort of beyond that, you know? The Republicans just ran a dude who married his mistress, and Newt Gingrich is looking good in 2012 (hah).
What none of that changes is the fact that Villaraigosa is precisely the kind of telegenic useless Democrat who can get David Hasselhoff and Natalie Cole to play his mayoral inauguration and who then spends his term gallivanting around the world building recognition and support for his causes without having any causes beyond promoting himself.
As the LA Weekly put it a couple months ago, "the mayor spends most of his working day flying in and out of town, holding staged press conferences, attending banquets, ceremonies and parties, raising political money and providing face time to high-powered special interest groups in a position to help his political advancement." So yes, of course it makes perfect sense that Villaraigosa was standing up there with President-elect Obama, because there were a shit-load of cameras there. But what the hell did he have to add to the discussion on the current economic crisis? Guys, let's not let this useless hack become an important new face of the Democrats in charge of the country, ok?
Send an email to Alex Pareene, the author of this post, at alexp@gawker.com.
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