“Failure: so much promise, so much disappointment,” proclaimed a Los Angeles Magazine cover article in 2009. The same magazine had hailed his election three years earlier with the headline “Pop star mayor.” But last week, Mr. Villaraigosa could be found next to President Obama here, as Mr. Obama announced him as chairman of the Democratic National Convention. The next day, he played host to Xi Jinping, the Chinese vice president, at a luncheon and a Lakers’ game. And these days, analysts say that for all his early troubles, Mr. Villaraigosa is building a record on crime, mass transit expansion and the environment that, if short of the original promise of his mayoralty, is substantial and is positioning him for advancement. “I’ll acknowledge there have been big challenges over the years,” Mr. Villaraigosa said in an hourlong interview in his office at City Hall one recent morning, putting at the top of that list his failed marriage and the economic downturn that pounded the city. “But I was persistent and dogged in what I tried to do.” With a little more than one year left in the final term in office for Mr. Villaraigosa, a reappraisal of him is under way amid signs that he is orchestrating a shift in his political fortunes. Mr. Villaraigosa’s name has returned to the small list of next-generation Democrats who have been waiting in the wings as members of the old guard of California politics move closer to retirement. “There are plenty of people in L.A. who aren’t going to feel great about him personally — that’s always going to be true,” said Raphael J. Sonenshein, the head of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. “But he’s really made a comeback that will pay off in a statewide race. He has politically recovered in a lot of ways.” Maria Elena Durazo, the executive secretary treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, A.F.L.-C.I.O., said that when the mayor took office, “he jumped in, he tried to do a bunch of different things. Some panned out, some didn’t.” “In the last year, I think he’s settled down to become much more thoughtful,” she said. “The ideas that he’s pushing forward, he’s really been focused on them. Maybe he learned some stuff from the first few years.” None of which is to say that Mr. Villaraigosa has recaptured the electric popularity that he enjoyed in the flush of his initial election, as a mayor of Mexican descent in a city with a vibrant and expanding population of Mexican-Americans. (He was its first Latino mayor in more than a century.) When his convention appointment was announced, a group of city workers that has battled with the mayor responded on its Twitter account: “Can this genius really be advancing politically after the disaster he has been to Los Angeles?” One of the people seeking to succeed him, Austin Beutner, whom Mr. Villaraigosa appointed as his first deputy mayor, has been sharply critical of “the barnyard called City Hall,” as he describes his former place of work. For his part, Mr. Villaraigosa, in the interview, argued that he had repaired much of the damage he caused with the affair, but he also attributed many of his difficulties to an economy that had forced a retrenchment and layoffs. Asked to list the disappointments of the past seven years, Mr. Villaraigosa, characteristically, pushed aside the query to respond with a detailed list of what he viewed as under-recognized accomplishments: crime rates at record lows, a rollback of gang activity, a $40 billion mass transit system financed by a half-cent tax he helped persuade voters to pass, and tough environmental regulations. While there may be some dispute as to how much credit Mr. Villaraigosa deserves for all that — crime is going down across the country — it is a more substantive record than he would have been able to boast about a few years ago.
