L.A. mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt is making a big splash, but can he swim?

Spencer Pratt, please call me.

We must talk.

You say you want to be mayor of Los Angeles, but do you really?

I know that being a candidate saves you from anonymity. Career in reality TV went off the cliff. you have it CEOs support you and the fans are going crazy and you’ve managed to capture social media attention.

But at some point, you may have to answer questions from reporters you’ve been avoiding.

And if you win, you’ll have to go to city hall five, six, seven days a week, and I don’t know if you saw my column a few weeks ago, but the fountain on the south lawn hasn’t worked in about 60 years. If you get elected, you better put a wrench in your lunchbox because no one has figured out how to fix it.

So that’s almost the truth. And the unions will want what they want, and the socialists on the City Council will lie in wait, especially after President Trump blows you a kiss across the country and confirms your MAGA credentials.

More than 30,000 people are waiting for their broken sidewalks to be fixed (I’m not exaggerating) but there is no money and if you hire a few thousand more police officers as you promised, the city will be bankrupt for the next ten years and you will have to take out a loan to buy a donut.

So, like I said, call me because I think you still have time to change your mind.

If you choose to go ahead and actually win, it may feel like a sequel to the reality show “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here” and you may end up praying that the show gets canceled. The mayor’s hours are long, and everywhere you go someone will ask you to solve this or that problem, and as you wander the corridors of power you will rethink your campaign promises and hear the ever-resonating quote from HL Mencken:

“Every complex problem has a clear, simple and wrong answer.”

Can I confess something?

I feel guilty about all this.

I don’t mean to be impertinent, but I feel partly responsible for you being in contention for this job.

Like you, I was calling out too Problems with the management of Los Angeles, And I’ve been doing this for years. But I had the good sense not to run for mayor.

Why this?

Because unlike you, I know that fixes are not as easy as we would like.

When Karen Bass first ran for office, I had a long conversation with her about her homelessness plan, among other things. At the end of the day, he asked for my opinion.

I reminded him that although people wanted the city’s top elected official to clear the streets immediately, a mayor was limited to authority shared with the City Council.

Due to drug epidemics and untreated mental illnesses that are largely under county authority.

With unspecified funds from the nation’s capital.

By global forces that have transformed the economy and created staggering levels of inequality, exacerbated by high housing costs.

Bass was aware of all this, but said having worked in Sacramento and D.C. and having built relationships with district superintendents, he could create better systems and get better results.

So how did he do it?

It’s not great. And then there’s the fire.

As I said before, leaving the country despite forecasts of increased bushfire risk was probably the biggest mistake of his political career.

I don’t need to remind you of this. As someone who lost your home in the Palisades, you know that Bass responded poorly, then stumbled on rebuilding, and then played a role in downplaying the Fire Department’s failure to adequately disperse and extinguish the fire that became an inferno.

To sum up, he has left himself wide open to a challenge.

And if you two beat out Assemblywoman Nithya Raman and the other candidates in the June 2 primary, he probably can’t believe how lucky he is that you could be his opponent in November.

I don’t find it against you that you haven’t worked in government or politics before. Many voters prefer foreigners these days. But if you had done something meaningful at some point in your life, like running a successful business or volunteering at a food bank, that might help. Were you middle school class president or in the Boy Scouts? Anything can help.

It’s not like being someone’s boyfriend and then husband on the MTV reality show “The Hills,” which follows the work of a woman who goes from “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County” to an internship at Teen Vogue, can’t prepare a young man for statesmanship.

In this culture, you can take it all the way to the White House.

But the weak resume might explain why he took so many social media-fueled photos without offering anything of substance to Bass, Spencer said.

Let’s arrest the drug zombies.

OK, what happens next?

I recommend reading my colleagues Doug Smith and Andrew Khouri’s book about what you can and can’t do about homelessness as a mayor in Los Angeles. Frankly, you have a lot to do. In fact, I’m reminded of what a Philadelphia columnist said years ago about an unfit politician: He stands in shallow water for so long he doesn’t realize he can’t swim.

If I were you, I’d think President Trump made the mistake of promising easy solutions. It would deliver a massive infrastructure program. He would reform better and cheaper healthcare for everyone. He was going to lower consumer prices on Day One and here we are; While millions of people wonder how they will pay their bills, Trump is cheating so he doesn’t have to pay the IRS.

With all that said, I’m glad you decided to run, because elected officials need constant reminders that their jobs are not safe, even when opponents are in over their heads. I would almost like to see her win because this is a reality show I would definitely watch.

And I say this despite the fact that you once told your talk show friend Alex Jones, who insisted that 9/11 was an inside job and that the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 children was a hoax, that the melting ice caps were exaggerated. Or, As you explained to Jones, “We’ve all seen images of polar bears swimming towards new patches of ice.”

Will you know how to swim when the general elections come and the ice starts to melt?

steve.lopez@latimes.com