Steve Lopez: Villaraigosa to manage Dodgers, advise Cheetos

This just in:

Former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been hired to replace Dodger manager Don Mattingly and will also take over as West Coast adviser for Cheetos.

In other new jobs Villaraigosa has lined up on his recent cash acquisition sprint, he will become weekend weather anchor on KCAL-9 beginning Saturday, and also help manage the fallout from the Bank of America mortgage fraud judgment.

OK, I made it all up. But I almost didn’t have to.

USC announced Friday that Villaraigosa will be a part-time professor, the news coming the same week as the announcement that Villaraigosa will be an advisor to the global PR firm Edelman. He’ll be adding the new gigs to two other new gigs, one with Herbalife Ltd., and another with Banc of California.

And it didn’t seem to matter to him that his new bosses at Edelman have been hired by someone who is accusing Herbalife of operating an illegal pyramid scheme.

So is the job acquisition frenzy anything other than a blatant cash grab while Villaraigosa waits to figure what to run for next, with the possibilities including governor or national office?

No, not really. The USC job includes something fatuously called “the USC Villaraigosa Initiative for Restoring the California Dream,” which is going to be difficult to print on one of the ex-mayor’s umpteen new business cards.

And good luck to him on restoring the dream, by the way, something he hasn’t been able to pull off during 20 years in public office.

I’m wondering if any of Villaraigosa’s cheerleading new employers considered the fact that his record as mayor was not exactly Olympian. He had a few solid achievements but was a disappointment in many ways and overall, pretty average, especially when you consider the approval of overly generous employee contracts that led to the dramatic cutback in city services during his reign.

A magnanimous ex-mayor might have been more inclined to do public good for the sake of doing public good and helping restore his standing in the public eye. He could have gone to work for nonprofit charities focused on healthcare, education and enrichment of the hundreds of thousands of people living in disadvantaged communities here in the city where he was mayor.

Not much money in that, though, and the man’s priorities are clear.

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@LATstevelopez

steve.lopez@latimes.com