<\/p>\n
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, left, and mayoral candidate and City\u00a0Council Member Nithya Raman debate at the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association on Wednesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
David Crane\/Los Angeles Daily News<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, the debate between Los Angeles\u2019 mayoral candidates got ugly.<\/p>\n
Incumbent Karen Bass, who amassed the most votes in the\u00a0June primary<\/a>, faced off against City Council Member Nithya Raman, whose campaign finished only a few percentage points behind. The event was their first match-up since June, and presented a perfect opportunity for each to make an affirmative pitch to voters.\u00a0<\/p>\n The event, however, proved to be anything but.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Instead, Bass and Raman embraced the slash-and-burn tactics that have typified the campaign so far: treating the election like a bitter personal feud rather than a conversation with voters.<\/p>\n Both candidates spent a substantial amount of time at Wednesday\u2019s debate<\/a> quarrelling over topics like homelessness, crime and whether the other has been responsive to their constituents.<\/p>\n At moments, it got uncomfortably intense.\u00a0<\/p>\n During one exchange, Raman accused Bass of worsening the city\u2019s financial woes by giving police officers raises while failing to prevent them from finding jobs in other cities. Bass countered that Raman opposed a proposal to hire 170 new officers in January.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cI think that she\u2019s irresponsible in what she talks about, because she talks out of both sides of her mouth,\u201d Bass added.\u00a0<\/p>\n When discussing unhoused people in Los Angeles, Raman again attacked Bass.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cRight now at City Hall, no one is in charge,\u201d she said. \u201cMayor Bass only looks at Inside Safe. That\u2019s the only program her office manages. We are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in 8,000 beds not being managed. You deserve accountability.\u201d<\/p>\n At one point, the candidates were so furiously disputing facts about the city that the debate moderator\u00a0intervened.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the issue: The audience doesn\u2019t know who to believe, and they don\u2019t have the confidence either of you have a definite plan,\u201d the moderator said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Lately, Bass and Raman have spent so much time trying to discredit one another that the people they hope to govern seem to have become secondary characters in their own election.<\/p>\n One of the most recent flash points was Raman losing her leadership role on the City Council\u2019s Housing and Homelessness Committee. In\u00a0a video<\/a> responding to the shakeup, Raman said, \u201cI might be getting punished for running against Mayor Bass, but Angelenos are the ones who are paying the price for these political games.\u201d<\/p>\n There has been no evidence that Bass\u2019 office was involved in the reshuffling. Still, the removal of a mayoral opponent from a position of institutional power in the middle of a campaign is bad optics. But Raman\u2019s response compounded the problem rather than solving it. Instead of using the attention to press her policy proposals on housing and homelessness at Wednesday\u2019s debate, she spent her airtime\u00a0relitigating the squabble. Both sides, in other words, ended up talking about each other rather than what they would do to improve life for voters.<\/p>\n \u201cIt does not speak to voters or their concerns,\u201d Mike Bonin, a former Los Angeles City Council member who now serves as executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University Los Angeles, told me.\u00a0<\/p>\n He added that it is fair to say a story about potential political payback is notable; these squabbles typically don\u2019t ultimately matter to voters: \u201cThere are very few of them \u2026 driving their kids to school or while sitting at the kitchen table with their spouse trying to figure out how to pay the bills \u2026 caring about committees in City Hall.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The question of who deserves credit for modest drops in homelessness in Los Angeles in recent years has been a recurring point of contention. Raman has been touting a decline in unhoused people<\/a> in her council district. But a spokesperson for Bass\u2019 campaign told\u00a0NBC Los Angeles<\/a> that the mayor\u2019s signature housing initiative, Inside Safe, was responsible for the reduction, arguing that \u201cNithya Raman is taking credit for the results of Inside Safe while campaigning against it.\u201d<\/p>\n Voters deserve to know whose policies work. But they probably care less about who deserves to take a victory lap than about whether the city can keep making progress.<\/p>\n Even if voters are following these disputes closely, the back-and-forth over committee assignments and program credit will likely fade from memory by the time ballots are cast. What tends to stick with voters isn\u2019t the blow-by-blow of a summer squabble. It\u2019s the broader sense of what a candidate stands for and whether they seem capable of leading.<\/p>\n Former Los Angeles City Council\u00a0Member Zev Yaroslavsky, who now directs the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, told me he doubts that recent controversies will move many votes, especially at such a politically fraught moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight<\/strong> are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect<\/strong> the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.<\/p>\n