Karen Bass is terrible at this

What is actually reprehensible, to borrow her word, is this cheap and clueless line of attack from a politician who presided over the devastation that motivated Pratt to try to unseat her. In a recent CNN interview, Bass was asked about the fires and how her challengers have accused her of “mismanaging that response on a number of levels.” After paying brief lip service to the notion that the “buck stops” with her as mayor, Bass promptly passed the buck to “climate change” and “climate events” beyond her control.

Let’s set aside the atrocious governmental response to the fires, the dry fire hydrants, the scandalously lethargic and snarled rebuilding efforts, and the fact that Bass was out of the country when the fires started raging, despite red flag warnings and in violation of a campaign pledge not to travel abroad while mayor. It is breathtaking to see the mayor retreat to the “climate change” talking point given the recent revelation that the fires were allegedly set as an act of intentional arson by a leftist who was obsessed with the accused assassin of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Angelenos must choose among a flailing and inept leftist incumbent, an even further-left Zohran Mamdani/Brandon Johnson/Katie Wilson-style socialist, and an outsider being branded as a “MAGA Republican” to scare a deep-blue, albeit very dissatisfied, electorate. The heavily Democratic composition of that electorate may well doom a candidacy like Pratt’s, but he hasn’t been gaining traction by some fluke or coincidence. He is speaking passionately and clearly about glaring problems plaguing the city, cranking out one viral video after another, and at least making his two leftist rivals, both professional politicians, sweat. So much so, it seems, that Bass doesn’t want to deal with the accountability and inconvenience of another candidate forum.

Organizers of an upcoming event posted online on May 9 that “the League of Women Voters and the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs regret to announce that Mayor Karen Bass has withdrawn from the televised Los Angeles mayoral forum scheduled for May 13 on FOX 11.” The mayor had committed to participating and confirmed her appearance in late April, only to pull out after the May 6 debate less than a week before the next scheduled forum. Her “commitments” appear to mean precious little, including her aforementioned vow not to travel internationally during her mayoral tenure. 

The event quickly collapsed and is now canceled altogether. The arrogance and entitlement are staggering. It seems clear as day that the citizens — and potential noncitizen voters, apparently — of Los Angeles deserve better than Karen Bass and the city’s existing leadership, but voters will have to make that determination for themselves.

One challenge is that among the many voters who crave change in their city, a substantial portion want to follow the lead of other hyperliberal cities by downgrading from a bad Democratic mayor to a worse socialist mayor. Nithya Raman, a limousine leftist, thinks the cure for LA’s myriad ills is a sharp leftward turn.  Like Mamdani, she is pretending to disavow her explicit and publicly stated “defund the police” radicalism, but that sort of COVID-era activism is a heuristic for the type of ideology she would seek to impose as mayor. As usual, people will get, and deserve, what they vote for. The city’s mayoral primary is June 2. If none of the candidates receives a bare majority of the vote, a two-person runoff will occur in November’s general election.