In a comprehensive profile of outgoing Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, L.A. Weekly reveals that the former Democratic National Convention chairman has solicited Fox News host Bill O’Reilly for a job. According to the article:
He had fervently hoped, friends and colleagues say, to land an Obama cabinet post as secretary of transportation. But after hamming it up with Charlie Sheen in Cabo San Lucas in January, he was seen in Washington, D.C., as having too much baggage …. Villaraigosa loudly asked O’Reilly for help landing an on-camera job. Villaraigosa said he wanted ‘to speak to [Fox News CEO] Roger Ailes’ about ‘going to work’ at the network.”
Villaraigosa’s friends and allies say that he will need to generate three quarters of a million dollars per year just to keep up the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed. They say he’s dead broke, and has no job ready for him. “Villaraigosa has suggested to friends, civic leaders and neighborhood activists that he’s the right choice for a Wall Street firm, a think tank, a university seeking a scholar-in-residence or a publisher looking for a hot new memoirist,” the article reports.
All of this despite the fact that he cleaned up to the tune of $1.7 million as mayor.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).