Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ political career is likely over after these fires in the county are contained and extinguished. She has zero chance of being re-elected if she’s not recalled first. Peter Hamby of Puck News, a Los Angeles resident, penned a damning story that took shots at everyone, from the social media folks who he claims are spreading misinformation to Elon Musk for trying to bait firefighters into saying there was no water available. Hamby contends there was enough water, though the blaze's size made combating it ineffective. We’ll leave you to debate that in the comments section below.
After saying that the Los Angeles area population would like the social media brigade to STFU, peppered with nice anecdotes about how Angelenos are coming together and helping one another through this disaster, he turned his fire toward Karen Bass, who everyone hates. It’s not as if the mayor’s office has a lot of executive authority. It’s mostly a ceremonial office, but even that, she’s failed to execute well, with some being quoted as Bass putting on a clinic on what not to do. Even those who supported her in the mayoral campaign can’t defend her trip to Ghana, which looks like a dereliction of duty. She boarded that plane knowing full well the fire conditions were perilous for the area (via Puck News):
The bigger issue—the main issue—is that Bass lost the public trust in spectacular fashion. The National Weather Service warned of dangerous fire conditions on Friday, January 3. Bass knew about it, because we all did. If you live in L.A., you got the weather alert, on the news or on your phone. The mayor’s office certainly did. Despite that, Bass boarded a plane the following day for Ghana as part of a delegation attending the inauguration of the country’s president. And as The New York Times reported over the weekend, Bass had promised during her mayoral campaign never to leave the country. It got worse on the return trip—a long way home—when a Sky News reporter happened upon Bass and an aide at the airport. The reporter asked Bass, repeatedly, to deliver a message to the city. Bass ignored him, on camera, for 90 painful seconds, in stone-faced silence. The clip is devastating, a campaign ad ready-made, the moment for which she will always be remembered. “If it is true that she left the country on a Saturday after the warning came out, that is a dereliction of duty,” Endeavor C.E.O. Ari Emanuel, who donated to Bass’s 2022 campaign, told me.
Backers of billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso—Bass’s once and possibly future rival for mayor—also smell blood in water ahead of next year’s election, if a recall doesn’t come first, which is a real possibility, even though it would require a mountain of verified signatures from Los Angeles voters. But as one Democratic strategist told me, “You never know. The anger is there.”
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The job of the Los Angeles mayor is, in many ways, ceremonial. You bring a political point of view to City Hall, and you show leadership when called upon. But it’s hard to find anyone in Los Angeles media or politics right now, including loyal Democrats, who thinks that Bass has done either of those things in the last week.
She came into office promising to be an in-the-weeds problem solver, especially on homelessness. But now, with Angelenos looking for guidance and solutions, they’re more likely to get it from the WatchDuty app or a local news anchor or one of the many city and county officials Bass keeps deferring to during the city’s emergency briefings, televised sessions that began only after the mayor returned from abroad and the fires had already chewed through thousands of acres and hundreds of homes. “It feels like she isn’t built for this,” said one Democratic consultant working in California, pointing out that Bass has spent her entire career in the State Assembly and in Congress. “This is wartime. This isn’t like voting no on some appropriations bill.”
I talked to another Democrat who has worked for mayors in other cities, who said that Bass “has put on a clinic on what not to do,” starting with her decision to leave the city while knowing Los Angeles was on the cusp of a tragedy. “All mayors are known for two things,” this Democrat told me. “One of them you get to choose. And one of them is going to choose you.” Rudy Giuliani, in New York, chose to enter office as a crime fighter. But the crisis of 9/11 chose him. For Bass, the crisis not of her choosing was the fires, and she lost her credibility immediately when she refused to say something, anything, at the airport on the way back from Ghana. “That is now how everybody sees her and will always see her,” the Democrat continued. “She obviously made the wrong choice of going in the first place, but she could have fixed all that by getting off the plane and at least saying she cared.”
No one is standing up for Bass these days. Kristin Crowley, her own fire chief, has thrown Bass under the bus in numerous media appearances, accusing her of underfunding the department. The city’s controller, a 34-year-old gadfly C.P.A. named Kenneth Mejia, sided with Crowley, posting a lengthy social media review of Bass’s budget cuts. Meanwhile, Newsom conspicuously copied Bass on a letter announcing an investigation into the city’s water resources and fire preparation.
And Newsom, a former mayor himself, expressed a flash of angry confusion during a CNN interview with Anderson Cooper in the burning Palisades last week, saying local officials needed to provide better answers about the response. These are all obvious signals that Bass has zero political capital left, much like Joe Biden after his disastrous debate last summer.
Bass has already announced for reelection next year, a race she will almost certainly lose, possibly to Caruso, who came close to beating her last time, despite being a former Republican in a deep blue city. At the time, Bass didn’t have much of a campaign message beyond being the next Democrat in line, but she won with the backing of an outside group organized by Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, which ran ads portraying Caruso as a mini-Trump. Barack Obama also gave Bass a final perfunctory lift, endorsing her late in the campaign when Bass was struggling to close the deal with L.A. voters.
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Cenk Uygur declares that Karen Bass has no chance of reelection, and that everyone in LA 'Hates Karen Bass': "Karen Bass is a Ghana-er. No chance of reelection. Everyone in LA hates Karen Bass now."
— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) January 14, 2025
The people who voted for someone without qualifications are shocked that the… pic.twitter.com/NGM9irEwps
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turk, a progressive commentator, quipped that Bass was a Ghana-er if she thought she could keep her job. Hamby is dead-set on selling the line and saying there was enough water despite the Santa Ynez Reservoir, which should’ve been full to fight the Palisades blaze, being empty for months. Also, is Rachel Darvish lying about there being no water?
“Why was there no water in the hydrants, Governor?!”
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 9, 2025
Desperate mother CONFRONTS Gavin Newsom to his FACE over his mismanagement of resources in California wildfire prevention. pic.twitter.com/qLEpxxrpBc
The article takes shots at everyone, but Bass gets riddled like Sonny Corleone here.
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