Can Spencer Pratt Win LA?
Reflections from the City of Angels
My new novel, Colossus, is out now. It’s an American epic (“a challenging portrait of a thoroughly modern man”) and you’re going to want to buy it wherever books are sold. Order it today!
I have a great deal of affection for Los Angeles. Maybe it’s because I am such a New Yorker, moored on the East Coast, that the city, like San Francisco, never loses its allure for me. I usually stay in Beverly Hills and rent a car. Last year, I drove up to Laurel Canyon, took Mulholland, and imagined what it might have been like to be young and rich there in 1968. I spent an afternoon baking in the sun at Venice Beach and strolled the Santa Monica Pier. This year, I meandered up the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu, then made my way all the way to Echo Park to meet a writer and grab pizza. LA is what people say it is—too sprawling, too dependent on the automobile. But I feel the dreams around me, the sense that this is, or was, the embodiment of a distinctly American ethos, a place to think very big. I still have stardust in my eyes.
The other drive I took this year was to Pacific Palisades. A year and a half later, it remains a site of devastation, like a little city that got bombed out in a war not very long ago. There are beautiful houses that stand, untouched, and just as many empty lots, rubble-strewn fields, scorched edifices, and the clangor of construction crews trying, sporadically, to resurrect it all. Over one lot hangs a large black sign with blocky white lettering: KAREN BASS RESIGN NOW. Karen Bass is the mayor of Los Angeles and she is up for re-election. She was the mayor last year, during the Palisades and Eaton Fires, which were two of the most destructive wildfires in the history of LA. When Pacific Palisades began burning, Bass was in Ghana, breaking a prior pledge to not conduct foreign trips while she was mayor. For her, it was rotten luck, and the cataclysm of the fires has hung over her mayoralty. Many residents, rightly or wrongly, blame her for what happened—the city’s halting response and the sluggish rebuild. Since I do not consider myself an expert on these matters, I’ll refrain from offering any analysis on how the Bass administration responded to the fires. In time, perhaps, I’ll form a stronger opinion.
Rather, I want to explore the political dynamics of this mayoral race, and why Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star who once deemed an impossible longshot, might have a chance to dethrone Bass, a former congresswoman who has spent decades in politics. Pratt very well might miss the cut on Tuesday—California has top two nonpartisan primaries, and a recent poll shows him narrowly in third, trailing democratic socialist Nithya Raman—but the fact that he has run so competitively is meaningful in its own right. An unease permeates the city, and it’s one he’s prepared to seize upon—or at least exploit.
Here is why I am watching Spencer Pratt closely.
