It wasn’t working for many in Huntington Beach, actually. Ortiz’s brief foray into municipal politics illustrates why celebrities and politics are rarely a great mix: Skill at garnering attention doesn’t automatically translate into competence with the day-to-day work of elected office.
The area around Huntington Beach, California’s Orange County, was once a hotbed of support for the ultra-conservative John Birch Society. Even as the region has become more centrist — Joe Biden won more votes than Donald Trump last year — it retains pockets where the far right meets the far wacky. Anti-mask protests attracted significant attention, for example, though polls showed a large majority of Orange County residents considered covid a real threat.
Ortiz saw opportunity in this discord. The former MMA fighter, an Ultimate Fighting Championship Hall of Famer, got into politics last year. He raged at local rallies against masking and lockdowns, over time insulting a wide swath of people, including Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and podcaster Joe Rogan (whom he dubbed “a quitter” for leaving California for Texas).
His flamboyant speech attracted attention — and fans. He won election to the City Council with a vote total that broke city records, which set him up to serve as mayor pro tempore.
Things went downhill from there. Ortiz’s short tenure was marked by high-profile controversies, including a verbal altercation with a constituent at a local food bank and getting caught filing for unemployment benefits even as the city paid him a salary for serving on its council.
Ortiz picked a feud with the school district when he refused to send his sons to class wearing masks, as required. He himself refused to wear a mask to city council meetings, forcing the body to meet virtually until recently for fear of police turning up to enforce state law. "I am not going to allow a spectacle,” Huntington Beach Mayor Kim Carr told Ortiz. “Your plan is to create a commotion.”
He is, of course, no stranger to spectacle. When a popular burger joint refused to serve Ortiz early this year after he entered the establishment minus a mask, he berated it on social media. He was quickly forced to apologize, though, as even many hard-core Ortiz supporters opposed potentially damaging a local business in the midst of the pandemic recession.
To Fred Smoller, a professor of political science at Chapman University and longtime observer of Orange County politics, Ortiz, like his hero Trump, appeared to want the prestige, fame and celebrity of public office, but without the tedious, often invisible labor involved.
Right-leaning skepticism of covid might have helped sweep Ortiz into office, but as the pandemic threat recedes, local politics is returning to more local concerns. Huntington Beach rarely offers its elected officials a national audience. It’s the local cable public access station. In the moments before Ortiz read his resignation statement, the people who spoke in the public-comments portion of the city council meeting voiced concerns about pending appointments to a city mobile-home advisory board and inadequate federal regulation of olive oil. This is not the sort of stuff that makes for political YouTube stardom.
Ortiz wasn’t up for the actual work, Smoller says. “When the going got tough, Ortiz got going,” he told me.
Perhaps, if there is an upside to Ortiz’s controversies, his exit is a sign that we are all moving on. Many of us want to party this summer — witness the thousands who arrived for Lopez’s birthday bash last month, and the copycat gatherings it inspired in other places. Then again, Ortiz is on social media, raging about the “corruption” of Huntington Beach’s government and seemingly promising a return. “Don’t worry. My time is bad now but I’ll rise again,” he posted Thursday. Here’s hoping his next kickback doesn’t involve politics.
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