The most fortunate thing that ever happened to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was the catastrophic Palisades fire of January 2025. That sentence sounds cruel until you study how her political survival actually works. The fire — with its dead, its incinerated neighborhoods, its iconic image of a stone-faced mayor refusing to answer questions on a tarmac after returning from Ghana — is so visually overwhelming and emotionally charged that it absorbs nearly every ounce of public anger directed at her administration. Critics keep relitigating the trip to Accra. They should be relitigating everything else.

Because behind the smoke, Bass is presiding over one of the most quietly disastrous mayoralties in modern American urban history. A federal judge is breathing down her neck over billions in unaccounted homeless spending. The city ran a billion-dollar deficit two years into her tenure. The Department of Justice has sued her city. The National Guard and U.S. Marines had to be deployed because she would not deploy her own police. And her response to nearly all of it has been to hide — from auditors, from forums, from voters.

Read More: https://jdrucker.com/the-best-thing-karen-bass-did-was-botch-the-palisades-fire-and-it-goes-downhill-from-there/

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