L.A. mayor’s race: The world isn’t watching either

This Los Angeles mayoral election isn’t exactly setting the city’s electorate on fire. Nor the world, for that matter.

It’s so low key that I was surprised to see a very focused piece in the Guardian, Britain’s liberal national newspaper -- an intense analysis of the methodology of a Times-USC poll about a race that even the candidates’ hometown isn’t paying much attention to.

Former Mayor Sam Yorty once told me, in what I think was the last interview he gave, that when he traveled the world as mayor in the 1960s, people would say to him, “Los Angeles … Los Angeles … is that anywhere near Hollywood?”

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Hollywood, a mere neighborhood within Los Angeles, used to be a prim little town that banned liquor, yet it still eclipses, in the world’s imagination, the vast quarters of the rest of regular-folk L.A., and is still a cliche that, in strangers’ minds, characterizes the whole of the city.

That, along with the dreary fact that the runoff candidates are battling to find differences between themselves, and the reality that L.A.’s mayor has less clout than the mayors of New York and Chicago, doesn’t help to muster up attention that goes much beyond the journo cliches of laid-back, quirky and glam.

The Guardian story -- which concluded that, after all, the poll’s findings are probably right -- got me wondering how, or even whether, newspapers elsewhere in the world are covering an election that can’t even bestir the good townsfolk of Hollywood-is-not-the-total-of-Los-Angeles.

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“You wouldn’t know it on the U.S. East Coast, where the focus is on who will win the contest to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York,” the Guardian tells us, “but the election to be mayor of the nation’s second most populous city is also occurring this year.” Give the Guardian the benefit of the doubt -- you wouldn’t know it 10 miles from City Hall either.

Get a load of a couple of comments on the Guardian’s online story, one from “Profangus,” that asks “Who cares unless you live in LA? As a friend once said to me / it’s not like Madrid!” and the answer, from “follard,” “Everybody reading the Guardian. We’re obsessed with the US. Without it we would have no life -- with no chance of getting one.”

Then I skipped over to the website for the Telegraph, Britain’s establishment paper. The latest stories I could find that mentioned the L.A. mayor -- Antonio Villaraigosa -- were all about the Chris Dorner killing spree, and before that, about Villaraigosa’s role at the Democratic National Convention last September.

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Perhaps we should change the mayor’s title to “mayor of Los Angeles, which includes Hollywood,” or “mayor of Los Hollywood,” and maybe the job would get voters’ eyeballs and attention.

Given that Villaraigosa is the city’s first Latino mayor in well over a century, I looked for coverage south of the border. A popular Mexico City paper called El Universal had a story about the mayor of Los Angeles dated just before the primary -- hey, great, I thought. But it turned out to be a gossip item about Villaraigosa, headlined, essentially, “The mayor of Los Angeles wants to hook up with Kate del Castillo,” a Mexican actress.

Over at the sober Mexican newspaper Excelsior, I found two serious stories about the election: one the day of the election itself, and the other one the day after. The first pointed out that the colorless runoff and its candidates were the result of “years of lack of interest on the part of the electorate, and that neither of them [candidates] has the recognition of other leaders of big cities” like New York or Chicago.

The story deplored the projected low turnout, and declared flatly that the candidates need desperately to interest voters in their ideas and promises, and that compared to Hollywood, the Lakers, the Clippers and the Dodgers, municipal government is often ignored, and that mayors have come and gone with the same unfulfilled promises, from improving public transit to fighting homelessness in skid row. Most people, said Democratic consultant Gary South, couldn’t give a damn.

The election-day story anticipated a runoff. It pointed out the millions already spent on advertising by the candidates, and noted that if the sales-tax increase on the ballot were to pass [it didn’t], L.A. would have one of the highest tax rates in the country. In short, Excelsior’s readers may have been better informed about L.A.’s election than many Angelenos who just ignored the news that was put before them.

So thence across the ocean, virtually, to France. I found nothing at all in Le Monde online, but Le Figaro had a dramatically written story on March 6 about the election of the day before, the disengaged voting public and the deplorable turnout. Before I hit the paywall, here is its description of a Los Angeles polling place:

“An empty parking lot. A volunteer dozes on his hand. Another one yawns. A gimpy old man announces thunderously, almost menacingly, ‘I am a Republican,’ as he walks in.” I’m almost tempted to cough up the euros to keep reading!

Niente in Italy’s Corriere della Sera online, which is perfectly understandable. The popestakes have been a lot more interesting than L.A.’s mayoral stakes.

And far to the east, on Pravda’s English website, the last mention of the L.A. mayor I could find was a November 2011 story about Occupy L.A. Ah, Pravda -- some things never change!

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