Bass Misses the Pass
When Joe Biden was interviewing candidates for vice president, I crossed my fingers for Karen Bass. She was everything I wanted a vice president to be: sturdy, reliable, competent, and upright. I knew very little about her except for basic demographics and that she was a well-liked California politician. Biden didn’t need to appeal to Californians, but I thought that Bass would appeal to the rest of us, and take Black women office-holders to the next level in the hierarchy.
What I didn’t know is that quiet competence didn’t quite describe it; that in an episode that called for command and control, a reasonably loud voice, and an air of authority, Karen Bass might be missing in action. It happened catastrophically in the Los Angeles fires, where she hunkered down to the point of disappearance and had little to say about recovering from catastrophe. It was like her team had passed her the ball, but all she could do was drop it on the court.
Our family in Los Angeles, who experienced the fires first-hand, said that they did not feel Karen Bass’s presence. Meanwhile, Gavin Newsome grabbed for the microphone and used it to enact the theater of power. Whether or not that produced measurable results, it seemed to leave Bass without a political future.
It might be happening again as we speak. Donald Trump has just sent troops to Los Angeles to put down an “insurrection” against his authority. The episode is pure fake-o/dake-o politics. There is no insurrection in Los Angeles this week, but Sauron adores a show of force. It’s even better when the law is against him and the issue plays to his trump card of immigration. The practice of sending the troops in an emergency is bound by law and established norms. It requires that they be called in by a local authority and they should not be deployed in the absence of a summons. Nothing like this has happened in sixty years. Sauron is now signaling that Los Angeles is in chaos and there is no alternative to a political coup.
I know what I would want from my mayor, that she stop traffic immediately on the Golden State Freeway, burn a stack of tires a mile high, and demand that Trump remove his troops from Los Angeles. If that’s what it takes to block a take-over of the city, that’s what you do in the face of fascism. Local law enforcement is perfectly capable of controlling the “chaos.” Bass doesn’t need the feds to deal with activists, even if they show a propensity for car burning.
Instead Karen Bass can’t quite seem to decide. She’s making reasonable noises about a federal intrusion to “control” four hundred protesters with mixed agendas, without saying much about the tyrannical Donald Trump. She seems mostly worried about the prospect of disruption and promises that the city will “rise above it.” She hasn’t focused hard on the primary provocation, that the era of wholesale round-ups has begun. Status violations are not rape and murder.
This doesn’t bode well for the political health of Los Angeles. It certainly bodes poorly for Karen Bass. Five months after the ascension of Sauron, is there a Democratic pol who doesn’t understand that whispering gets you nothing except for nothing in return? That you need persuasive rhetoric, vivid images, and the concrete force of heart-piercing storytelling? Karen Bass needs a boatload of messaging specialists camping out at her kitchen table.