BLUE CITY BLUES: GARCETTI’S LEGACY.

President Joe Biden has nominated Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti as ambassador to India. Assuming the Senate confirms him, Garcetti, who would leave office early (his second term ends in December 2022), might find India familiar in certain respects. Like Mumbai or Delhi, Los Angeles now has massive homeless encampments throughout the city, even increasingly in posh neighborhoods like Brentwood and throughout the middle-class strongholds of the San Fernando Valley. Late last week, as Garcetti prepared to leave town, homeless advocates, angered by a city ordinance against indiscriminate camping on city streets, vandalized Getty House, the mayor’s official residence.

It’s not the scenario Garcetti would have wanted at the end of his tenure. The son of a former L.A. district attorney, a graduate of Columbia University, and former Rhodes scholar, Garcetti once seemed, to the city’s media establishment, like the epitome of a modern progressive mayor. In 2018, USC’s Dornsife Magazine embraced the idea that the city was undergoing a “renaissance” built around density, verticality, and transit—all components of Garcetti’s vision. Garcetti won reelection in 2017 in a low-turnout race, getting more than 80 percent of the vote against virtually nonexistent opposition. Some (notably Garcetti himself) even saw him as a potential president, but that notion didn’t test well, and Garcetti took the same express to national oblivion as New York’s Bill de Blasio.

Go past the hype, and you find at best a lackluster record.

At the very best.