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GELFAND’S WORLD - I think I’ve figured out why voters find the current choices for L.A. Mayor to be uninspiring. It’s simple: Neither offers a positive sounding, forward looking approach to our future. Suppose some candidate had made one or two of the following offers in the lead-up to the primary:
I will develop 50 miles of light-rail transit during my time in office.
I will find a place out of town where our homeless and poor can camp in comfort, but off our streets.
I will work with the state and county to welcome the aviation and electronics industries back to Los Angeles.
I will respect neighborhood councils and work with them and find them a seat at the table.
I will set up a commission of Los Angeles residents, legal experts, and your elected representative to fix the Los Angeles city Charter so as to create a government that works instead of just posturing and promising.
And so on . . .
I mean, imagine how Los Angeles would look eight years from now if serious attempts were made on all these issues, or even on just some of them. And by the way, that first platform plank about building more light rail isn’t weirdly futuristic or even crazy. It’s just an admission that we are a century behind Boston, New York, Chicago, and pretty much every major European city when it comes to getting people around.
Or, to put it even more simply, suppose we had candidates whose political promises at least had something to do with what most voters think of as their own issues. If you are going to make promises, at least aim the majority of them at the more than 3 million who are still fighting the affordability battle and whose grandchildren will be dealing with climate change every single day.
So what does all this have to do with Nithya Raman and her candidacy for mayor of Los Angeles?
Let’s consider the candidate and her political promises (at least to start with) by looking at her campaign website, which you can find here. From that website, I am beginning to abstract a feel for the candidate herself and the essence of her platform. Let me offer a few immediate thoughts:
Raman has a pretty substantial academic background in city planning, but that background is yet to translate to the nuts-and-bolts, practical applications that would apply directly to Los Angeles. Her platform concentrates a lot of its oomph on how to spend the taxpayers’ money on coddling the entertainment industry while largely ignoring other industries such as shipping, tourism, aviation, space exploration, and the once-dominant agricultural industry. There is a lack of critical sense in exploring how the entertainment industry could be linked to the tourist industry, and particularly the role that location filming could play in supporting tourism. Raman appears to be unaware of the neighborhood council system and how it could be used (according to its original purpose) to provide useful feedback to the mayor and the City Council on how the residents of Los Angeles are doing on a day-to-day basis. And finally, in spite of her impressive academic background, Raman pays little attention to the role of major academic centers (UCLA, USC, Caltech, Occidental, the several Cal State Universities, and research centers embedded in major hospitals such as Harbor-UCLA, Cedars-Sinai among others) in developing the industries of the future. This oversight is a bit peculiar considering that Raman’s college and graduate school training in Cambridge, Massachusetts should have provided some clues. To put it even more bluntly, where is either candidate in terms of providing for robust development of the biotechnology industry in this area? Finally, if we are to talk about the economic development of this area, we might talk about a whole new sector in renewable energy, non-polluting machines, robotics, and technological remedies to global warming. I don’t see anything much that is forward looking in Raman’s website.
Still, there is Raman’s recent record of winning City Council elections and the mayoral primary, which suggests political smarts. At the same time, people I know who have tried to deal with her City Council office have been frustrated and were, to put it mildly, unimpressed by her level of public service. One referred to her essentially as the worst City Council representative he had ever encountered.
It is a quandary. Is Raman some sort of political genius who pulled a rabbit from a hat and defeated an incumbent City Councilman, or is she the worst City Council representative in living memory, or is she just an Ivy League academic who set sail from the shores of Massachusetts and landed on this Pacific shore? Who’s to know unless she becomes the mayor and is asked to lead and to produce?
Her list of gripes:
All of the above is not to say that her platform is wrong, or seriously off target. She hits on a number of issues that have appeared in these pages. For example, the inadequacy of our 911 and 311 systems (not to mention the extraordinarily inadequate 1-877-ASK-LAPD) is noted. And there is a pro-forma promise to repair the problem, but without any serious attempt to explain how this is to be accomplished.
And Raman might not be wrong in terms of wanting to retain the entertainment industry as an economic engine. It is, after all, a source of salaries for a fraction of our residents. What is missing is any sense of how the industry affects the rest of us – those who have to put up with the inconveniences and noise and occasional downright abuse by the practitioners of location shooting. It would be an easy problem to solve, yet neither the industry nor city government is willing to hold the discussion.
And then there are a couple of observations that become perplexing when you look at them. The first is the fact that Raman and her detractors refer to her identification with the Democratic Socialists of America. I didn’t see anything on her campaign website that refers to this, nor do I see any policies that we would traditionally think of as socialist. And yet she joined the group and asked for their support, as widely reported in the news media. What’s a little weird is the way (back in Feb. 2024) that the DSA simultaneously endorsed her and censured her for supporting Israel, using boilerplate lefty language that you can find here. Perhaps Raman is loyal to DSA policies in spite of the fact that she is not running publicly on their platform. Perhaps not. I suspect that the public will see this conflict as simply evidence of opportunism on her part.
What mainly comes out of Raman’s campaign website is the usual litany of complaints that we hear from politicians both lefty and righty, but without specifics as to how she would run Los Angeles differently. This approach is neither a sin nor a felony, but it inspires this thought: Why is she running other than the reason that other politicians run for higher and higher offices, and what, if anything, would she do in office?
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
