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Betty Pleasant is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Wave and writes the paper's gossipy Soul Vine column, mostly about black community politics. In the run-up to the mayoral primary, she was aggressively anti-Hahn. Bob Hertzberg got a surprising number of friendly mentions so far from the Valley, and just before the election she endorsed him and Antonio Villaraigosa. Now, in her post-election column, she rants that since Hertzberg lost democracy itself is flawed:
We are angry. We are disgusted and some of us are moving out of this city and leaving it with the 5,769 Jim Hahn lovers who wouldn’t know a decent mayor from a pothole in the street! Since few people bother to do it anyway, we believe popular voting for our leaders should be eliminated. We believe Democracy is overrated: the Greeks invented it, and then they discarded it....We, who voted for Bob Hertzberg, saw it coming and did everything we could to get our man — a fine man who would have made a hellava mayor — into a runoff with Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor-worthy frontrunner, thus waving bye-bye to the Hahn forever. We daydreamed of a runoff with no Hahn in it.
Come to think of it, she was pretty hard on Bernard Parks too. By the way, the Wave let her write straight news stories about Hertzberg.