ROGER SIMON: Who the Hell Is Nithya Raman?
I worked in Hollywood. I wrote for newspapers and websites. I knew politicians, journalists, studio executives, activists, and assorted crackpots of every description.
I arrived when Sam Yorty from the San Fernando Valley was mayor. All of us smartypants film-and-drama-school wannabe literati thought he was a yahoo. I lived through Bradley, Riordan, Hahn, Villaraigosa, Garcetti, Bass (from afar—by then I had left), and others. I watched Hollywood transform, newspapers shrink, neighborhoods burn, homelessness proliferate, and the city grow from a sprawling postwar metropolis into something quite different.
Yet when Nithya Raman emerged as a serious contender for mayor, my first reaction was not approval or disapproval.
It was: “Who the hell is Nithya Raman?”
Well, now I know her politics are supposed to be on the far, far left of the Democratic Party as she heads into a runoff against merely far-left (one far) former Fidelista incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, whom Ms. Raman endorsed (before Nithya did or did not throw in the towel, depending on who you believe).
Speaking of which, it’s hard to believe she actually beat out Mr. Pratt. The redoubtable Dan Greenfield has a good analysis of that —‘The LA Mayoral Election is Being Stolen”. Subtitle: “How does the third-place candidate win the majority of late-arriving ballots?”
To be fair, it’s good to see L.A. awarding someone for being extremely competent at her job — that job being to increase the “Homeless Industrial Complex” to a size that would make the Manhattan Project seem like a neighborhood 7-Eleven:
Tweet continues, “in 2017, [Raman] ran for city council in 2019 on a ‘fix homelessness,’ promptly firehosed infinite taxpayer cash at other ‘homeless non-profits,’ and now suddenly says ‘it’s not okay for people to be sleeping on the streets.’ ‘We can fix this’? Yeah, we can, if the ‘we’ doesn’t include you.”
