Partial Victory for Antonio

Amidst an absurdly low turnout, LA Mayor and nominal 2010 gubernatorial front-runner Antonio Villaraigosa was not quite successful enough to tip the school board in his favor - at least not yet.

There were 4 open seats on the school board. Villaraigosa was fairly well assured to win 2. He needed 3 for a majority on the board. Here are the results:

In nearly complete returns, the mayor's favored candidates finished ahead in three races and trailed in the fourth. But two of those leads were not sizable enough to avoid a May runoff, meaning that, once again, Villaraigosa's school intervention plans could be put on hold [...]

The two big-money contests pitted an incumbent against a challenger favored by the mayor. In those races, Villaraigosa faced one loss and one runoff. The union-backed Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte won handily in her South Los Angeles race and Villaraigosa-favored Tamar Galatzan and incumbent Jon M. Lauritzen headed to a May showdown in the San Fernando Valley.

The mayor officially sat out the battle in District 1, which pitted incumbent LaMotte against charter school operator Johnathan Williams.

He "sat it out," most likely, because he didn't want to get sullied by Williams' defeat. But he pretty much did everything but endorse him. Williams outspent his oppoenent by 2-to-1 and still lost.

That the Galatzan-Lauritzen race is headed to a run-off is no surprise: the two had big money behind them, the challenger from the mayor and the incumbent from the teachers' union. Amazingly, the mayor was unable to put away the race in District 7, where Villaraigosa-endorsed Richard Vladovic will now go to a May runoff against retired principal and low-funded candidate Neal B. Kleiner. That's really surprising to me.

We'll now see a UTLA firewall strategy for May. Villaraigosa needs both seats to gain a school board majority. And he seems to know that it's a tall order, because he's being conciliatory again:

Villaraigosa had planned to oust at the ballot box any board members who resisted his schools agenda, but amid Tuesday night's uncertain outcome, he adopted a conciliatory tone. Earlier, he had called board President Marlene Canter, with whom he had refused to meet for months.

"I want to work with the school board," he said in an interview. "I'm reaching out…. I'm looking for a partnership that's focused on change and innovation. That's what it's been about from the beginning."

Riiiight. Why do I have trouble believing that one? Must be the two million dollars funneled to candidates battling incumbent school board members.