With three weeks until Election Day and polls showing her on the verge of losing, Mayor Karen Bass began channeling the Sun King himself, Louis XIV:
The State is me.
Her only hope of victory is to enlighten voters by insisting that the political establishment that left Los Angeles in a mess and that she embodies is worth staying in power for four more years. It’s a harebrained strategy that came to a head during last night’s debate, as Bass kept pointing out that the old regime in Los Angeles simply doesn’t like his democratic socialist opponent, Nithya Raman.
“Your colleagues have a hard time working with you,” Bass said at one point, later saying that Raman’s voters don’t care about her, even though the council member was re-elected two years ago. The mayor twice boasted that immigrant rights groups supported her, twice referenced Imelda Padilla, a moderate San Fernando Valley city council member whose Internet broadcast of Raman was removed from the “Mean Girls” Burn Book, and also described his opponent as “not ready for prime time.”
Well, the way the mayor’s term has gone over the past two years, if this were a prime-time TV show, it might be called “Breaking Bad 2.” And it wouldn’t really be a success.
If that were the case, two-thirds of Angelenos wouldn’t have decided to vote for anyone other than Bass in the primary.
Bass arguably won the debate Tuesday night, but it felt like the technical “victory” — and that’s probably the wrong word — of a politician who was simply more polite. The mayor really needed a final blow, and she didn’t get it.
Instead, she effectively told voters that the last four years of disasters, inefficiencies, and ineptitude were still a better option than taking a chance on City Hall’s equivalent of the classroom jerk.
Yet people are so angry at Bass and what she represents that a democratic socialist has a good chance of becoming the next mayor of Los Angeles — an unthinkable prospect even last year, with no one to blame but the ruling class for leaving this great city hobbled, cynical and on the verge of giving up.
So the establishment doesn’t like Raman: so what? And: Boo hoo.
Portraying Raman as a political leper while claiming that Bass represents stability and good times ahead is not the winning strategy that Bass and Raman’s critics believe. It’s really just a sad coda for Bass.
She has been a good soldier for Los Angeles, someone who has participated in nearly every progressive movement in Southern California since she volunteered for Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign as a teenager nearly 60 years ago. Although Bass embarked on a 22-year political career that stopped in Sacramento, Washington and City Hall, the native Angeleno still successfully presented herself as a political outsider.
Because she was: a black woman in a kingdom not meant for people like her. She co-founded a pioneering nonprofit in the crucible of a changing South Los Angeles in the 1990s and always seemed to land on the right side of history until becoming mayor in 2022.
Unfortunately, Bass didn’t prove to be the visionary that Los Angeles desperately needed.
Outgoing Mayor Karen Bass (left) sits for a debate with City Councilor Nithya Raman (right) along with NBC4 Chief Political Reporter Conan Nolan, NBC4 News Anchor Colleen Williams and Telemundo 52 Anchor Alejandra Ortiz during the Los Angeles Mayor’s Debate on Tuesday, October 13, 2026.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
Like so many baby boomers, Bass eventually became The Man without realizing it. Today, she’s not only the figurehead of the city’s liberal potentates, she’s calling on them to rally around one of their own — and they’ve responded in kind. Democratic politicians, bureaucrats and union leaders, once agitators like Bass who now seem to exist primarily to maintain their sinecure, have worked mightily to convince disbelieving voters that Bass deserves another chance.
This has always been the marvel of the Los Angeles political establishment. It can take someone like Bass, once considered so radical that her days visiting communist Cuba in the 1970s torpedoed her chances of becoming Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020, and turn her into an innocuous incumbent president. That may turn democratic socialists like councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado, and Hugo Soto-Martínez — people who explicitly showed up to take on a sclerotic City Hall — into die-hard Bass supporters who refused to support any of their own in Raman.
Raman was also a prominent Los Angeles politician, so much so that she initially supported Bass. But she now sees her ride as the machine’s biggest seller – it remains to be seen whether this is a genuine change of heart or a self-serving chameleonic move, as critics claim. It was Raman who said at the end of the debate, “When the mayor faces problems, she blames the system. With your support, we can actually change the system” — catnip to enough Angelenos that Raman seemed to be on the brink of victory and a monumental upset.
After the debate, NBC journalist Robert Kovacic interviewed elected officials to let them praise Bass or Raman. The latter’s proxy was City Comptroller Kenneth Mejia, another person loathed by Los Angeles political cognoscenti because he continues to oppose them. Mejia gushed about how Raman “destroyed” Bass with the enthusiasm of a Swiftie.
Bass’ supporters included Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez and Assemblyman Rick Chavez Zbur, both of whom gravely echoed their candidate’s warnings about the danger of a Raman town hall. Chavez Zbur reduced Raman’s not-bad performance to a “load of complaints” – ironic, since most of Bass’s evening was spent bashing Raman instead of offering him much positive.
Rodriguez, meanwhile, told Kovacic that voters should not choose Raman because “we cannot afford this level of indecisive leadership.”
I rolled my eyes when Rodriguez — whose office declined the opportunity to sit down with me to explain why Latinos should support Bass — said that.
She’s part of the eastern San Fernando Valley’s legendary Latino political machine, another group of former gatecrashers who assumed the trappings and style of the old guard once they took power. Rodriguez has long blasted Bass with the same venom she reserved for Raman until the latter rose to her challenge – but now that Rodriguez’s power is threatened, she’s suddenly decided to become Bass’s rider or murderer?
Moves like this remind me of another French monarch, Louis XV. “After me, the flood,” he is said to have said, warning of what would happen once his reign ended.
If Bass’s vow to govern as before represents decisive leadership, more and more Angelenos seem to be saying: give us the Raman flood.
Besides, no one has ever said, nor ever put up a campaign sticker: “The establishment? It’s cool!”
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