Good morning. It’s Tuesday, October 20. You can expect a nice day of T-shirt weather leading up to some rain — maybe even thunderstorms — on Wednesday.
1. A disastrous L.A. mayoral campaign might tell us something about the race Xavier Becerra is running now.
Xavier Becerra plays with two of his daughters in the office of his 2001 mayoral campaign. (Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
In the most recent L.A. Times/UC Berkeley poll, Xavier Becerra was twenty-five points ahead of his Republican opponent, making him the prohibitive favorite to be the next governor of California — arguably the second most powerful executive in the country.
Given the stakes, it remains striking how little we’ve heard about Becerra’s history in Los Angeles, the city he represented for decades and where he built his political career. One thing we’ve heard especially little about: his campaign for mayor of the City of Los Angeles in 2001.
Why might Becerra be reluctant to talk about that campaign?
