Tony Castro's America

Report Card: Round 1 to Hillary

Democratic Presidential Debate
Candidate Report Cards

Hillary Clinton  A
     No surprise. Nothing like tutorials from Bill.

Barack Obama  B-
    Sound bites, more style than substance and little else.

John Edwards  B-
    Could use another medical update.

Bill Richardson  C
    Should know that when Castro dies, Cuba will not be in a "post-Democratic" era.

Joe Biden  C-
     Leading contender... for The Comedy Store.

Chris Dodd  C
    Where's Bianca Jagger when you need her?

Dennis J. Kucinich  C-
    Who did this guy's hair dye job?

MIke Gravel   D
    I thought this guy was dead.

Moderator

Brian Williams  D
      Hardly Tom Brokaw. Nor Jim Lehrer, for that matter.

Broad to Antonio: 'Hasta la vista, baby'?

Eli Broad apparently isn't waiting on Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to come up with an alternative to his seemingly defunct attempt to take over the LAUSD -- and he's found more upscale company with which to partner.

On the eve of the first presidential debate, Broad and the foundation he heads with wife Edythe Wednesday joined up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for what they call "the Strong American Schools campaign" aimed at elevating American education to the top of the upcoming presidential campaign agenda.

Strong American Schools is a nonpartisan public awareness and action campaign designed to give a voice to every American who demands strong leadership to improve our schools.

"The American dream is slipping away, and unless our leaders dramatically improve our public schools, our standard of living, our economy and our very democracy will be threatened,”" Broad said in a statement  touting the announcement in Columbia, S.C., where Democratic presidential nominees will square off in a debate Thursday night.

"Our country’'s education system is no longer the best in the world.  We need every American to demand better schools and specific policy solutions from presidential candidates.  Our future depends on it.”"

“Broad and Villaraigosa parted ways on the education front last year when the Los Angeles philanthropist and billionaire grew disenchanted with the mayor's backroom political compromises to get AB 1381 -- the measure to give the mayor control of the LAUSD -- through the legislature.

A Presidential Candidate and His Roots

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson may not have the money to compete with the "rock stars" of the presidential campaign, but he showed he has the sense of humor Monday night at a Hollywood fundraiser.

Richardson entertained supporters -- among them City Councilman Tom LaBonge -- at Lucy's El Adobe Cafe with an anecdote about his 93-year-old mother -- who is Mexican and still lives in Mexico.

"My mom, God bless her, is getting along in years, and sometimes she has difficulty remembering. Well, when I called other day, she asked me, 'Are you still governor?" Richardson recounted. "'Yes, mother, I'm still governor. They didn't impeach me yet.' And then she says, how's your sister? And I said, 'Fine.' And then she asked, 'Are you still governor?' And I said, 'Yes, mother.' And I said, 'Mother, in fact, I've told you this, but I'm going to tell you again. Two months ago, I announced for president.' And she said, 'El presidente de que, hombre!'"

Richardson also cleared up his California roots. He was born in Pasadena, but it turns out his California residency was brief.

"Most of California doesn't know that I'm Hispanic, but I'm working on it," he said, explaining that he had appeared on several Spanish radio shows, "and I'm going to be with George Lopez Saturday."

"My father was an American, and he had this complex -- that he wasn't born in the United States. He was born in Nicaragua... So he said, I am not going to permit my son not to be born in America. We lived in Mexico. He was working there. So what they did (when my mother was due) was to get in the car and drive up here. So I was born where (my father) had a sister -- at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena.

"So I was born there and we went right back. Right after I was born, we stayed a day and we went back. And last night, there was a fundraiser for me at (filmmaker) Moctezuma Esparza's. He's in Pasadena. He has a house there. And this woman from Huntington Hospital says, 'Well, governor, we'd like to do a fundraiser here at Huntington Hospital, and you can talk about your roots in Pasadena.' My roots were about four hours!

"But now that California is one of the first primaries, my roots are going to increase. I'm a native son!"

(Photo: Lucy's El Adobe owner Lucy Casado with presidential candidate Bill Richardson.)

David Halberstam: The Best and The Brightest

The two reporters I admired most and who shaped the early part of my career are now gone. Roy Aarons, who reported from the West Coast for The Washington Post for many years died in 2004. David Halberstam was killed in a car crash today. He was 73.

Their careers and their friendship were intertwined through me. In 1971, as a young reporter covering politics and civil rights in Dallas, I was also The Post's stringer in Texas -- and involved with their national staff reporters whenever they journeyed into that state, as Aarons did that summer. I began our friendship as Roy's lackey and wound up doing some of his legwork when he came down with the flu.

Somewhere along the way, and from long distance calls I would get from him, I must have impressed him. Late that year, I got a call from Halberstam telling me that Roy had given him my name as someone who could help him with some last-minute, fact-checking and reporting in Texas. He had some old Lyndon Johnson and South Texas stories he wanted verified, and I spent a week getting him whatever corroboration I could. He said it was for a book that was at the press but over which editors were queazy.

The book would be The Best and The Brightest.

Years later, both of them would be instrumental in helping me get a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, where Halberstam visited me -- closing down the Faculty Club on a snowy evening with me and the poet Robert Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had been a roommate at Harvard and lifelong friend of James Agee, and, like most writers, Halberstam also had a fascination with a fellow Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

'I'm Not a Lawyer Here...'

No joke. Antonio went to law school at something called Peoples College of Law and then failed the bar exam several times. But he still disingenuously insists that both the Superior Court judge and the state appeals court justices didn't know their law in striking down his LAUSD takeover bill.

This comes from the Los Angeles Times' op-ed blog based on the interview from the mayor's visit to the Times Thursday morning -- ahead of his visit to the Daily News.

If the common complaint about Antonio's American Idol alter ego, Sanjaya, was that he couldn't sing, can't we say about Antonio that he'd make a terrible lawyer?

Antonio: The Sanjaya of L.A.

At 2:44 p.m. Thursday, Antonio Villaraigosa walked into the newsroom of the Los Angeles Daily News, enroute to a meeting with editors and reporters, trailed by a posse that outnumbers that of Vinny Chase, the mythical rising star on the HBO series Entourage.

The mayor would love that. In his own mind, after all, he is the biggest star in Los Angeles.

Antonio had not been at the Daily News offices since Oct. 2. I know because it was my first day at the Daily News, and I was asked to sit in on that meeting. I was not asked to sit in on today's meeting. No one at the newspaper is surprised.

Today I understand Antonio refers to me as "that Castro guy." My how I have fallen. As recently as 2005, Antonio used to go to great lengths to boast to other reporters that I was the first reporter to have written about him -- in his 1994 Assembly campaign -- and that "Tony, here, has covered me the longest and written the best stories about me."

What changed our relationship was one story he didn't like: 'The Man/The Myth: The Untold Story of The Mayor's Rise from Poverty to Power,' published Nov. 19, which Daniel Hernandez in The Weekly last week called "an exhaustive takedown last year of the mayor’s self-made image"  reporting how "along the way the Mexican American Prince story crossed from reality into myth." 

Antonio and his entourage went ballistic. Vinny Chase and his boys could learn a thing or two. But the mayoral hatchet men's attempts at character assassination were like bad attempts from the gang that couldn't shoot straight. All they succeeded in doing was getting me calls from book publishers to an offer from one night club owner to reprise my onetime gig as a female impersonator. I just may -- at the next roast of Antonio.

For the mayor, though, it tore back the curtain. The political wizard of L.A. was exposed for who he is. After an extended honeymoon with the news media, he suddenly found himself fair game. The Washington Post published an embarrassing photo of him snoozing in the House of Representatives gallery during the president's State of the Union. A Superior Court judge then laughed the mayor's LAUSD plan out of court -- and an appeals court this week agreed. In South L.A., voters rejected his candidate to unseat an African-American school board incumbent. And last week the mayor lost the city the 2016 Olympics bid.

Finally, in the wake of his State of the City address Wednesday, the mayor finds himself contradicted by East Valley High School officials, police and students over his claim that the school is the source of a turf war among four gangs -- a claim that apparently is, if not just overstated, flat out wrong.

So the mayor is out campaigning again, supplied with breath strips, green tea, room temperature water, a sad-eyed flack who looks like Manolete come back from the dead  and maybe even a hair stylist. He also needed a tour guide. On the way out, he got lost in the newsroom and wound up at a desk he didn't want to be at, ready to shake the hand of its occupant.

I turned around to a stunned look on the mayor's face and an outstretched hand.

"Hey," I said as we shook hands. "Didn't I see you on American Idol?"

In L.A., after all, even Sanjaya had his day.

A Tale of Two Latinos

What do Alberto Gonzales and Antonio Villaraigosa have in common, besides being Latinos?

They're both on the hot seat.

For the attorney general, it's obvious. In his first day of hearings Thursday, he was grilled mercilessly -- and that was by the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee -- for his role and early attempt to diminish it in the debacle over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

For the mayor, the hot seat is a little more subtle but just as brutal. He's taking a beating. On his failure to land the Olympics. On his costly and poorly conceived plan to take over the city's public schools. Zev Yaroslavky has stolen the mayor's thunder on coming up with a possible solution to the Westside traffic nightmare. And all that is with a friendly news media that hasn't yet started all the doubting and Monday Morning quarterbacking, as it ultimately will, and as it ultimately will have to ask what Jimmy Hahn was saying in 2005 -- that Los Angeles was getting style but no substance, a smile, a wink, charisma and celebrity but little more than a Jell-O Mayor.

Interestingly, it's been about 10 months since Daniel Hernandez's op-ed in the Times took the paper to task on its adoring coverage of Antonio:

"We want him to succeed. We want him to keep us safe, keep us excited about living in L.A. We want him to snag the Olympics, an NFL team and a bigger subway system. We want synchronized stoplights and racial harmony. We want him to make it to the governor's mansion in one squeaky-clean piece. We believe in the man. I mean, he's from East L.A.! How cool is that?

"The reality is that Villaraigosa is a politician, and politicians are, first and foremost, concerned about getting, holding and expanding power."

But then hasn't this been the tale of Latinos in power -- Latinos who raise expectations with their own heightened ambitions. Henry Cisneros, Art Torres and Richard Alatorre come to mind as recent examples. Going back to the height of the Chicano movement, there were Reies Lopez Tijerina, Ramsey Muniz, Corky Gonzales and Jose Angel Gutierrez.

The American news media and the non-Latino Establishment are forever romanticizing the fresh young Latino leader, helping create these legends in their own minds, and all we ever really get is political sopapillas: Rising Latino political stars that look good and say all the right things, but ultimately nothing more than a lot of empty political calories.

Antonio Finds April Is the Cruellest Month

The last four days have not been kind to Antonio.

On Saturday it was the U.S. Olympics Committee telling him "hasta la vista, baby" on Los Angeles' bid to host the 2016 Olympics. Tuesday it was the state appeals court telling him to go back to law school -- that his LAUSD bid won't fly constitutionally.

I was in the middle of an interview with Danny Bakewell, the Godfather of South Los Angeles and publisher of The Sentinel, when his assistant informed us of the appeals court decision. Bakewell was ecstatic.

Earlier in the interview, Bakewell said that when it had to, the African American community would tell Antonio where to go -- as in the school board race in which the mayor tried to unseat Marguerite Lamotte by his thinly-disguised championing of Johnathan Williams, the black charter school proprietor who was stiffing the LAUSD on a nearly $10 million loan until election time rolled around.

Unless Villaraigosa stupidly chooses to appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court -- which insiders don't think he'll risk after already exhausting so much political capital -- his hopes of having any control over the schools will be the school board runoffs.

The Real Loser: Antonio

So much for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's charisma and political clout and influence built up from all those out-of-town jaunts in his less than two-year term. And so much for being the "Latino Tony Blair."

The U.S. Olympic Committee sent an humbled Antonio home with sombrero in hand today when Los Angeles lost the right to be the American city bidding on the 2016 Olympics.

The mayor was philosophical, saying: "I've often said Chicago is the best-managed big city in the U.S. It's led by a great mayor and great American. This is not about Chicago vs. L.A. It's about putting together the most spectacular Games in the history of the Games."

Yeah, just not in L.A.

Count Antonio the big loser and add the Olympics bid defeat to a growing list. The mayor has failed to win over the NFL for an expansion team to Los Angeles. His LAUSD takeover bill was laughed out of the courts. Now this.

Now Pinch-Hitting for Andres Martinez...

Just moments before delivering my talk at the Tomas Rivera Institute's seminar on increasing Latino wealth, I learned I was a sub for Andres Martinez, the recently departed Los Angeles Times editorial page editor who stepped down with a cloud over his head. How absolutely fitting.

I don't know if it was that news or the fact that I was still red-eyed, headachy and coughing from the fire and winds the night before in Beverly Hills, but once at the podium, I couldn't read the prepared notes. So I winged it -- and not altogether with what I planned to say.

Instead, I wondered out loud whether readers -- especially Latinos and other minorities -- hadn't come to expect from the news media what it was never meant to do. In the passion for equality and democracy of the past half century, hadn't minorities come to expect of the news media some kind of "representative coverage" -- not unlike the demands of one-man, one vote and other notions of democracy -- when the news media has never been about that. The news media historically has been a reactive institution. If something is happening of some importance, the news media reacts. Even then, the news media has never been very good about doling out its coverage in quotas. I recall an old editor telling me that "newspapers are not democracies." And I think he was right.

I also made the point -- not very popular among many of the Latinos in attendance -- that an even greater ill-conceived expectation among Latinos outside the news media had been to place on Latinos in the news media the responsibility of advocating for increased and improved Latino coverage as well as increased representation in the newsrooms. Once a reporter becomes an advocate, I think I said through reddened eyes and the help of throat lozenges, he loses his effectiveness as a reporter. Being the baseball fan that I am, I equated it to expecting of Derek Jeter off-the-field behavior of a manager or a personnel director. The moment Derek Jeter begins making out the team roster and the batting lineup is the moment he ceases being a teammate and becomes something else.

It all went down like you would expect.

What can I say. You could have had Andres Martinez throwing a pissy fit.