The All-About-Me Mayor: Antonio Villaraigosa’s Frenetic Self-Promotion - Page 1 - News - Los Angeles
The All-About-Me Mayor: Antonio Villaraigosa’s Frenetic Self-Promotion
Hours of travel, fund-raising and PR leave little time for his job
) By Patrick Range McDonald Wednesday, Sep 10 2008
IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON of July 14, a week after quietly slipping home from a trip to Hawaii, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was halfway though a typical workday. He’d spent the morning doing interviews on two Latino radio stations, his picture was taken with an old friend, Juan Alvarez, he met with major labor union insider Sean Harrigan, he lunched with his staff, he was prepped by aides on what to say at an upcoming press conference urging Angelenos to vote for higher taxes, and he held a meeting to discuss one of his persisting embarrassments as mayor — his failure to plant a promised “one million trees,” or even a fraction of them, in Los Angeles.
Villaraigosa angled to sit behind Bill Clinton at the DNC, assuring that his face would be plastered on network news.
Villaraigosa angled to sit behind Bill Clinton at the DNC, assuring that his face would be plastered on network news.
As he began his closed-door meeting to review the million-trees fiasco, a loose coalition of angry community activists billing themselves as the Save L.A. Project stood on the steps of City Hall, venting frustration over the Los Angeles Unified School District, the mayor’s stiff new rate increases on Angelenos’ utility bills, and a controversy over alleged backroom talks by Villaraigosa’s Planning Department “density hawks” about building yet another big-box project, this time a Home Depot in the Valley.
Villaraigosa’s spokesman, Matt Szabo, had the job of watching the protest so he could report back to the mayor, who has made his frenetic hourly pace and constant busyness the hallmarks of his first three years in office. After getting briefed for a carefully staged press conference scheduled the following day, at which Villaraigosa would urge L.A. residents to back a big boost in the Los Angeles County sales tax, he prepared for a special meeting at the posh mayoral mansion, Getty House, that was of pressing importance: posing for a statue of himself for Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.
At the hourlong “sitting,” Villaraigosa offered the Tussaud’s creative team the quiet privacy of his official residence, on the leafy border of Hancock Park and Windsor Square on Irving Boulevard. Three artists had flown in from London, meeting him at Getty House with boxes of fake eyeballs, hair samples and tooth samples.