You may have noticed that LA Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom have been getting more and more defensive. The more evidence that shows their incompetence and failure to mitigate the wildfire disaster, the more they try to convince us they did nothing wrong.
Their defensiveness won’t work. The devastation is too overwhelming. When so many neighborhoods have gone up in flames, when so many people have lost their homes, when one of the world’s great cities has turned into an inferno, you know you’ve bought yourself a political nightmare.
My advice to Bass and Newsom: own up to your failures. Your voters are not stupid. They’re reading all the reports. Stop parsing words and playing games to deflect blame. You may not be responsible for everything, but you’re responsible enough that continuing your blame deflection is shredding any remnant of your credibility.
You can’t expect your Democratic constituents to come to your rescue just because they hate the other team. Many of your loyal voters are angry. They feel betrayed. They’ve been mugged by the reality that your policies and your priorities have failed royally. They’ve seen their neighborhoods burn, and they want to know what went wrong, even if it means that their own team screwed up.
And yes, you screwed up. It’s not even a question. Water management, forest management, evacuation preparations, budget priorities, you name it. On every level of preventing and mitigating the wildfire disasters that have so shaken our city, there are failures on your end.
Politically, I would say you’ve hit rock bottom. At this subterranean level of performance, no one cares anymore about left or right, about Democrat or Republican. We care only about results.
The results are the worst calamity our city has faced, and none of your verbal evasions can change that.
You may want to change your body language from defensive to humble. Get on our wavelength. We’re humbled. We’re devastated. And we’re in no mood for blame games.
Fight the fires, yes. Focus on the emergencies, yes. But don’t forget the reckoning, because we won’t.
