Technically, He Deserved A-plus
Importantly, from a technicians standpoint, his speech was unflawed. This talk would have won him a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Toastmasters Club. Mr. Villaraigosas only speaking-aid, well out of view, was a list of notes that weighed less than a swimsuit in a porn movie. His talk was pitched and paced to defy the most demanding critic. In this, he succeeded. Although Mr. Villaraigosa could awaken at 3 in the morning and declaim for 2 hours about his rich Hispanic roots, he demonstrated, possibly to the concern of some, that he is taking seriously the notion of being the mayor of all the people. Preparing himself, daily, for larger, broader office than the mere mayor of a single city, his advisors had an early awakening. They realized that the dulcet tones of an Hispanic dialect play boffo in Southern California, and pretty much across the state. Elsewhere, though, it is riskier, a more complicated call. They concluded the Mayor has a better chance of winning an election if he sounds more like Mr. Anglo than Mr. Hispanic. More and more, the urgently ambitious Mayor expects to be addressing national audiences. His Hispanic ethnicity may be written appealingly all over his natty, handsome, dark, small to medium-height looks, the last vestiges of the dialect he grew up with have almost washed away. Or been rigorously scrubbed away. Make no mistake, America is his stage, not Figueroa Street or Ventura Boulevard.
Say That Again
He did not sound as if he had just fallen off the tractor from Topeka. But his sterling locution must have delighted the generalists, the bigots and also the future consultants in the room. He didnt, but Mr. Villaraigosa may as well have been standing beneath a room-sized portrait of himself. That is how intensely intimately he pitched his passionately punctuated pursuit of his own inner self. He wanted to be clear on who the speech was about, and who the author was. 0ratorially, Mr. Villaraigosa executed the laborious equivalent of completing a 5,000-word jigsaw puzzle in 4 minutes and 30 seconds. The interlocking rhetorical links, interchanges, bridges, references and ever-present, precisely planned self-deprecations formed an infrastructure so convoluted that only Helen Keller could have negotiated the route with her eyes closed. If that is a critical aside, to remember all of that and deliver the goods on a steaming hot plate that you are telling your listeners is fresh may properly be deemed a master stroke.
Keeping His Word
In ways, this was a standard neighborhood speech. Mr. Villaraigosa pledged in last years winning campaign against the incumbent Jim Hahn that once elected, I will show that I am not here to fill space. I think big, very large. Houdini and the brightest young Democratic Party minds in the United States must have been proselytized to develop a mountainous matrix of vaguely germane information to fuel his flashily successful campaign to become the Czar of Czars of Los Angeles public schools without having to worry about satisfying one single Los Angeles voter. He pressed so many political-justification buttons in 55 minutes that if the room had been an elevator, the people would have levitated 4,000 floors. Take this dandy: When he was first elected to the state Assembly in 1994, 69,000 persons were incarcerated in California, he said. Today, 173,000 are behind bars. Seventy percent, he said, cant read, write and did not graduate high school. Since 50 percent of ninth-graders drop out before qualifying for their diploma, he said that shows that there is an inexorable link between under-education and lives of crime. Emphatically, he emphasized the dire need for visionaries in all compartments of Los Angeles life to think more creatively than all who have gone before. Unarguably, the wretched state of the working poor never resides far from the Mayors consciousness. Several times, the Mayor reminded his listeners, almost boastfully, that he was a liberal Democrat and thought like a liberal Democrat, but that he unequivocally rejected a couple of orthodox liberal Democrat doctrine. He indicated, not bashfully, that this was to be interpreted as a sign of political courage. His strongest clinching argument for becoming the schools czar may have been his virulent rejection of the long-held Democratic notion that poor children flatly cannot learn, or, ipso-facto, will be so far in arrears of their peers they would have no chance of catching up before they died. We are not buying that junk, the dynamic Mr. Villaraigosa said, pounding the stubborn podium just in case his booming voice did not sufficiently bounce off the four tall walls. If Los Angeles is going to be one of the great global communities, if this is Americas city of greatest hope and promise, we must succeed, he said. We have got to have high expectations for these children, and we have got to be innovative in our thinking. The latter two power-points he stated six times apiece.
Postscript
At no juncture were the suited ladies and gentlemen tabled around the room permitted to forget what Antonio Villaraigosa has achieved, the state of his master plan, their own responsibilities in bringing his dreams to life, and his flaming desire for far greater office.