You got to give credit where credit is due: Our beloved Antonio Villaraigosa has gone from being mocked as the 11 percent mayor, the freebie mayor and the FAILURE. mayor to become touted as the next President of the United States of America.
Yahoo! News promoted Antonio’s candidacy on its home page today linking to a story written by a staff writer named David Chalian under the headline “Is Antonio Villaraigosa poised to be America’s first Latino president?
Despite running the country’s second largest city and coming from the fastest growing voting demographic in America, the mayor himself is quick to wave off talk of a presidential run.
“The answer is no,” Villaraigosa replied when asked by Yahoo News if he wanted to be president one day. “I want to finish this job with a bang. I want to go out with my head up high. I want to say to this city, ‘I put everything into this job,’” he added.
“The job I’ve said to people I would like is I would like to be governor of the state of California,” he said. (Paging Jerry Brown.)
Modesty doesn’t really become Antonio or come across when he turns down the presidency to become governor of the nation’s largest state.
And there are some minor obstacles mentioned in the article like his “rocky (and public) personal life, lack of a developed national fundraising base and occasional conflicts with portions of his political base” – no mention of the mess the city has become under his leadership over the last seven years.
“Recall that Bill Clinton made it to the Oval Office with the personal baggage of infidelity and Barack Obama became the first nonwhite candidate to achieve the highest office in the land—you can begin to see how Villaraigosa’s interest in a 2016 run may yet develop . . . Charlotte provides an opportunity to start road testing his brand beyond Los Angeles’ city limits.”
Charlotte, of course, is where the mayor as chairman will gavel the Democratic National Convention to order and show of his beaming smile and seductive charm to a national audience.
It has been an incredible run, from the dog house to the White House, almost as if there is some kind of tweet going around from the political operations desk to the media: Boost Villaraigosa.
He’s become a regular on Sunday morning network news shows and the darling of idolatrous reports by the New York Times, all of which seems to have raised his self-esteem.
“I think I’m going to take a time out. I’ll probably associate with a think tank or a university. I want to write. I want to read. I’ll probably speak around the country. I certainly get enough invitations,” Antonio said.
“I want to be part of a discussion about what I call the radical middle that says the way for us to forge ahead is to move ahead, and you can only do that by taking the best of both views and forge a consensus based on results and putting the nation first.”
Think tank? Huge speaking fees? Governor? President? The ‘radical middle’? Antonio?
You got to love the guy, he really could have been a contender if he had stuck to his job and really ruled from the middle instead of pandering to the rich, patronizing the poor and squeezing the middle to support a political machine that has only made things worse for nearly everyone.
