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Garcetti with Vice President Joe Biden.
A glowing puff piece in the Columbia magazine declares Eric Garcetti the "very model of the modern mayor, generally: He blogs, he tweets, he delights in a wonky new smartphone app that his counterpart in Mexico City uses to monitor air quality. He gladly submits to AMAs (“ask me anything” sessions) on Reddit…" The story revisits some of his college experiences and musical theater triumphs, describes his City Hall office nicely, and leaders readers with the sense that this guy is going somewhere. Some excerpts:
The iconic, white-granite tower has symbolized downtown L.A. for generations, and Garcetti’s cavernous third-floor office has a powerful, sturdy ambience. But there are some personal touches: In one corner he installed an upright piano so he can keep his jazz chops in shape; parked at the other end is his Trek mountain bike, helmet dangling off the handlebar. The room is dominated by an amber-tinted, 9-by-14-ft. mural titled Los Angeles: The Future — a WPA-style panorama of local geography and landmarks. Though it dates from the 1990s, the work seems to look backward rather than forward, a luxury the mayor does not enjoy….Garcetti says he has been reading Ben Barber’s "If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities," and he agrees with its thesis that cities often can address problems such as resilience and sustainability more effectively than divided or entrenched national governments….At Columbia, Garcetti was a political force who wrote and performed in theVarsity Show, rowed freshman crew, volunteered with community service groups, excelled academically and graduated magna cum laude. After earning a master’s at SIPA, Garcetti studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics, undertook research and human rights missions in East Africa and taught international relations at USC and Occidental College….He’s now in his 10th year in the Navy Reserve (lately on less active duty called Individual Ready Reserve); he has earned marksman and sharpshooter ribbons with a 9mm pistol and the Navy Marine Corps Achievement Medal. Garcetti has landed acting roles on TV’s The Closer and All My Children and the feature film End of Watch, among other credits. He has been honored by Human Rights Watch, Green Cross International, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Aspen Institute, and in 2007 was presented with Harvard’s John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award, given to elected officials and civic leaders under 40 who embody JFK’s qualities of leadership, pragmatism, vision and tenacity.
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The question inevitably arises: Could we be talking about a future American President?
“Certainly,” affirms [Ben] Jealous, who recently joined a socially conscious venture capital partnership based in Oakland, after six years as NAACP president and CEO. He has known Garcetti since their student council days, when they teamed up on several community and campus causes — most notably the preservation of the College’s need-blind/full-need admissions and financial aid policies. Jealous sees Garcetti as an authentically committed social activist and a gifted politician….
“I don’t wake up every day and see a future President of the United States in the mirror, in the way that I think some people do,” [Garcetti] says. “I think if you do good work, the next step takes care of itself.” He adds, “It’s a difficult thing in the culture of our politics to live in this moment and this place, in this job. But I really, really push myself hard to do that, because, even if I were to become President of the United States, I don’t want to miss this experience. The moment the President was re-elected, in November 2012, all the coverage wasn’t, ‘What’s going to happen in America?’ It was ‘Who’s going to run in 2016?’ Can we just stop for a moment and live here and now?”
