Following the first rally of her 2021 Los Angeles mayoral campaign, Karen Bass spoke candidly about what she saw as a potential drawback to the office: a lack of international travel and involvement in world affairs.
Bass was accustomed to traveling the world as a Democratic member of Congress and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and had spent decades working on U.S.-Africa relations. It was one of the most absorbing parts of his political career, as he told The New York Times in an interview conducted on October 17, 2021 at his home in the Baldwin Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles.
“I went to Africa every two months, all the time,” he said. He added: “The idea of leaving that, especially international work and work in Africa, I was like, ‘Hmm, I don’t think I want to do that.’”
She ultimately decided she wanted to, telling the Times that if she were elected mayor, “not only would I live here, of course, but I also wouldn’t travel abroad; the only places I would go would be Washington DC, Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, relative to Los Angeles.”
That promise has been broken in a spectacular way.
When a cascade of deadly and destructive wildfires broke out in the Los Angeles region on Tuesday, the mayor was returning home from Ghana, West Africa, where she had attended the inauguration of a new president.
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