James now is asked to almost every debate and has won a healthy amount of media coverage.
"He is the only one who is willing to look the facts in the eye and not worry about the unions and special interest groups," says Richard Riordan, the last Republican mayor of Los Angeles, who left office in 2001 and endorsed wealthy political newcomer Austin Beutner for mayor last April, only to see Beutner drop out of the race.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TEAM KEVIN JAMES
Kevin James, left, volunteering as a lawyer at a 2011 naturalization effort
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James, like Riordan when he ran in 1993, has never held public office. For much of the last two decades he's been an entertainment lawyer, moonlighting as a midnight talk-show host.
"He has a radio talk-show host perspective on government, which is considerably to the right of everyone else," says Bill Carrick, Garcetti's gentlemanly campaign strategist. "That's the reason he's gonna find it difficult to expand his coalition."
James has to convince voters what the audience in Holmby Hills decided: that L.A. is in bad shape and desperately needs a change of direction.
"I don't have to do much convincing," James insists. "We have a jobs crisis, a budget crisis, an infrastructure crisis, a transportation crisis, a corruption crisis."
The charming James speaks with an Oklahoma twang and is somewhat reminiscent of a guy from a 1950s television family. But as a radio host, he was a firebrand. He briefly became the object of national ridicule when, in 2008, he appeared on The Chris Matthews Show and froze up during a discussion of Barack Obama. Matthews asked James to define the term "appeasement" and James could not do it. The clip, which went viral, made James look like a partisan hack or, worse, a hayseed.
As 2013 begins, James faces a new problem with the media: Journalists will focus on where the top mayoral fundraisers get their fat campaign war chests. Already, media have reported that Greuel and Garcetti are beholden, moneywise, to city government employee unions who wield outsized influence on the City Council's positions.
News stories about the $11 million from a secret donor to an Arizona nonprofit that fought Proposition 30, Jerry Brown's tax hike, clearly hurt the opposition to Brown's successful measure on Nov. 6. So what happens if notorious conservatives such as the Koch brothers put money into the independent PAC for Kevin James?
"Any money that goes into the super PAC, no matter where it comes from, is independent," James insists, sounding naive if not in full-blown denial. "I don't owe them any debt. I'm not voting on any of their issues."
Davis, not James, will decide how to fashion the TV and radio ads with the money he raises, and those ads are sure to cause a stir in Los Angeles, where previous hotly contested mayoral races have been nasty.
"I don't know what we'll do," Davis says coyly. "Will it be demon Garcetti? I doubt that. But the odds are, you'll notice it."
