Mayor’s skin still thin -- 3 years in

I could be wrong, but I’m beginning to wonder if maybe I need my own TV show in order to get an interview with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

There he was on “The Charlie Rose Show” last week, talking about two subjects I had asked to speak to him about. I never got a callback from his press guy, but the mayor seemed quite happy to be there with Charlie. Or maybe I’ve got that wrong and he was just happy to be on national television, in which case I could be out of luck.

I’ve been asked by KTLA to do some TV work for them now and then, and I’m sure a muttering graybeard would push ratings up like a rocket. But nobody there has offered me my own show, and even if they did, a local broadcast might not be a big-enough forum for the national co-chairman of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brilliant campaign for president.

That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to the mayor about -- his role in Clinton’s huge primary win over Sen. Barack Obama in California. I wanted to hear the mayor’s insights on the overwhelming Latino support for Clinton, but he talked about that very thing with Charlie Rose instead.

I had also asked Villaraigosa’s press guy if I could speak to the mayor about the murder of LAPD SWAT Officer Randal Simmons and the impossible challenge of finding the right words to say to the officer’s loved ones.

I got the cold shoulder just as I did last August when I suggested to an aide, and then in a column, that the mayor and I should revisit skid row together and talk about what had been accomplished since his promise to transform the neighborhood.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not crying here. There’s plenty to write about without the mayor returning my calls. Nor am I surprised that he seems to be icing me.

I haven’t always blown air kisses the mayor’s way, particularly during last year’s Summer of Love at City Hall, and he has never been quite sure enough of himself to handle criticism well.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to his sycophantic staff to step in and advise him to embrace his enemies, suffer his defeats with class and disarm critics by showing them he’s grown a tough skin. It’s a common mistake among politicians, including Villaraigosa’s pal Clinton, to hide from the press and then wonder why the public finds them remote.

I’d still like to talk to the mayor. I’m worried about him. I’m worried that he might be slipping into a funk over his falling approval ratings, the difficulty of fulfilling campaign promises, a city analyst’s swift dismissal of his budget-balancing proposal, and Clinton’s spectacular cliff-diving candidacy. We may all pay a stiff price unless we pull together and begin telling the Mini Mayor he’s so good we can’t even remember Slim Jim’s last name.

“We’re really investing in public transit,” Villaraigosa told Rose.

OK, everybody join hands with me and shout:

“Way to go, Antonio!”

Don’t make the mistake, by the way, of asking what public transit the mayor is “really investing in,” or if he’s raised more than $8 and a bag of doughnuts to build his subway to the sea. Keep it positive, and we’ll all be better off. Maybe we could get the mayor’s transit advisor, Jaime de la Vega, to lead a victory parade in his Hummer.

I feared for Rose when he brought up the mayor’s dalliance last year with Telemundo anchor/reporter Mirthala Salinas.

“I had a tough summer,” Villaraigosa said. “I got divorced, and it wasn’t pretty.”

The worst thing you can do in a situation like that is lie, Rose said.

“Luckily I didn’t,” Villaraigosa said.

Actually, maybe he should have. Salinas might not have lost her job and ended up on talk radio, where last week she and her co-host were talking about how immigration raids are splitting up families. John Rabe, host of “Off-Ramp” on KPCC-FM (89.3), had assigned intern Grissel Espinoza to listen to the show, and Espinoza heard an angry caller ask on the air:

“What did Mirthala do with Villaraigosa? Isn’t that family disintegration?”

Ouch.

Shortly after Rose brought up the affair, Villaraigosa launched an attack on a Times columnist.

My colleague Tim Rutten had loaded the mayor onto his rotisserie last week for pandering to cops at Officer Simmons’ funeral and for generating “more unfinished initiatives than an ADD clinic.” The mayor called that “a cheap shot at people who have ADD” and added, “I think he knows my son has attention deficit disorder.”

I checked with Rutten, who said he “wouldn’t know the mayor’s son if I tripped over him.”

One more thing the mayor told Charlie Rose is that he intends to run for another term as mayor after this one. That means I could have more than five more years to land an interview. But I’m guessing today might not be the best day to ask again.

steve.lopez@latimes.com