L.A. needs an ‘inexperienced’ mayor like Spencer Pratt
by Editorial Board · The Washington TimesOPINION:
In today’s primary for mayor of Los Angeles, the chief rap against former reality TV star Spencer Pratt is his lack of experience, but it is career politicians who made the City of Angels the hot mess that it is.
Incumbent Karen Bass has held public office for 20 years. Besides her current term as mayor and 10 years in Congress, she was speaker of the California Assembly.
Los Angeles has the largest unsheltered homeless population in the nation. Homeless encampments are notorious for filth, addiction and mental illness. As a candidate for mayor in 2022, Ms. Bass promised to end homelessness in the city. How’s that working out?
Ms. Bass helped pave the way for the 2025 Palisades fire by cutting the city’s firefighting budget to provide more funding for her favorite diversity, equity and inclusion programs. When the fire broke out, she was on a junket to Ghana.
As to Mr. Pratt’s lack of background, the experience of most politicians consists of making bad situations worse — raising taxes, piling on enterprise-crushing regulations and allowing waste and fraud to run rampant.
It is the novices who get things done.
Neither Ronald Reagan nor Arnold Schwarzenegger had political experience before becoming governor of California. Donald Trump and Dwight D. Eisenhower came to prominence in business and the military, respectively, and had never held elective office before becoming president.
Career politicians favor solutions that have been tried and failed countless times. Instead of new ideas, they have shopworn cliches: “economic justice,” “affordability,” a “living wage.” Often, they use their failures in one office as a credential to seek higher office.
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Mr. Pratt is a reality TV star, like the 47th president. As with Mr. Trump, he is more interested in practical solutions than ideology. He looks at the homeless in Los Angeles and proposes getting them off the streets and into rehabilitation facilities or mental hospitals as quickly as possible.
There is no reason that mothers taking their children to a park should be forced to witness homeless men defecating or masturbating in the street.
For career politicians, the solution to this and other problems is to throw more money at it and, not coincidentally, more contracts at their friends.
Leave it to neophytes, such as Spencer Pratt, to propose solutions that might actually work.
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