And while no one has ever made the leap directly from a mayor's office to the oval one, there is reason to think that might not be such an outlandish proposition for Democrats in 2020.
Garcetti has also been making the rounds in other early primary and caucus states, including both New Hampshire and South Carolina. Next month, he is holding a fundraiser for the South Carolina Democratic Party that is expected to bring in US$100,000.
And Garcetti is not the only city leader who might be in the presidential mix. Among the others being mentioned are New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and New York City's Bill de Blasio. Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is a popular keynote speaker at state party dinners, and he has a political action committee that is spending money in Iowa, Michigan, Arizona, Colorado and other states.
"I think that what the country is seeing is they need leaders, and they're looking for where the leaders are, and you can find a whole bucket-load of them that are really good that are running the cities of America," Landrieu said recently as he launched a tour to promote his new book.
"It's hard to argue that governors and senators and congressmen and maybe businessmen are more capable of being the president than the mayors that have run some of the biggest cities - and in some cases, some of the smallest cities - in the country."
Mayors have run for president in the past and not gotten very far. That is rooted in part to an antipathy to cities in political culture that goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson.
Both Sam Yorty of Los Angeles and John V. Lindsay of New York vied - briefly and forgettably - for the Democratic nomination in 1972. As recently as the 2008 race, New Yorker Rudolph Giuliani, still with the glow of having guided his city through 9/11, was considered the early Republican front-runner, until the limits of his appeal beyond the Hudson River became clear.
But if there is any lesson from the last presidential election, it may be that the kind of credentials once considered a prerequisite for the office may actually be a liability. After all, who would have predicted that a reality-TV star and real-estate developer with no government experience would be sitting in the White House today?
And these are not the days of the old city-machine politics. Mayors have the advantage of not being infected with a Beltway taint, putting them in a good position to campaign as outsiders.
In some respects, they represent the kind of consensus-oriented activism that used to be associated with governors, before state capitals became so politically polarised.
Meanwhile, inner suburban areas have joined urban ones as diverse strongholds of the Democratic base, even as President Donald Trump demonises cities as lawless wastelands.
"I come from the home of the Korean short rib taco," Garcetti told a group of Asian and Latino activists at the Iowa state capitol.
And crucially, at a time when the Democratic Party is looking for new faces and fresh story lines, its crop of young, dynamic mayors offers some of the most compelling ones.
The number of Democratic governors, traditionally the party's presidential varsity roster, has dwindled to 16 - down from 29 when Barack Obama was inaugurated. In the Senate, on the other hand, so many Democrats are positioning themselves to run that it is hard to tell whether any of them will be able to emerge from the pack the way Obama did in 2008.
Garcetti, 47, talks frequently about his Jewish-Italian-Mexican lineage and the fact that his grandfather, who was carried across the border as a baby and who fought in World War II, "was what we would call a dreamer, before that term was ever used."
The antidote to tribalism may be in finding those kinds of commonalities, which is something that people who run our cities have to do every day.
Whether a mayor could actually win the presidency remains a questionable proposition. But the fact that so many of them are thinking about running suggests that maybe our politics are not so broken after all.
