Monday, May 16, 2022

Rick Caruso’s Campaign Is a Sign America’s Political Ground Is Shifting

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, May 16, 2022

 

Just how wild will this year’s midterm elections turn out to be? The most right-of-center option in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, billionaire developer Rick Caruso, could well end up winning and is ahead by one percentage point in the most recent poll.

 

California holds its primaries in about three weeks, and under the state’s unusual rules, all candidates, both party members and independents, participate in a non-partisan primary. The top two vote getters, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the general election; this is how two Democrats, Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez, faced off in the November general election for U.S. Senate in 2016. (This led to many Democrats arguing that Senate elections were inherently unfair because their party received many more votes in the Senate elections nationwide than Republicans, glossing over the fact that in California, Democrats received 12.2 million votes and Republicans received none.)

 

In addition to the congressional elections, Los Angeles will hold its mayoral election. Incumbent mayor Eric Garcetti, the Democrat well known for holding his breath around Magic Johnson, is term limited. (Biden nominated Garcetti to be the U.S. ambassador to India in July 2021, and he is currently awaiting a confirmation vote in the U.S. Senate, a confirmation vote that does not look like a sure thing.)

 

Back in 2015, city voters approved a city-charter amendment moving mayoral elections from odd-numbered years to even-numbered years, aiming to increase turnout; this means that Garcetti’s second term has been five and a half years instead of the usual four. The city’s turnout in the 2017 mayoral election was an abysmal 20.1 percent; the expectation is that this year’s turnout will be significantly higher.

 

If no single candidate gets a majority of votes, the top two finishers advance to the runoff, which will be held on November 8. The most recent Berkeley-IGS Poll is intriguing because it has Caruso at 24 percent, Representative Karen Bass at 23 percent, city councilman Kevin de León at 6 percent, and six other candidates in the low single digits, with 39 percent of voters undecided. If all the undecided stayed home, the primary election would end with Caruso at 39 percent and Bass at 37.7 percent — a strong finish for the latter that would, at minimum, give her a good shot in the runoff. The question is, can Caruso and his relentless television-advertising campaign win over enough of the remaining undecided voters to put him over 50 percent and avoid a runoff?

 

Los Angeles is beset by the same problems as many other big American cities — rampant homelessness, increasing violent crime, scandals and corruption in city government, droughts and other natural disasters. But Los Angeles’s general sense of lawlessness and societal breakdown is vividly exacerbated by piles of trash in the streets, the sight of ransacked freight trains, and a progressive district attorney who has ceased prosecuting certain crimes. Los Angeles County sheriff Alex Villanueva said that his office presented 13,238 cases that the district attorney’s office ultimately declined to prosecute under District Attorney George Gascón’s new soft-on-crime special directives. “These are people that did bad things that left a victim, have the evidence presented, and they said ‘don’t bother.’” Oh, and being the epicenter of the nation’s supply-chain problems isn’t helping the city, either.

 

Unsurprisingly, the severe downturn in quality of life has Los Angeles voters contemplating new options — including a billionaire developer who is somewhat conservative — or at minimum, conservative by Los Angeles standards.

 

Caruso is on the board of trustees for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. In addition to playing a big roll in his own family’s charitable foundation, he has served on various governing boards for the University of Southern California, Pepperdine School of Law, Loyola High School, and St. John’s Hospital. He endowed the USC Caruso Department of Otolaryngology at the Keck School of Medicine, as well as the USC Catholic Center.

 

In April 2020, President Trump appointed Caruso to his “Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups Task Force Committee,” a task force aiming to mitigate the economic impact of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. A few days later, California governor Gavin Newsom appointed Caruso to his own “Business & Jobs Recovery Task Force.”

 

As a politically active Los Angeles real-estate developer with an estimated $4.3 billion net worth, Caruso has a long history of political donations to candidates in both parties — including rival Bass in 2011. He’s donated to Republicans such as House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, former senator Dean Heller, former congressman Joe Heck, the National Republican Congressional Committee; and he’s donated to Democrats such as Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Xavier Becerra, and Ted Lieu.

 

Caruso has some experience in city government; Democratic mayor Tom Bradley appointed Caruso, then 26, to the position of commissioner for the L.A. Department of Water and Power. Then, in 2001, Mayor James Hahn appointed Caruso to the Los Angeles Police Commission for a five-year term, where he helped recruit William Bratton as Chief of Police. Caruso was a registered Republican until 2012, when he switched to “decline to state.” Earlier this year, he registered as a Democrat.

 

In the most recent Berkeley-IGS poll, 61 percent of Angelenos named homelessness as one of their top two issues, and 38 percent named crime.

 

Caruso is a scathing critic of the Garcetti administration on street homelessness, and points to massive amounts of public spending that yielded only a few new housing options for those who are homeless. He calls for canceling “all contracts for housing projects that have not been built and begin the process to limit per unit costs to under $350,000 by ensuring we utilize modular housing, shipping containers, and other innovative and cost-effective methods that can reduce timelines and provide dignified housing.” Caruso says he will also request the state controller to immediately conduct a full investigation of all city construction contracts related to homeless housing to root out waste and fraud. He pledges to create an additional 30,000 shelter beds in his first 300 days as mayor.

 

But it is on crime where Caruso sounds, if not outright conservative, then vehemently opposed to the shibboleths of the woke Left:

 

Rhetoric about ‘defunding the police’ makes no sense when you consider that murders are skyrocketing and L.A. is the most under-policed big city in America. Yes, we need to invest in more training, both to reduce unnecessary use of force incidents and to eliminate any elements of unconscious bias. But when an emergency strikes, we all want our first responders to arrive quickly and to save lives, and we need to show our support for them with respect and gratitude, along with a constant and firm demand for excellence, fair treatment, and world class professionalism. . . .

 

The endless headlines around ‘smash and grab’ robberies around the holidays only highlighted the lack of any real consequences for those who deliberately flout our laws. We all see, feel, and know firsthand that property crime is not being adequately enforced. We’ve all seen our neighbors’ homes burglarized or have had our cars broken into, or worse yet, stolen. We need to make sure there are consequences and fair repercussions for those who break the law.

 

Bass getting 23 percent in the most recent Berkeley-IGS poll is also intriguing because she was at 32 percent in February — meaning, if the poll is accurate, that she’s losing support as the election approaches. Not too long ago, Bass looked like the heavy favorite. Ironically once described as “the anti-Kamala Harris,” Bass ended up on President Biden’s short list for vice president along with Harris; from 2019 to 2021, she chaired the Congressional Black Caucus. Interestingly, she also has a few conservative admirers. George Will has praised her “even-keeled disposition,” and Minority Leader McCarthy called Bass his favorite Democrat. “She’s not one that you have to agree with 100 percent of the time or she’s not going to work with you,” McCarthy told the Wall Street Journal.

 

When asked about homelessness by Vanity Fair, Bass responded: “Absolutely, elected officials could have done more. I think a local billionaire could have done more too. Rick does give a lot of charitable money—but he builds luxury housing!” Bass also told the magazine that she was torn about leaving Congress to run for mayor. “This was not an easy choice,” Bass said. “It wasn’t because I’m sick of D.C. at all, but because I’m concerned L.A. could go in a very negative direction, because people are very frustrated. We absolutely have an increase in crime, okay? But I don’t believe the city is going to hell in a handbasket. I don’t. And I believe very deeply that when you have campaigns that are based on fear, that’s when you get people to go along with very bad policy.”

 

The problem for Bass is that Angelenos are not in a particularly patient mood, having heard similar promises from a lot of city officials for decades, and Bass has been representing L.A. in Congress since 2011 and for six years in the California state assembly before that. This is a race worth watching, even if you live far away from the city of angels.

No comments: