After three months of waiting for the Los Angeles mayor's endorsement, Phil Angelides used a joke Tuesday to brush off Antonio Villaraigosa's conspicuous delay in putting his popularity to work for his own party's nominee for governor.
Villaraigosa, a national star of the Democratic Party, "wanted to plan a big wedding, and big weddings take time," Angelides told a crowd of hundreds packed into a Los Angeles school auditorium for the mayor's announcement.
The event's splashy theatrics -- a brass band, dancing, hundreds of screeching schoolchildren and 13 television cameras to capture the scene -- only underscored the political energy that Villaraigosa has denied Angelides over a difficult summer for the state treasurer's campaign to oust Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"This is a man with the courage of his conviction," Villaraigosa said, echoing an Angelides campaign line that has rarely drawn so much attention.
Yet even as Villaraigosa appeared with Angelides in San Francisco and Los Angeles on Tuesday, he left open the possibility that he would soon campaign with Schwarzenegger, too -- for billions of dollars in public works bonds on the Nov. 7 ballot.
Villaraigosa also declined to criticize the Republican governor, who has vowed to sign a bill that will give the mayor some of the power he has fought to gain over public schools.
"You know, my mother raised me as a young boy; I remember her telling me, people want to know what you're for, not what you're against," Villaraigosa said at a stop with Angelides in San Francisco's heavily Latino Mission District. "I'm for Phil Angelides."
Villaraigosa's muted approach to Schwarzenegger is one of many signs of the governor's success, so far, in using his incumbency to encroach on his Democratic rival's natural support base, most recently by striking deals with legislators to fight global warming, raise the minimum wage and offer prescription drug discounts.
"It's been masterful," said Jude Barry, who managed state Controller Steve Westly's campaign for governor in the Democratic primary. "It seems they have a list of Democratic issues that they want to systematically take off the table."
On a Labor Day campaign swing, for example, Angelides could not criticize Schwarzenegger for agreeing to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, since that has long been Democratic dogma; instead, he questioned the governor's commitment to enforce the law if reelected.
