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For a Democrat who entered the presidential cycle with great prospects, it marked the end of a sharp fall.
“For a long time there has been this aura around Eric Garcetti that he’s someone with a great future, that he will reach great heights of power,” said Darry Sragow, a longtime Democratic strategist at Los Angeles. “And in the world of politics, that means everyone is nice to him and a lot of people like to be with him. And then it fuels the feeling that he is someone significant.
Sragow said, “Sometimes that turns out to be true, and sometimes things just don’t work out that way, at least for the time being.”
Two years ago, Garcetti was gearing up for a much-anticipated presidential race, raising money for Democrats across the country and positioning himself – and mayors like him – as an antidote to dysfunction in Washington, DC.
Today, he presides over a city that has been overwhelmed by the coronavirus and is in the grip of a budget crisis driven by a pandemic, homelessness and an increase in violent crime. A public corruption investigation engulfed the town hall. And next month, Garcetti will be filed in a lawsuit accusing a former senior employee of sexual harassment. His 9-year-old daughter, Maya, has tested positive for the coronavirus, and Garcetti and his wife are in quarantine.
If there was any good news for Garcetti, it was the prospect that he could finally get a break from the Black Lives Matter-aligned activists banging drums every day for weeks outside his residence for protest against a possible meeting.
“He won’t be s — secretary”, Melina Abdullah, organizer of Black Lives Matter, said before Garcetti’s announcement. Once that happened, she added, “We’re glad we didn’t see it fail.”
Garcetti presented his decision as a choice. “As the administration contacted me about my service,” he said, “I let them know earlier this week that my city needed me now, and that I wanted to be here and that I had to be here.
But several Democrats close to Garcetti have said he would have left for administration if the offer had been good enough. Instead, Biden chose Gina McCarthy, former director of the Environmental Protection Agency, as head of domestic climate policy, and Buttigieg for transport.
Garcetti, a friend of Buttigieg, once joked that he was “the older and straighter Pete Buttigieg”. But Buttigieg heads for the Cabinet. And like Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor who campaigned for Secretary of Transportation, Garcetti is on the sidelines.
“Pete has taken on the air of Eric throughout this affair,” said Doug Herman, who was a senior mail strategist for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns and a senior advisor to Garcetti in his first run. for mayor in 2013. “In the countryside, in terms of running, in terms of being the voice of the cities”, and now “in terms of getting a ministerial post for which Eric was mentioned. “
It’s hard to watch Garcetti’s last two years’ arc through any lens other than the missed opportunity. With the presidential primary approaching, Garcetti was once seen as a more credible candidate than Buttigieg or several other mayors and former mayors considering campaigns. The mayor of the country’s second-largest city, now 49, of Mexican-Italian-Jewish descent, represented a new generation of Democratic leaders from outside the ring road.
And Garcetti was not lacking in ambition. He has traveled extensively, creating a nonprofit group of mayors, workers and business leaders to fund investments in cities across the country. And he generated goodwill by using his connections to Hollywood money to help raise funds for state Democratic parties at a time when party operations in many states were slim.
In the end, Garcetti hesitated in the presidential campaign, saying being mayor was “what I’m supposed to do.” But even in his resignation – and even with his troubles in Los Angeles – Garcetti appeared to have hit his ticket to DC One of the former vice president’s earliest supporters, Garcetti co-chaired Biden’s campaign and helped scrutinize candidates for election. the vice-presidency.
“Look, he did everything he was supposed to do,” Herman said. “He did public support… He put his neck on the line with fundraising. He was there in a real way, and early. When it wasn’t cool being on the Biden team, Eric was there.
Had Biden returned the favor, a likely special election to replace Garcetti would have turned politics in Southern California upside down, attracting a wide range of mayoral candidates. Los Angeles City attorney Mike Feuer, a former state lawmaker, has previously announced he is running for mayor in 2022 and almost certainly would have run in a special election. City council chairman Nury Martinez and councilors Joe Buscaino and Mark Ridley-Thomas, former state lawmaker and county supervisor, were among the potential candidates, as were councilor Kevin de León, the former head of the Senate of the Democratic state which ran unsuccessfully against Senator Dianne Feinstein. in 2018.
Now everyone will wait. And so will Garcetti, whose most likely path will be a mid-term nomination by Biden.
As the Biden administration evolves, Herman said, Garcetti will likely be the “first person to step off the bench … I certainly don’t think that’s the end of the road for him.” And former Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said Garcetti’s outlook was not toned down.
“Now is not the time to write Eric Garcetti’s obituary,” said Yaroslavsky, who now heads the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “Biden remembers his friends and Garcetti is his friend.”
Garcetti will have to keep it that way. Via a spokesperson, Garcetti declined to comment. But if not for a later date, it is not clear where Garcetti could go. He is not in the realm of Democrats considered likely to be nominated to replace Vice President-elect Senator Kamala Harris, and Los Angeles mayors do not have a rich record of campaign success on their own. statewide. No Los Angeles mayor has gone up to the governor’s office.
The compounding problem for Garcetti is that it’s also difficult for Angelenos – outside of election season, when California money beckons – to keep DC’s attention with Los Angeles away from the country’s political and media centers. , residents of the East Coast see politicians here as the “JV squad,” said Antonio Villaraigosa, former Los Angeles mayor.
“They seem to think that the cities on the East Coast which are a fraction of the size and importance of Los Angeles are more important,” he said.
Yet Villaraigosa said: “In a few years, when [Garcetti’s] term is up, I really think someone like Biden would be open to him.
For Garcetti, he said, “I don’t think it’s over.”
Jeremy B. White contributed to this report.
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