Joe Biden’s already been to New Hampshire. Bernie Sanders will be in Iowa in July.


Eric Garcetti is headed to Wisconsin.

The Los Angeles mayor and his staff like to say his trip to the state Hillary Clinton famously forgot to pay attention to last year — he’ll keynote the state Democratic convention June 2 — is because the former state party finance director is a friend who used to fundraise for him, or that he was just such a hit when he spoke to the Wisconsin delegation during the Democratic convention last year that they invited him for more.

Or, crazy as it may seem right now, it’s exactly what you think.

Running for president without being a statewide elected official first, and the mayor of L.A. to boot, goes the thinking in his orbit, isn’t the kind of liability it used to be — have people not noticed that Donald Trump is the president, that Emanuel Macron just won in France as a first-time 39-year-old candidate?

“I’m not focused on running for president,” was how he tried, briefly, to deflect when I asked him whether he’s looking at the 2020 race, in an interview in Washington, D.C., for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast.



[Subscribe and listen to the whole podcast to hear Garcetti also speak about his recent dinner with Hillary Clinton]

We were sitting in a room one floor up from where he’d just spoken at the Ideas Conference, hosted by the Center for American Progress, which eagerly promoted the event as the first roundup of potential Democratic candidates and picked him to give the opening keynote.

He’s 46, was just reelected to a second term with 81 percent of the vote, and is half-Mexican (he speaks Spanish fluently) and half-Jewish (he’s an active member of a very progressive L.A. synagogue), a Rhodes scholar and former Navy intelligence reserve officer. Clinton thought he was handsome, and that helped keep him in play in the consideration to be her running mate, though he didn’t make it to the finalist round, people familiar with those conversations told me.

His deflection on 2020 lasted about 20 seconds.

“I think the rules have changed, absolutely. And these categories are artificial. Does a governor of a state of 3 million have more experience than a mayor of a city of 4 million? I mean, we’ve got the sixth-largest economy in California in the world. We’ve got the 17th-largest in Los Angeles if it was an independent country,” Garcetti said. “It’s not an issue of experience or whether voters are even willing to anymore. I think, ‘What does this country need?’ Who will they need?’ And I trust voters. They respond to the right people at the right moments, and I’m ready to support that person in the future.”

I asked him whether he’s ready to be that person himself. He went right back to that not-so-wiggly wiggle word.

“I’m not focused on it, but the sky’s the limit in terms of what we need to be able to imagine for this country,” Garcetti said.

At a time when cities are stepping up their opposition to Washington, led by mayors like Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel trolling the Trump administration by posting deleted climate change data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s website and launching new efforts to stand up for immigrants, mayors around the country are buzzing about the Garcetti speculation.

“Somebody with a background like Garcetti in the corner office, I’d be very comfortable with,” said Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, cautioning that he’s still a long way from endorsing anyone. “I think he’d be a very interesting candidate.”

To city partisans, the 2016 map that Trump loves showing off that makes the whole country look red is both aggravating and completely misleading, mistaking miles for people.

“Given geographic shifts within the party — and country — toward urban areas, it may be time for a mayor to run for president on a cities agenda,” said Howard Wolfson, the top political aide for Mike Bloomberg and one of the architects of the former New York mayor's near-run as an independent last year.

Garcetti doesn’t like Trump’s map either.

“The idea of red-washing or blue-washing an entire county because a few more people vote one way or the other does a disservice to the people who live there,” Garcetti told me.

And that’s the message he’s trying to promote, whether in his political speeches or hosting a meeting with six mostly conservative cities and Trump’s National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, whom he’s known for years through Goldman Sachs’ work in L.A.: Done right, infrastructure spending isn’t a Republican or Democratic issue, and there are potential allies all over the country.

In Wisconsin, Garcetti is speaking at the state convention just outside Madison as Democrats gather to start thinking about how to pick up the pieces in next year’s races. Garcetti has “a fantastic message about how progressive principles help our economy and help our community members and our voters,” said Martha Laning, the state chair who invited him.

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Garcetti’s version in his speech at the CAP conference was, “I know you’re pissed off about the political moment … but don’t settle for being pissed off.”

“Everybody’s right to be pissed off. What rational person or feeling person wouldn’t be pissed off right now? But if that’s your end goal, and that’s the final state, you can’t actually accomplish things just being pissed off,” Garcetti said. “It can be a motivator to hit the street, to speak up, to demand that your representatives stand up for your values. But there’s a lot of people in America who aren’t obsessed with the soap opera here, and aren’t actually following the back and forth between left and right on Facebook feeds.”

So that’s the explanation for what he’s up to that doesn’t have to do with potentially laying the groundwork, why he’s traveling around the country so much for work, or for the three separate nominating speeches he made for party officer candidates at the Democratic National Committee meeting in Atlanta in February.

“My main job and my overwhelming job starts with my family, my street, my neighborhood, and my city. But I’m playing too much defense in my backyard to not get involved in the national discussion,” Garcetti said. “I’m thinking about people who, when judges are appointed, are going to lose their reproductive rights. People are going to lose their health care. Like, that really keeps me up at night. So where I would have probably turned down stuff in the past, absolutely, you’re right, I will be out there when I can and when invited to make sure that we take that strength of Los Angeles, and California, and where Democrats and mayors are getting things done, and spread it around this country.”

California has an open governor’s race next year, but few really expect Garcetti to get in, since he won’t be sworn in to his new term until July 1, and he won’t make any more moves until after the 2024 Olympics are decided in September. There’s the possibility of a Senate race, if Dianne Feinstein decides to retire, but people who know him have trouble seeing him get excited about a job that wouldn’t make him an executive.

Bill Carrick, a California consultant who counts both Garcetti and Feinstein among his clients, said donors and friends around the country keep urging Garcetti to just go big with a White House run. “He’s raised money around the country, and he’s got friends who’ve been in elected office or are currently in elected office. It’s not like they’re saying ‘If you run, I’ll support you,’” Carrick said. “But they’re saying, ‘You should think about it.’”

Garcetti has a wry air, smiles in a way that he tries to make out as self-deprecating but deploys for its charm. He doesn’t so much light up the room as coolly calm it down, whether in his appearance at the Women’s March in Los Angeles in January or at his CAP speech, which was largely about the economy of the future already being here.

Among the big hurdles if he runs will be that question mark about his ability to stir a crowd and his relatively low profile outside of top Democratic circles. But his biography would give him inroads into a variety of important bases of Democratic voters and a lot of the big California donors that other candidates have to fly in to visit.

Plus, Boston’s Walsh said, imagine the political possibilities, especially in what’s likely to be a huge field, and cites statistics like one of his favorites from 2016: Clinton won in Boston with 19,000 votes and carried the Massachusetts primary by only 17,000. Depending on the other candidates, he said he could see a scenario in which big-city mayors form a coalition of beachheads all around the country in 2020 for the right kind of candidate.

“A lot of the mayors have the grass-roots organizations around the country, and I think that’s something that’s important to win these presidential primaries,” Walsh said.

Garcetti is hoping to make a national splash by winning the competition to host the Olympics and — in a rare positive comment about Trump beyond general statements about needing to work together and get past politics — said he’s had a surprising level of interest and help, including a call from Trump to the head of the committee.

“He was very thorough. It’s definitely in his wheelhouse. I mean, it’s something that he said, ‘We should be bringing the Olympics back.’ Asked my advice about infrastructure,” Garcetti said, adding that he took the opportunity to press the case for more cops and being open on immigration.

“He listened,” Garcetti said. “I’m worried sometimes he or members of his administration only hear one side of the story.”

He’s already on defense about Trump internationally as he tries to seal up the Olympic bid. “A lot of the world is worried about us. They’re worried that we’re turning away from them,” Garcetti said.

I asked whether he’s worried that that will tip the decision to Paris, the other finalist.

“Maybe for some of them. And there’s certainly some talk of that, but what I said is, ‘Don’t we need the Olympics now more than ever? Do you want an America that further turns into itself?’” he said.

But he’s trying to stick to the sunny script as he goes around the country. And beyond that message, Laning said she’s glad to see an ambitious Democrat make her state a priority again.

“We just thought it would be refreshing to all of our delegates to see how much people around the country care about what’s happening in Wisconsin,” Laning said, working in a not-so-subtle dig at Clinton. “It’s just exciting to have that interest. We could have used someone coming in the last election. It would have been nice.”

As much time as he spends traveling, though, he’s always a mayor of Los Angeles with the perspective of a mayor of Los Angeles.

“Boy,” he said, after returning from Washington to speak at the state Democratic Party annual convention in Sacramento on Saturday, “is it great to be back in America.”



David Siders contributed reporting from Sacramento.