Beyond Cool: What Makes a Good Mayor

Re “We Don’t Need a Cool Mayor,” Commentary, May 19: Joel Kotkin urges Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa to address critical local issues with the heat of passion and commitment. What Kotkin avoids is the heart of the problem: a corporate-dominated public policy of perpetual military and class warfare. This has generated a gross and growing maldistribution of wealth and power, growing indebtedness at all levels of government, a regressive tax system, suffering caused by cuts in funding and denial of vital public services.

Add the deaths and wounding of thousands of our soldiers and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians. The tragic reality is a hell on Earth of suffering, hatred and violence even in history’s richest, most technologically advanced nation, leading to a weapons-of-mass-destruction suicide of humanity.

Unless we stop dodging the connection among local, domestic and global crises and our public policy of perpetual warfare treated as an unavoidable necessity, there is no hope.

Nicholas Seidita

Northridge

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Kotkin snidely suggests that Villaraigosa seems to be only a charming, handsome, articulate showboat, one of his mannequin mayors. Of course, he overlooks the mayor’s actual accomplishments: from an East L.A. single-parent family to union organizing and speaker of the state Assembly. How can he imagine Villaraigosa as Mr. Hollywood at odds with the blue-collar people of L.A? The article is, itself, a cute, shallow caricature.

David Eggenschwiler

Los Angeles

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Kotkin’s cautionary warning presents a false dichotomy between popular politicking and effective governing. After all, personality politics began not with the 2005 mayoral campaign but with the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon debates, where, as in 2005, the candidates represented old versus new, notwithstanding their closeness in ages.

The key for the mayor-elect will be to translate the infectious enthusiasm for his personal story into the governing power and authority to work with the City Council, school district, neighborhood advocates, business and labor leaders and others to refine and implement his municipal solutions.

Kotkin need not admonish Villaraigosa to govern based on L.A.’s economic and other needs. Campaigning and governing require different skills and strategies. Success in one area neither guarantees nor degrades success in the other.

By setting a new course for the nation’s second-largest city and media center, Villaraigosa’s local accomplishments will resonate nationally like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s and former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s. To these, it’s not a choice between addressing challenges and being cool. It’s doing both.

John Trasvina

Pasadena