It’s one thing to refuse to fight dirty, and it’s another to just stand there and let a bully beat you up. This is a difference that Antonio Villaraigosa, unfortunately, never figured out in the last days of his losing campaign. With his unrelenting TV hit ads, some of them perfectly fair and many of them not, winner Jim Hahn turned his haplessly passive opponent into a punching bag. The outgoing city attorney hit him with the Vignali crack-pipe ad and with a shot at a tiny handful of his legislative votes — out of the former Assembly speaker’s many hundreds of good ones. It is tiresome to enumerate how many different ways the former front-runner could have defended himself without, as he was inclined to put it, fighting dirty, taking the low road. For instance, he could have dismissed the lies for what they were — lies. He could have pointed out that he asked for review of the crooked Vignali’s case, not clemency — a misstep shared with the reputable Cardinal Roger Mahony.
Source: Dear Losers | L.A. Weekly