GUEST COLUMN - Antonio R. Villaraigosa has been a mayor whom this city loves to love and loves to hate. The red carpets. The late-night parties. The lofty promises, many met and some not. The disintegration of a marriage and a relationship with a television reporter while in office, all covered with the flashbulb ferocity befitting a Hollywood personality.
“I love life,” Mr. Villaraigosa, 60, said in an interview at his City Hall office, scattered with the mementos of his eight years as mayor. “And I get beaten up about the fact that I love life, from time to time. If there’s a concert, I’ll get up and I’ll dance with Aretha Franklin. Yes I will.”
But not for long. Los Angeles is about to lose its bad boy, larger-than-life chief executive, whose term is up, as Mr. Villaraigosa put it with more than a glint of wistfulness, “on June 30 at 11:59 and 59 seconds.”
Like him or not, that will be quite an adjustment for the residents of this town, a stylistic sea change that is beginning to sink in with the campaign to replace him by two earnest if relatively monochromatic candidates, Wendy Greuel, the city comptroller, and Eric M. Garcetti, a member of the City Council. (It is difficult to imagine either candidate showing up on Charlie Sheen’s Twitter feed partying at a hotel opening in Mexico, as happened with Mr. Villaraigosa. “I got pounded on that for 10 days,” he said wryly, though he offered few regrets.)
But the transition may even be tougher for Mr. Villaraigosa, a mayor who described himself as someone with a “fairly severe case” of attention deficit disorder, a self-diagnosis that will not draw any quarrel from the people around him. (Read the rest … including the Mayor’s explanation: “I’m on the short end of a stick, right?” … here)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 25
Pub: Mar 25, 2013
