Zen Studies

Or, why the Mayor is in trouble.

OK, nirvana-seeking dum-dums, you have likely already penciled out the fact that the Mayor's office spent about $100 per vote on another unvarnished, thirtysomething, one-photo-op school board candidate, Tamar Galatzan. And yet, after all that tooth and all that jack, $1.2 million in fact, Ms. Tamar still could not quite put away a man 31 years her senior and with a far smaller coffer, Jon Lauritzen.

The koan before you, Zen/Zan masters, is not who will win. It is not the hour to answer that. The koan is, "Why didn't the Mayor's mix of muscle and money already prevail?"

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The answer, dear beloved dum-dum disciple, is that we have this enormous voting block in Los Angeles, one that has controlled most Valley-situated elections since the late 1980s. It is known as "the baby boom."

But when it comes to education, this baby boom---mostly anglo, mostly homeowner, mostly putting their kids in private schools---makes all the noise of one hand clapping in the voting booth. And thus, the Mayor, though still popular with the baby boomers who elected him, fell flat on his face when it came to electing his most critical LAUSD candidate outright.

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If the modelo for electing Mayor-sanctioned school board candidates was the Monica Garcia campaign, it was a virtually untested model. Not even inserting a few extra accent marks into her name, nor placing her in in a crowd of Latino honchos for the one-stop foto-op, could do half as much as the UTLA did itself in electing her. After all, the UTLA ran a man with a lot of baggage: Chris Arellano---not as much as the mostly inattentive media thought, but enough to crush him nonetheless.

It turns out that the Mayor's handlers would have been smarter not to slime Arellano a week before that election---that skewed results, even made them unreadable. It would have been better at that time to see what the Mayor alone, without the backdoor slime, could do for a candidate. Last Tuesday was the more legit test: and we found out that maybe it's not so much, after all.

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Who will win this race between Lauritzen and Galatzan: it's not going to be who gets out their most predictable base best. It's going to be whoever makes the mostly bored-to-tears, mostly anglo, mostly homeowner, mostly private-school-parent baby boomers care more about the election. That's actually a pretty hard task for the Mayor at this point; the City keeps slamming forty-unit condos on their blocks; they don't blame the Teacher's Union for that.

Shanti, dum-dums.