on the case of a wronged Orange County nanny simply because they shared an ethnic heritage. They saw in his election the fulfillment of his people’s long-held aspirations for power and respect. Never mind that most of the voters who had elected the mayor to office were white: he was expected to speak out in favor of immigration reform and amnesty and other subjects far beyond the influence of his actual, quite meager powers, as outlined in the city charter. When he spoke out for immigrant legalization, like these people expected him to, it caused another kind of voter to focus on the seeming threat of his Mexicanness, and a few to harden their belief that he was the leader of a Chicano conspiracy to enslave white people. His Mexican heritage was, at once, his greatest political asset and his heaviest albatross.
“Not saying anything at all makes me look weak,” the mayor said. He did not use that word often in referring to himself, it was a sort of taboo in the mayor’s circle, and hearing the mayor say it caused the consultant to sit forward in his seat. “People are starting to think I’m running away from it.” The mayor’s career, from a rough-and-tumble Eastside childhood, to UC Berkeley and a quixotic minor crusade or two as a civil-rights lawyer, to the state legislature, and finally to election as the mayor of the second largest city in the United States, was a dance between affability and toughness, charm and ruthlessness. He understood that “weak” was poison in politics, just like it was on the streets of his youth. The early chapters of his biography were set in a preppy Chicano Catholic school, where the mayor-to-be wore cardigan sweaters and played Black Panther dress-up games, and finally got into the fistfights that led to his expulsion. When the mayor heard the word “weak” and its many synonyms he felt a twinge of the old aggression, and his silence for the past twenty minutes had come from having suppressed a powerful desire to tell that hotel maid to go fuck herself.
It was a rare moment of self-doubt from a politician on an incredible winning streak, a man who spent his day subjecting his consultant and everyone in his circle to his constantly shifting enthusiasms, his volatile self-belief. He was going to plant a hundred thousand trees, hire a thousand police officers, and lay a cute TV reporter or two—all by Christmas. Now the imprisoned nanny was mucking it all up, and threatening to detract from his brilliance, and she was doing it all the way from Orange County. The mayor sensed that the pro-Araceli grumbling would eventually spread to his old civil-l ibertarian circles and to the unofficial club of well-to-do Westside liberals who funded his campaigns. A few of these people had already written letters to the editor, emails, op-ed pieces, and Internet postings that commented on Araceli’s “railroading” as emblematic of the “marginalization” of immigrants in the justice system and the workforce, and the “power relations of narrative and belief” in the city between immigrants and nonimmigrants, and other nonsense like that. The mayor understood that these people measured his silence in such matters, it was a running tally they kept in their heads. They kept expecting him to break out in a rash of cowardice.
“I’m going to have to say something,” the mayor said.
The consult ant brought his hands together in concentration. He was a wordsmith, an avid reader of history, and a dedicated student of marketing and message. Quickly he arrived at a broad outline of what the mayor might say—the trick, as always, was to make an essentially moderate and cautious position sound bold, principled, and eloquent, a skill all great American politicians possessed going back to Lincoln. He shared his ideas with the mayor and once he was done the mayor smiled at him and said, “Brilliant.”
“The key thing is the tone,” the consultant said. “You want to sound measured. Like an adult. Above the fray.”
Several hours later the mayor was in East Hollywood, at a memorial service for one of the last remaining survivors in Southern California of the Armenian genocide. When the event was over he addressed the four television reporters outside, who were expecting a few innocuous Armenian-centered remarks. “I’m going to take pity on you guys today, and make a little bit of news,” the mayor whispered into the ear of a female reporter. “I’m going to say something about that