During one of his many appearances before
the cameras at this year’s Democratic National Convention, Los
Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spoke movingly about the mother
of “indomitable spirit” who, according to his narrative, raised him
after his father, an abusive alcoholic, abandoned five-year-old
Tony Villar and the rest of the family, took up with a new woman
and gave his first son by the new woman the identical name Tony
Villar.

Villaraigosa has been retelling variants of this family history
for many years. Tragically, he didn’t wait until his father was
dead before telling it. As Tony Castro reports in a
profile of L.A.’s lame duck chief executive, several of the
main characters have challenged the accuracy of Villaraigosa’s
Dickensian tale: 

Villaraigosa’s father, Antonio Ramon Villar Sr., finally spoke
up for himself in a 2006 interview in which he adamantly challenged
the mayor’s allegations.

“God knows that I was never an alcoholic and that I never hurt
his mother or abused my family,” Villar Sr. told me, denying the
mayor’s long-accepted account of his purported difficult
childhood.

“I know the public has been poisoned against me, but this is the
truth, so help me God.”

Villaraigosa’s claim that his father later gave another son the
exact same name he had given him also is inaccurate.

That other son—christened Anthony Gustavo Villar, a professor at
the University of California, Santa Cruz – has personally contacted
Villaraigosa demanding to know why he has publicly vilified their
father, said Estela Villar, Anthony Gustavo’s mother and the wife
of Antonio Ramon Villar Sr.

Villar Sr.’s second family portrayed him as a husband and father
who has been gentle, loving, kind and deeply religious—and who in
half a century of marriage never abused his wife or their four
children, nor shown any hints of alcoholism.

Even without embellishments, Villaraigosa’s hard-luck story
remains compelling – and rare among major American politicians.
Unfortunately, accounts of youthful privation had already dominated
the speakers’ setlists at both the Democratic and Republican
conventions, creating a special irony for the feckless L.A. mayor.
Villaraigosa was one of a vanishingly few people inside Charlotte’s
Time Warner Cable Arena who could truthfully claim the Hamiltonian
tradition of low birth, but nobody wanted to hear it.

That wasn’t the worst. Villaraigosa’s on-camera disaster came
when he overrode an obviously split floor voice vote with the
unbelievable claim that a supermajority had
voted in favor of the God/Jerusalem change to the party
platform that President Obama favored. 

Correct procedure called for an exact vote count, and
Villaraigosa appeared torn between his instinct for
ward-boss strongarming and his longing to appear statesmanlike.
Judge for yourself whether the nearly 60-year-old Villaraigosa in
this clip does or does not look like a little boy overwhelmed by
the complexities of a man’s job: 

That the L.A. mayor’s national coming-out would fail
should have been known in advance. He didn’t just come from
humble beginnings.
He’s made of humble stuff. At the DNC, when he trumpeted the
early assistance he got from an affirmative action program,
Villaraigosa didn’t mention that he went on to fail the California
bar exam four times. This might not matter if he had bloomed in
later life, but he did not. 

Since Antonio Villaraigosa
settled into the Windsor Square mayoral residence in 2005 (he later
had to depart while divorcing the long-suffering Corina Raigosa),
L.A.’s unemployment rate has soared. Its gross domestic product has

dropped by double-digit percentages. World-famous retail
streets like Melrose Ave. and Wilshire Blvd. are studded by “For
Lease” signs and speckled with homeless people. The city’s budget
has not been balanced for four years. In his 2009 re-election race,
Villaraigosa got a small majority even though he was running
virtually unopposed and outspent his nearest competitor
(politically unaffiliated gadfly Walter Moore) fifteen to
one. 

Villaraigosa’s good moves in office have been no-brainers like
re-appointing Police Chief William Bratton and denouncing the L.A.
teachers union in a 2010 speech. Observers have been eager to
praise his evolution from shakedown man to steward of the
commonweal.