Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo
Rick Caruso, as chairman of the University of Southern California Board of Trustees, announces USC’s 12th president, March 20, 2019, in Los Angeles.
My home city of Los Angeles hasn’t seen many local tycoons attempt to buy their way into power. Richard Riordan was a white-shoe lawyer and founder of a private equity firm when he became the last Republican mayor in 1993, but he didn’t have unlimited cash. Contra Riordan, recent history in California is that self-funding rich candidates lose, from legendary flop Al Checchi in the 1998 governor’s race to Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in 2010.
But Rick Caruso, the developer known for building garish, Disney-fied malls like the Americana in Glendale and The Grove in the Fairfax district, has spent roughly three out of every four dollars in L.A.’s mayoral campaign, nearly all of it from his own bank account, in advance of Tuesday’s primary, in which 11 other candidates have also been running. This unusually large spending blitz, supplemented by endorsements from Gwyneth Paltrow, Kim Kardashian, and Elon Musk, is intended to net Caruso the simple majority he’d need to avoid a runoff in November.
He’s currently running neck and neck in the polls with Rep. Karen Bass, with most of the other top-flight candidates having already dropped out. So despite Caruso’s long history as a Republican in a Democratic city (he switched his registration from the GOP to “decline to state” in 2019 and became a Democrat only this January, a fact he obviously finds so potentially damaging that he sent a cease and desist letter to the Los Angeles Times to prevent them from publishing it), it’s not impossible that he will find enough support in a low-turnout primary to end the race outright.
The son of a rental-car magnate, Caruso is worth around $4 billion. He combines Michael Bloomberg’s money with Rudy Giuliani’s policy platform and Donald Trump’s self-image as an outsider reshaping politics. The last part is the most risible: For a big-time developer, taking the top spot in L.A. City Hall is pretty much a step down in civic influence. Nearly all of the public-corruption scandals that Caruso has condemned in the campaign have developers at their core.
Nevertheless, his campaign tactics are working, at least enough to reach the runoff and maybe more, because Caruso is playing on well-worn fearmongering by running against crime and homelessness. In what he hopes will be a law-and-order year, Caruso is waging the ultimate law-and-order race, completely unfiltered due to his huge sums in advertising and a largely invisible media apparatus. It will only be enough, however, if voters don’t recognize the deceit at the heart of the enterprise. But then, Caruso’s particular expertise is marketing mini-fantasylands.
Like his campaign, the malls Caruso has built are monuments to artifice, with soaring fountains and ersatz Main Streets that recall some imagined 1950s commercial paradise. They are clean and manicured and free of any sign of the struggles of a city where more than 1 in 5 residents live in poverty. Caruso’s campaign message, in a way, promises to bring The Grove to every highway and byway of the city: He promises to tackle homelessness, reduce crime, and restore honor to City Hall.
Despite Caruso’s long history as a Republican in a Democratic city, it’s not impossible that he will find enough support in a low-turnout primary to end the race outright.
There’s significantly less than meets the eye in his ambitious proposals, however. Caruso has vowed to make 30,000 shelter beds available in his first month in office, with no sense of where they would go or how wrenching it has been to secure even a fraction of that space for bridge housing in any corner of the city. He has called for affordable housing to be built, though not at any of his properties, which have hardly any affordable units.
He also wants to get tough on crime, notwithstanding the fact that the two pandemic years (2020 and 2021) have seen the lowest levels of citywide crime since 2015, significantly below where things stood in the 1980s and ’90s. (The neighborhood with the biggest increase in crime last year was tony Bel Air, which explains some of why it’s being talked about so loudly, as it’s reached the people with the megaphones.) While violent crimes, particularly homicides, are up, Caruso’s plan is more similar to Giuliani’s “broken windows” approach (former New York City and Los Angeles police commissioner Bill Bratton is a Caruso supporter), flooding the streets with cops and targeting misdemeanors. In fact, criminalizing homelessness is a core of the policy. In one TV appearance, he said that as soon as people decline shelters more than twice, “you’re going to say, ‘I’m sorry, you’ve now broken the law.’”
The fact that police aren’t very good at their jobs (the LAPD’s clearance rate for homicides in 2020 fell to 55 percent, down over 20 points from the previous year) hasn’t factored into Caruso’s equation. Which presumably is something Caruso should know, as he was the president of L.A.’s civilian Police Commission for two terms, helping institute the practices of surveillance-heavy “community policing” in nonwhite neighborhoods that continue to create frictions. During his tenure, the LAPD systematically underreported crime, which I guess is one way to lower the crime rate.
All this is one reason why it’s so amusing to see Caruso portray himself as an outsider poised to take down city corruption. While he was running the Police Commission, the LAPD suddenly got this spanking new headquarters downtown, a tribute to his twin skills of insider contacts and connections to L.A.’s insular developer world. As Joe Mathews points out, the near impossibility of raising revenues at the local level in California has saddled local electeds with little power. Caruso is part of the deep-pocketed cohort that has filled in the gaps. Not only has he run the Police Commission, but he was on the board of the Department of Water and Power (DWP) in the 1980s, and the board of the Los Angeles Coliseum in the 2000s.
Caruso has claimed that as mayor, he will sever all ties with lobbyists and work for $1 a year. These are predictable rich-guy pronouncements, but they fly in the face of the fact that, in Los Angeles’s weak political structure, the developers practically run the place. Caruso, his family members, and his employees gave nearly half a million dollars in campaign contributions to city officials and their initiatives between 2011 and 2016, donating to literally every citywide elected and city councilmember except one, while obtaining their approvals for his array of development projects.
When you hear about L.A. political corruption, these are quite explicitly the kinds of deals that are discussed. The current FBI investigations that have ensnared three city councilmembers are all about doling out favors for numerous developers in exchange for money. While nothing specifically untoward has stuck to Caruso, the idea that he can rail against public corruption is like Tony Soprano condemning the surge in organized crime in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area.
Despite this, Caruso has attempted to paint Bass as the true insider, blaming her in campaign ads for homelessness happening “on her watch” (when she was in state and federal legislative jobs in Sacramento and Washington) and for cutting mental-health funding (as the state Assembly Speaker, in the middle of the Great Recession, when California had the biggest budget deficit in its history and no way to print money).
A particularly audacious example of such attacks comes from an independent-expenditure ad from the Police Protective League, hitting Bass for taking a $95,000 tuition scholarship in 2011 (which was approved by the House Ethics Committee) from a corrupt USC dean who was later indicted on bribery charges. But Caruso was from 2018 until his mayoral run the chair of the USC Board of Trustees, including during the time when the “Varsity Blues” scandal of pay-to-play admissions for wealthy celebrities and financiers emerged.
Bass and her allies are busily comparing Caruso to Trump, aided by a headline in the L.A. Times from over a decade ago that was just about Caruso being a large developer. That rings a bit hollow as a counterattack, though in a highly charged political environment it might work. What is more resonant is that Caruso reflects the very same inept, corrupt, big-money interests who have been running Los Angeles for a while now, and the claim that he can somehow break through them makes no sense.
While engaging in this guilt-by-association attack, Caruso’s opponents have failed to address, much less counter, the campaign of fear he’s running, which has clearly found adherents. Despite her activist credentials, Bass has been tilting her campaign a bit toward the voters in the San Fernando Valley who often decide mayoral races and who are more conservative, specifically on the issues of crime and homelessness. (Kevin de León, the only other major candidate still running, has some labor and Latino support but has failed to gain much traction.) The entire race has played out on Caruso’s turf, with little about transportation or economic development or the environment breaking through. That makes Caruso more formidable, as he offers pie-in-the-sky policies that many voters accept as easy solutions.
Caruso’s image in millions of mailers and 30-second ads looks as squeaky-clean as The Grove. But it’s a whitewashed portrait, and a dangerous one at that.
