Opinion: In today’s pages: Bratton’s successor, Trutanich’s tactics and Obama’s Afghanistan
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The police commission picked three finalists in its search for Los Angeles’ new police chief, and the editorial board says each possesses many of the qualities needed to succeed atop the LAPD. Just so there won’t be any confusion on that point, the board also describes what those qualities might be. The board also notes that two proposed ballot measures are due to be submitted today to enable and call a state constitutional convention, and it all but endorses them in a near-desperate plea for functional governance in California.
On the Op-Ed page, Raphael J. Sonenshein, former executive director of the city’s charter reform commission, accuses rookie City Atty. Carmen Trutanich of not understanding what a city attorney is supposed to do in this town. Columnist Tim Rutten gives a highly nuanced defense of the push to reveal who is contributing to efforts in other states to put Prop. 8-style bans on gay marriage on the ballot. Musing about the Northwest Airlines flight that overshot its destination by 150 miles, Peter Garrison, a pilot and contributing editor to Flying magazine, reveals just how boring it is to fly a modern airline jet. And columnist Doyle McManus dissects the Obama administration’s decision-making process on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan:
[T]he number of troops, as both McChrystal and Obama have said, is not the most important thing. More important are the answers to three questions: Will U.S. goals be limited to make them more achievable? Will Obama make it clear that this troop increase is the last one the Pentagon will get? And can the U.S. succeed in nudging Afghanistan toward a more functional, less corrupt government, without which the whole enterprise will fail?
-- Jon Healey
