Few in LA thought Becerra could outshine Villaraigosa

from Robert GreeneCalMatters

This comment was originally posted by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

For Southern California voters of a certain age, there is something disorienting about the current race for governor.

Not two Republican candidates could shut out the entire Democratic field in this overwhelmingly Democratic state. Democrats are always inventing new ways to wrest defeat from the jaws of victory, so none of this is particularly new or surprising.

No, the cognitive dissonance for Los Angeles voters who remember a historic mayoral race a quarter-century ago is this: Xavier Becerra leads the group. Antonio Villaraigosa struggles with a single digit number.

seriously? How can that did it happen What cataclysm occurred to bring about this twist of fate?

Villaraigosa has always been the electric one, the story maker, the man of destiny. After completing his term as speaker of the state assembly, he came home to Los Angeles to run for mayor in 2001. The broadcasters, after months of butchering his name, finally got around to pronouncing it correctly, then quickly learned how to pronounce Cristobal Aguilar, as in Villaraigosa could be Los Angeles’ first Latino mayor since Cristobal Aguilar in 1872.”

But it wasn’t just Latino. He loved work. Progressives loved him. The cameras loved him. His brilliant smile was like lighthouse on top of the town hall which once directed planes to the airport but has been closed for decades. Maybe it was time to turn it back on.

Who could stop the Villaraigosa phenomenon? His biggest obstacle was City Attorney James K. Hahn, scion of Los Angeles political royalty. Other candidates also made a play.

Then Becerra entered the raceand much of Los Angeles let out a collective “Who?”

Becerra was a lawyer, Stanford graduate, and born priest who served one term in the state assembly before succeeding the legendary Edward Roybal in Congress. He was one of the so-called Boy Scouts, earnest, clean-cut young Latino men who attended law school, focused on politics and (figuratively) stayed out of trouble (which, however, always seemed only an arm’s length away from some pre-election trick worthy of Richard Nixon).

Villaraigosa was only a few years older, but those were some important years. He was already a teenager during the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, a member of the MEChA while at UCLA, and a labor organizer early in his career. Like Becerra, he went to law school, but instead of Stanford it was the People’s College of Law, an unaccredited school dedicated to “progressive social change.”

Becerra had his nose buried in books. Villaraigosa focused on activism.

They ostensibly belonged to two rival Latin American political factions, divided by loyalties to different mentors and defined by different places on the political spectrum, different attitudes to coalition building, different elder brother figures on whose couches they slept while establishing residency to qualify for office.

But both men were actually working with many of the same leaders and on many of the same causes. When Becerra was preparing his run for Congress, his home was briefly Villaraigosa’s couch.

In the mayoral race, however, Becerra looked like Villaraigosa’s spoiler. Yet why should one Latino candidate feel obligated to stay out of another’s way when no one expected state comptroller and mayoral candidate Kathleen Connell, for example, to defer to Hahn?

What actually seemed to separate Villaraigosa and Becerra in the minds of most voters during the first round of the 2001 Los Angeles mayoral race was the difference in electricity. To put it mildly, Becerra has never been a particularly exciting guy.

This is evident in the counting of votes. It won less than 6%, too little to even make it a spoiler.

In those days, city elections and congressional elections were held in different years, so Becerra could lose by a lot for mayor and still return to his safe seat in Congress. Villaraigosa finished first, then Hahn beat him in a runoff, and then Villaraigosa defeated Hahn in a rematch in 2005. Villaraigosa was featured on national magazine covers and talk shows. He was a regular visitor to Washington DCUS Senator Dianne Feinstein said he had “special shine.”

Meanwhile, Becerra joined the Congress. No one ever accused him of shining.

But unlike Villaraigosa, whose activist legal education did not prepare him for the bar exam, Becerra’s membership in the state bar makes him eligible for political elevation unavailable to non-lawyers. Gov. Jerry Brown appointed Becerra as the state’s attorney general when Kamala Harris left the office to take her seat in the U.S. Senate.

As AG (which, as political pundits like to say, means “almost governor”), Becerra became known for his lawsuits against the first Trump administration.

Villaraigosa continued to call himself a “proud progressive” as he moved toward the political center (to Becerra) and prepared his bid to succeed Brown as governor in 2018. He got hit — maybe even faded — by Gavin Newsom. He wandered the political wasteland until Becerra became President Biden’s secretary of health and human services during the COVID pandemic.

And here we are. Neither Becerra nor Villaraigosa made any headway in the incumbent governor’s race until the moderately brilliant Eric Swalwell accused of rape and other sexual offenses and quickly dropped out of the race and then out of Congress.

Nothing seems obvious or natural about Becerra suddenly inheriting Swalwell’s support. But someone had to. After the revulsion against Swawell and after years of big-name power — Newsom as governor, Donald Trump as president once, and now again as president — Democrats may be hungry for someone steady, quiet and, let’s face it, a little boring. Villaraigosa scraping the lower regions of the polls is not boring. Becerra might just fit the bill.

A recent poll put him in charge along with the Republicans Steve Hilton. Speakers practice the name Romualdo Pacheco, the last Latin American governor of California in 1875. The reversal of fortune is complete.

Becerra’s unofficial campaign slogan may now be “calm down“, a word he cheerfully directed at Villaraigosa in a recent debate. Calm down, my excitable friend. Maybe that’s what California Democrats want right now. A little peace of mind.

This is what they wanted in the presidential race in 2020. And they got it.

For a little while.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.