Catching Up With Antonio Villaraigosa

It’s been eight months, almost a full human gestation period, since Antonio Villaraigosa lost his campaign to become mayor. It might be a good time, I thought, to see what the former speaker of the California Assembly made of the experience. By now, surely, his take on it must be fully formed. In some ways, the losers of high-stakes elections are more interesting to talk to than winners, who, subsumed into the business and pageantry of office, have little time for introspection, and nothing to gain from it.

Since the election, Villaraigosa has been rather interview-shy, an unaccustomed condition for a man who by instinct is candid and self-analytical. He agreed to meet for breakfast, and he showed up early one recent morning at the downtown Checkers Hotel as brisk-gaited and finely attired as ever, glad-handing waiters and busboys, making a point of chatting them up in their native Spanish. Villaraigosa’s loss apparently hasn’t dimmed his appeal to those who supported him and his message of change and ethnic inclusiveness. These days, however, the man Gov. Gray Davis, former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, the Los Angeles Times and 46.5% of voters wanted for mayor travels the city unchauffeured and unentouraged.

“Yeah, now I walk in by myself, but I’m comfortable with it,” he says. “I know the way it works. Two years from now I could be in an entirely different situation again.”

Since the election, Villaraigosa has landed a trio of paid consultancies involving the raising of private funds for investment in cities, the establishment of a biomedical research park at County-USC Hospital and the promotion of California agricultural products. Having turned down a fellowship at Harvard, he’s teaching and putting together forums on urban issues at UCLA and USC. “I want to profundicize, if that’s a word, my understanding of public policy, of how cities work,” he says. “I’m spending this time in deep introspection, and reflection, with an an eye to growing.”

That said, he clings to a desire to “turn this city around; to get it to understand and embrace its destiny as the preeminent city in the world, the Venice of the New Age.” (Memo to Villaraigosa supporters: The next mayoral election is 3 1/2 years away.)

What I was particularly curious about was how, after this interval of time, he looked upon now-Mayor James Hahn’s below-the-belt crack-pipe TV ad associating him with drug dealing. Villaraigosa’s response at the time was temperate. Had it not been, he probably would have lost the election by more than he did. All through the campaign he seemed wary of provoking white prejudice. When he responded to suggestive opposition ads, his poll numbers tended to fall. He had to restrain his Mexican American pride, keep the gloves on, appear as accommodating as a headwaiter, as humble as a supplicant. It’s a wonder he didn’t internally hemorrhage.

Yet the ad, which referred to Villaraigosa’s self-admittedly boneheaded letter in support of a presidential pardon for drug dealer Carlos Vignali, clearly remains stuck in him like an arrow. He has consistently expressed support for the new mayor, but within his magnanimous assertions, hurt and frustration seem to pace like caged animals. “As speaker, I passed the biggest parks initiative in the history of the state, the biggest schools initiative in the history of the state. And my whole life--reduced to crack cocaine.” He shakes his head. “My son on election night couldn’t stop crying. I told him, ‘In many ways we won tonight.’ He said, ‘I’m not crying because we lost. I’m crying because he cheated and you’re not supposed to win when you cheat.’ ”

For all this, Villaraigosa continues to maintain that “I did not lose because of my race.” He lost, he says, “because I was not markedly better.” He has “no regrets” about the campaign, feels “blessed by the experience.”

Sometime soon, Villaraigosa will undergo surgery on a noncancerous tumor embedded in his spine. The benign neoplasm was surgically reduced when he was a teenager. It has grown since, however, causing intolerable pain, and it must be whittled again. “They have to take the tumor off all the spinal spaghetti,” he explains. “You pull one of those strands and something’s out--your walking’s gone.”

The hurt and frustration that politicians experience must be handled with similar care, eliminated in a way that does not disable them politically. Had I been Villaraigosa, I’d have screamed bloody murder about Hahn’s ad and called it what it was, a cynical appeal to white prejudices about the presumed instinctive criminality of Latinos.

But that’s one of the more remarkable and underappreciated strengths of successful politicians. Not only can they subjugate their most compelling human urges to their ambitions, but they manage to function under the most ridiculous burden of all--our desire to know them genuinely and our tendency to reject them the moment they depart from the stagy nobility that makes us scorn them as phony.