Democrats Turn Up the Heat at Forums

Two Democrats vying for their party’s nomination to challenge Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger traded jabs Saturday over campaign cash, taxes and moral backbone as they dashed across the Westside and South Bay for scrappy back-to-back appearances before party loyalists.

The latest flare-up between state Controller Steve Westly and Treasurer Phil Angelides stemmed from a $5-million television ad campaign to be launched this week for Angelides by his longtime mentor, Sacramento developer Angelo K. Tsakopoulos, and his daughter, Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis.

At a Culver City candidate forum, Westly called such large outside spending efforts -- which are not restricted by donation limits that apply to candidates -- a “corrosive” force in California politics that ought to be banned. “It’s just plain wrong,” he said.

Angelides echoed Westly in proposing to outlaw such independent spending -- even if it could revive the treasurer’s cash-strapped campaign at a time when polls show Westly has pulled ahead among likely voters in the June 6 primary. (But when asked about the independent effort Friday night, he had said that if the Tsakopoulos group wished to mount such a campaign, “so be it.”)

Angelides also condemned Westly, a dotcom mogul, for spending $22.5 million of his personal fortune on the campaign. “I don’t think you ought to be able to buy the governorship,” Angelides told several hundred Democrats at the forum.

In remarks to reporters outside, Westly snapped back: “Mr. Angelides is a multimillionaire himself who’s put millions of his own dollars in campaigns in the past, so I think it’s a little disingenuous for him, above others, to say that.”

The biting tone among Democrats extended beyond the gubernatorial race as candidates for other statewide jobs appeared at the same gatherings Saturday in Culver City and Harbor City.

In the race for attorney general, Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown and Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo tangled over abortion, medical marijuana, crime fighting and personal style.

Brown, a former California governor, touted his wide-ranging experience.

Delgadillo criticized Brown for an increase in shootings in Oakland and questioned his loyalty to the party and its platform supporting abortion rights.

At both forums, Delgadillo, who was down 41 points in the Field Poll this week, attacked Brown’s decision to write a clemency letter in 1988 on behalf of Joan Andrews Bell, a protester with a history of disrupting abortion clinics.

“He says he is pro-choice, but he wrote a letter on behalf of an abortion terrorist for clemency, to get out of jail early, which she did, and then went on to attack more abortion clinics across the United States,” Delgadillo said.

Brown, who has a long record of favoring abortion rights, said in an interview outside Culver City Veterans Memorial Auditorium that he wrote the letter at the request of Mother Teresa.

“It’s absurd,” he said of the criticism. “When Mother Teresa asks you to do something that is fairly reasonable, most people would do it. [Bell] spent 2 1/2 years in solitary confinement. The sentence was longer than a lot of robbers were getting at the time. I said it was wrong, what she did, but the question was, was 2 1/2 years in solitary confinement enough?”

Delgadillo said crime, including homicide, is down in Los Angeles, in part because of his extensive use of injunctions against more than 30 street gangs, as well as his placement of prosecutors in city neighborhoods.

“In Oakland, headlines: Bloodshed continues in the city,” Delgadillo said. “I think you can do something about it.”

Brown said gang injunctions were “overrated.”

“I did something better. I’ve asked for felons who commit crimes at night and are convicted to be given night curfew,” Brown said.

He noted that he moved into one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, so he has a personal stake in reducing crime, and that economic development is one crime-fighting tool.

“Here’s the miracle,” Brown said. “Since I’ve become mayor, 10,000 new people have come into Oakland in new condominiums, new apartments and new housing. That’s a revitalization of the core of one of our most distressed cities. I will take the same can-do attitude to Sacramento.”

Brown said that crime was down 28% during his seven years in office compared with the previous seven years and that he has learned as mayor how to solve practical problems.

“I have gone from ‘Gov. Moonbeam’ to ‘Mayor Pothole,’ ” he quipped at one point, resurrecting a gibe from the past.

Brown said he would be a strong advocate for California’s medical marijuana law, but Delgadillo criticized his record, saying several medical marijuana centers have closed in Oakland while Brown has been mayor.

Brown said the attacks by his opponent will not resonate with voters.

“When you come out of the box as a nasty and an unknown, it doesn’t work quite as well. People want to know who you are,” Brown said.

Though both candidates spoke with passion, Brown’s no-holds-barred demeanor proved a crowd-pleaser, drawing some of the loudest applause of the day.

“I will be an unusual attorney general,” he said at one point. “I won’t be like the other ones. That place is so dull up there right now that you need someone to stir it up, and I will stir it up, for you, for the people, for the powerless, for the environment.”

In the race for governor, Westly drew on his improved poll ratings to argue that he was “the one Democrat in this race who can beat Arnold Schwarzenegger.” He used Angelides’ outspoken support for higher taxes to make his case that the treasurer could not beat the Republican incumbent.

“I’m not opposed to new taxes,” Westly told 200 Democrats in Harbor City. “We may need them, but they are the last resort, not the first resort. If you want a candidate who thinks the answer to every problem is new taxes ... there is another candidate in the race for you.”

Angelides and Westly both pledged more efficiency in government. But Angelides said California cannot balance its budget and give schools the money they need unless the state takes some of the billions of dollars that wealthy people and corporations have gained through “obscene tax cuts.”

“Anyone who comes before you and says they can wave the magic wand and close that budget gap without rolling back some of these tax cuts for people making more than half a million dollars a year, and corporations, just isn’t telling the truth,” Angelides told the crowd in Culver City.

Angelides also portrayed himself as a candidate who would stand his moral ground. He depicted Westly as a man guided by political expediency, citing the controller’s alliance with Schwarzenegger in the campaign for a $15-billion debt plan on the March 2004 ballot.

“As governor, I won’t wobble,” Angelides told Democrats at the doughnuts-and-coffee gathering in a Harbor City union hall. “I won’t equivocate. I won’t say I’ll do it as a last resort. I’ll do it because it’s right.”

Westly told the same group he had “stood up against Gov. Schwarzenegger” when they disagreed on school cuts and other matters. He also reminded crowds at both gatherings that organized labor and every prominent Democrat in California had supported the 2004 debt measure -- and that the only major ally of Angelides in the opposition campaign was a conservative Republican state senator.

“The question I have is, why was my primary opponent running around the state with Tom McClintock?” Westly said.