John Fund writes for National Review Online about new developments in the Los Angeles mayor’s race.
Insurgent candidate Spencer Pratt has built a broad-based coalition to back him in Tuesday’s primary for Los Angeles mayor. About half of independents support him, according to polls, and he’s been surprisingly successful at attracting Democrats who are fed up with the city’s decline.
He’s gotten donations from prominent liberal donors such as billionaire Haim Saban and Universal Music Group chairman Lucian Grainge. Nicole Avant, the Southern California finance co-chairwoman for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and the wife of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, has become a supporter, as has Jeanie Buss, the minority owner of the L.A. Lakers. Pratt also says that leftist A-list celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx have privately pledged their support.
But while Pratt has been careful to emphasize consensus issues such as pushing the homeless into treatment, speeding up recovery from the Pacific Palisades fires, cleaning up filthy streets, and fixing potholes, he has kept a hard edge on some issues. One is his insistence that his major opponent, Mayor Karen Bass, 72, is not only obviously incompetent but also beholden to the city’s leftist statist quo, given her dangerously radical-activist background. Since her youth, she has been captivated with Cuba’s communist dictatorship, which has been guided by either Fidel Castro or his brother Raul for nearly 70 years.
In a five-minute Instagram post produced by his campaign, Pratt has called Bass out for her involvement in the 1970s with a revolutionary group called the Venceremos Brigade, which was a joint project set up by the Castro dictatorship and the radical Students for a Democratic Society to have Americans visit Cuba for six-week tours to participate in public-works projects but mostly to be indoctrinated into communist ideology. …
… What’s clear is that her ardor for Cuba’s revolution, which she developed during her multiple trips to Cuba, lasted far longer than her years of youthful indiscretion.
