If basic common sense and a lackluster list of challengers headlined by gadflies and perennial protest candidates are any indication, this much is all but certain: On Tuesday, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will be re-elected to lead Los Angeles for another four years.

Confident enough to skip candidate forums and sufficiently comfortable with his record to run on what he considers a string of triumphs in the areas of public safety, education, environmental issues and job-creation, Villaraigosa is in command of the L.A. political establishment in a way that has not been seen for decades.

Still uncertain is whether the mayor — whose potential candidacy for governor is the subject of increasingly persistent chatter, and whose ties to the Obama administration seem to grow stronger by the day — will be in L.A. for his entire second term. While sidestepping that matter for the moment, he does invite voters to judge his record by quantifiable progress on a host of issues. On Monday, Wave Executive Editor André Herndon and Managing Editor Don Wanlass met with Villaraigosa inside his private City Hall office, where they discussed everything from crime rates and the progress of his schools initiative (“we’re going to double the success” of schools that are part of the Mayor’s Partnership) to whether the former Assembly speaker is eyeing a return to Sacramento in 2010.

On crime: “Since I’ve been elected, violent crime has gone down more than 45 percent. Last year, we went nearly two months without a homicide in Watts for the first time in almost 50 years. … We said we’d grow [the police department] by 1,000 officers by 2010. We’re at 694, on our way to 1,000. … Our department is reform-oriented, community-collaborative, respectful of the community they serve in a way we haven’t seen in a very long time — maybe ever. I put a civil rights leader at the head of the Police Commission, John Mack … It’s a different department.”

On jobs: “Summer youth jobs in South L.A. — when I became mayor, we started out with less than 3,000 summer youth jobs. Today we’re at 15,000. And with the federal stimulus dollars … we  expect to get maybe expecting 10,000 summer youth jobs over and above what we’re already doing. … We have created 50,000-plus jobs through direct activity that the city is engaged in [an aide later e-mailed The Wave, upping the figure to 65,000]. In an unprecedented way, we are engaged in workforce development … What we used to do, we used to train people for minimum-wage jobs in our WorkSource Centers. We don’t do that any more … we’re working all together to train people for the growth jobs.”

On schools: “I’ve made education my top priority … I’ve never made a lot of ado about the fact that I was the first [Latino mayor of L.A. in more than a century] … But when kids ask me how I got there, first thing I say is, ‘I can read and write.’ I made the public schools a priority because I went to these schools, and I know that we can do a better job of educating our kids. … When we took over Gompers, it had four or five bathrooms that were closed for five years. If all I had wanted to do was tinker around the edges, I would have done what every mayor’s done before me. The great Tom Bradley started LA’s BEST — 180 after-school programs that were started … over a 20-year period. Fifty have been established since I’ve been mayor. … What should you judge me by in the next four years? The kind of sustained improvement — not just in academics, but in safety, in cleanliness, in parent and teacher participation.”

On pollution: “I said [in his 2005 inaugural speech] the cleanest big city in America. When I said that, I’ve seen videotape, it pans the audiences and you see some of the politicians [rolls his eyes], you know, ‘Come on, L.A. has the dirtiest air in America.’ When I became mayor we were at less than three percent renewables, green power. I said we were going to get to 20 percent by 2010. On Oct. 1, 2008 we were at 10 percent, on our way … it’s working.”