There was one thing about Mayor Karen Bass that always impressed me. She had a keen awareness of cameras and an uncanny ability to keep a pleasant smile on her face, continuously, for unusually long periods of time. That prevents photographers from capturing an instant of anger or awkwardness that can resurface forever as an illustration of a politician in trouble.
But it’s not working for her now. The recent interview she gave to Fox 11’s Elex Michaelson is like something out of a Disneyland ride, a smiling plastic character having an adventure.
“While the city was burning,” Bass smiled, “and right after the fires were barely put out” – here she squeezed her eyelids in a cute twinkle – “we moved into rains, and mudslides. And during all that time, I did not think the focus should be on me.” Nodding and still smiling, she continued, “I thought the focus should be on the city and on the people who were suffering.”
In “All that Jazz,” the film about legendary Broadway choreographer Bob Fosse, there’s a scene where actor Roy Scheider, playing Fosse, barks at dancers, “Stop smiling! It’s not the high school play.”
Good advice, especially if you’re a mayor who was warned by your fire chief that your budget cuts would have a severe impact on your fire department’s ability to respond to wildfires and major emergencies, and then you fired your fire chief for making you look bad.
“Although there were warnings, that I frankly wasn’t aware of,” Bass smiled with her crinkle-twinkle, “although there were warnings, I think our preparation wasn’t what it typically is.” Then she cheerfully described the more extensive preparation for the recent rains.
Elex Michaelson asked, “But what do you mean there were warnings that you weren’t aware of, because I know we were talking about it on the news, a lot of people were talking about the problems.”
Nodding and smiling, Bass responded, “From the city, from the county, that level of preparation really didn’t happen. So it didn’t reach that level to me, to say something terrible could happen, and maybe you shouldn’t have gone on the trip.”
“Why didn’t it happen?” Michaelson asked.
“I don’t know!” Bass exclaimed with wide eyes, as if she was doing a Q&A in a pre-K classroom. “I mean, I think that’s one of the things we need to look at.”
This is her defense for flying to Ghana on January 4, two days after the National Weather Service in Los Angeles warned of very high winds and extreme fire danger coming up January 7-9.
Now-former L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley is on record telling the Board of Fire Commissioners in December that the mayor’s $17.5 million in cuts to the L.A. Fire Department’s budget, including a $7 million reduction in “overtime variable staffing hours,” had “severely limited” the LAFD’s capacity to respond to wildfires and other large-scale emergencies.
In the same budget, Bass gave her strongest support to salary increases for the city’s civilian employee unions, projected to cost $316 million the first year and $1 billion in 2028.
Bass is also responsible for hiring, at a salary of $750,000 per year, the DEI-spouting head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Janisse Quiñones, who could have been overseeing repairs to reservoirs and hydrants but in July was telling a radio station, “It’s important to me that everything we do, it’s with an equity lens and social justice, and making sure we right the wrongs that we’ve done in the past from an infrastructure perspective.”
And let’s not forget Deputy Mayor Brian Williams, hired by Bass in March 2023 to work closely with public safety departments, including LAFD. He wasn’t on the job in January because he was placed on administrative leave in December after the FBI raided his home. Williams allegedly called in a bomb threat to City Hall.
“I will tell you that I felt absolutely terrible not being here for my city,” Bass told Michaelson with a cheerful and reassuring smile, before affirming that she is running for re-election in 2026.
Voters should take a cue from Bob Fosse and invite her to leave the theater immediately.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley