Harold Meyerson

The last days of the Richard Riordan mayoralty have borne a striking resemblance to the first scene of King Lear. Old Lear, you will recall, is stepping down and handing the kingdom over to his daughters -- with the biggest piece going to the one who loves him most. Which......

Tuesday night‘s mayoral debate, the first of five between City Attorney James Hahn and former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, was notable for -- well, not a hell of a lot. The candidates repeatedly pitched their answers to swing voters, attacked each other only delicately and sporadically, and took refuge --......

Photo by Ted Soqui No one disputes the legitimacy of Kenny Hahn’s reputation in L.A.’s African-American community. “Older voters who remember the bad old days of [Mayor Sam] Yorty and [LAPD Chief William] Parker remember that Kenny Hahn was the one elected official who stood up to those guys,” says......

A less experienced, more excitable campaign honcho than Kuwata might have betrayed at least a momentary desire to throttle the aide on the spot, but Kuwata soldiered on genially as if nothing had happened. “Maybe he votes for passage at the end of the day to cover himself,” Kuwata improvised......

The lyric is 70 years old, but Ira Gershwin‘s mighty couplet on John P. Wintergreen, the candidatehero of the Gershwins’ 1931 musical Of Thee I Sing, can be applied, with one simple word alteration, to L.A.‘s own Antonio Villaraigosa: He’s the man the people choose Loves Latinos and the Jews......

Now it‘s the old Los Angeles against the next. The June mayoral runoff between City Attorney James Hahn and former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa pits the urban-liberal past against its future. Hahn ran strongest among elderly voters and in the African-American community, but that community, which constituted 18 percent of......

Photos by Debra DiPaolo (Villaraigosa) and Slobodan Dimitrov (Hahn) Three into two doesn’t go, and thus the drama of the closing week of L.A.’s mayoral primary. By every available measure (that is, the polls), just three candidates — City Attorney James Hahn, businessman Steve Soboroff and former Assembly Speaker Antonio......

I. Joel and Che, Together Again It‘s a crisp spring night at UCLA, and the 36th debate between the six major candidates for mayor of Los Angeles is not proceeding like the previous 35. In fact, it’s not proceeding at all. Several hundred students, after demonstrating all day outside a......

IT'S NOT EASY TO PICK A SINGLE MOMENT when it became clear that Los Angeles -- political Los Angeles -- had changed. There was the afternoon, nearly a year ago, when striking janitors (with the blessing of the cardinal and the backing of the mayor) sat down in a busy......