Last week was food, the conclusion of Stanley Tucci’s CNN series, Searching for Italy. This week, it’s national politics via the long-awaited midterms.
As I type this blog (Saturday, November 12th), billionaire businessman Rick Caruso, a former Republican turned Democrat, has a razor-thin margin over U.S. Congresswoman and almost-Biden VP candidate Karen Bass, 50.25% to 49.75%.
If elected, Caruso would be the second Italian American mayor of L.A, succeeding the outgoing Eric Garcetti, son of the famous former prosecutor. Caruso’s win, however, would be a much more ethnically identifiable source of pride given that Garcetti once described himself as “your average Mexican-American Jewish Italian.” His great-grandfather was an Italian emigrant to Mexico who was hanged during the Mexican Revolution. And his maternal grandmother was a Russian Jew who left that country due to its violent anti-Jewish purges. Interesting that although both of his Italian and Jewish ancestors faced discrimination and hardship, Garcetti is now seen as “Hispanic” by the American press.
This point was recently driven home when Caruso identified himself as a “Latin” in a televised mayoral debate. Angry mediacrats interpreted this as pandering to the Hispanic vote. In fact, Caruso was being semantically spot-on: the original “Latin” people were from Italy (Rome). Caruso had also referred to himself as “Italian” to add the context.”
An even more well-known Italian American pol in L.A. politics was John Ferraro, a 6’4″ former tackle for the University of California football team who became the city’s longest-serving council member (1966 until his death in 2001).
Back to Caruso. Though a billionaire on his own via his real estate and investment companies, his father was no slouch, either: papà Caruso founded Dollar-Rent-A-Car, one of the first such businesses in the nation. Clearly, the Italian mela didn’t fall too far from the tree. And upon whom has the son lavished much of his millions? The disadvantaged Black-and-Brown youth of the city, creating sports and other social programs. Did Spike Lee just faint?
Going a bit further east, former Clark County sheriff Steve Lombardo (Republican) defeated the incumbent, Steve Sisolak (Democrat), to become Nevada’s governor. An Army veteran with a degree in Civil Engineering, Lombardo oversaw the investigation into the 2017 Mandalay Bay shooting massacre in Sin City, one of the worst in our nation’s history. He also heads the board of an organization which tracks down missing children. When asked about the city’s continuing uptick in crime after the 2017 horror, Lombardo said, “It keeps me up at night.” He is the opposite of the media’s dago darling, Tony Soprano.
Going much further east, Doug Mastriano was soundly defeated in his bid for Pennsylvania governor by state’s attorney Josh Shapiro. An election denier who marched to the capital on January 6th (but did not participate), Mastriano and his image fed into the media’s popular pigeonholing of Italian American pols as right-wing extremists and/or figures of mirth. But no one was laughing in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis (100% Italian on both sides), won a near-landslide victory over former Congressman and governor Charlie Crist. DeSantis’s win fueled even more talk of a 2024 presidential run.
Incidentally, if he does decide to throw his Borsalino hat into the ring, DeSantis and his background may throw the media for a loop. First of all, probably 99 out of 100 Americans don’t even realize that he’s Italian. (They think he’s Greek or Anglo, perhaps even a tad Hispanic.) Secondly, his background completely destroys all media preconceptions of the Italian American male: lawyer (graduate of Yale and Harvard), a Navy veteran, and a former U.S. Congressman. He was also captain of Yale’s varsity baseball team, which certainly leads us back to Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio’s greatness back in the 1940s.
The most powerful Italian American woman in our government, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, suffered a double defeat. The first was the brutal attack on her husband, Paul Pelosi, by a deranged man who broke into their San Francisco home. The second is the probable take-over of the U.S. House of Representatives by the Republicans, which would definitely speed up her already-declared plans to possibly retire and move on, perhaps as the Ambassador to Italy. Her likely successor? U.S. Congressman and fellow Californian, Kevin McCarthy, whose mother’s maiden name was Palladino.
You weren’t expecting that last little fact, were you? As with DeSantis, the media’s Italian American radar never hums unless a public figure resembles their idea of what an “Italian American” looks or sounds like (i.e, a crude stereotype).
And although it was surprising ̶ and a bit thrilling – to hear Caruso admit to being “Italian American” in a televised public debate (he even correctly invoked the word “Latin!”) ˗˗ it would be even better to hear Enrico Caruso singing in the background at his mayoral victory party. We can dream, can’t we? -BDC
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