Villaraigosa Puts Mayor on Defensive

Two days after winning a spot in the Los Angeles mayoral runoff, Antonio Villaraigosa stood before a bank of TV cameras and vowed to root out “the waste and fraud infesting our city departments.”

At his side was City Controller Laura Chick, who pledged support for Villaraigosa and challenged the propriety of public contracts awarded by his opponent, Mayor James K. Hahn.

“The question is, who’s benefiting -- that’s the work of the federal and county grand juries,” said Chick, whose audits helped spark criminal investigations of alleged trading of city contracts for campaign donations.

Those remarks at Villaraigosa’s campaign headquarters in Boyle Heights on Thursday were part of a push by Hahn’s challenger to keep the mayor on the defensive.

Yet even as Hahn prepares to strike back, the mayor is grappling with a difficult question: Have his political troubles grown so large that voters will not believe him when he attacks Villaraigosa?

“He’s going to have real credibility problems,” said Thomas Hollihan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at USC.

Negative campaigns always run the risk of backfiring. But for Hahn, that risk is unusually high, Hollihan said, because of his low popularity rating -- a majority of voters held an unfavorable view of him -- and the frequent charge by opponents that he hit Villaraigosa below the belt in an ad during the runoff four years ago.

“There will be more skepticism,” he said.

Hahn has often denied there was anything wrong with his 2001 television ad faulting Villaraigosa for seeking the early prison release of a convicted drug trafficker whose father gave him campaign money. While not disputing the facts of the ad, critics said its images -- a crack pipe and grainy pictures of Villaraigosa -- stoked prejudices against Latinos.

Hahn reprised that attack in the run-up to Tuesday’s first round of voting in the mayoral race, pounding Villaraigosa and another rival for writing “official letters to get a convicted crack cocaine dealer pardoned.” This time, the ad did not show a crack pipe.

Villaraigosa, who was slow to react to the 2001 assault, responded immediately with his own blistering spot on “corruption,” “contracting scandals” and alleged “money laundering” by a Hahn fundraiser.

Since Tuesday, when he squeaked through the first round with 24% of the vote, Hahn has largely shunned attacks on Villaraigosa. Yet even as he focused on promoting his record on crime and jobs, Hahn has hinted at the more hostile engagement ahead.

“Campaigning is not a sport for the timid,” the mayor said Friday on a radio talk show when asked about negative tactics.

“People are people,” the mayor added. “You are much more likely to remember something negative about somebody than something positive about somebody. I wish we weren’t like that as human beings, but that’s kind of the way we are.”

Hahn campaign media strategist Bill Carrick was more explicit, saying Villaraigosa has “a long and rich public record that’s going to get thoroughly explored.”

Responding to shots from Villaraigosa at his appearance with Chick, Carrick said: “If he wants to make this about character, he’ll end up with a more negative campaign, and then he has to defend all his judgments and activities as a public official. This is a man who has raised millions of dollars, pushed special-interest legislation -- clearly been influenced by support he’s been given financially.”

But when Hahn tries to make such arguments in television ads, many voters are unlikely to listen -- and even less so when he tries to promote his own candidacy, said Garry South, chief strategist for the 2002 reelection campaign of Gov. Gray Davis, who narrowly won a second term.

South, who supports Villaraigosa, said there were parallels between Hahn’s predicament now and the situation faced in 2002 by Davis, whose poll ratings were dismal.

“Voters came to the conclusion that he wasn’t up to the job and he wasn’t doing the job,” South said of Davis. “Once that feeling got ensconced in the pit of their stomach, there was no getting rid of it. They had written him out of the play. My guess is that’s exactly where Jim Hahn is today.”

After mounting what South described as a “slash and burn” campaign against his Republican challenger, Bill Simon, Davis, a Democrat, pulled off a 5-point victory.

But in a state that leans Democratic, Simon’s conservative views were well to the right of most California voters, and his campaign was beset by tactical blunders, which eased the path for Davis. His victory was temporary: The governor was thrown out of office the next year in the recall.

On Tuesday, a Times exit poll found that a majority of voters disapproved of Hahn’s job performance. Among those who voted for someone other than Hahn or Villaraigosa -- those who are presumably up for grabs in the runoff -- the mayor’s ratings were substantially worse.

“He’s not a credible messenger for his own case because he’s so poorly regarded by the voters,” said Eric Jaye, a media strategist who advised the defunct mayoral campaign of City Councilman Bernard C. Parks.

Other shifts in the dynamics of the rematch do not favor Hahn. When he attacked Villaraigosa in 2001, the former Assembly speaker, now a city councilman, was unknown to many Los Angeles voters. So when Hahn launched his runoff campaign that year by saying Villaraigosa showed “a lack of concern and a lack of compassion for victims of crime,” few had enough independent knowledge to form their own judgment.

But this time, Villaraigosa starts off as a widely known politician -- one well-liked by city voters. The Times exit poll found 71% of voters who cast ballots Tuesday held a favorable impression of Villaraigosa -- giving him a well of credibility that Hahn can only envy.

“People are far more comfortable with him,” said Villaraigosa strategist David Doak. “People believe Antonio has vision. They don’t think that Hahn has vision. People believe that Antonio has energy. They don’t think Hahn has energy.”

A delicate task for Hahn is navigating the ethnic politics of attacking a candidate who would be the city’s first Latino mayor since 1872. The mayor and his campaign advisors are acutely aware of the potential for a backlash; Parks, an African American, said weeks ago that Hahn’s 2001 campaign against Villaraigosa was racist, a charge the Hahn forces adamantly denied.

“We’re not going to be intimidated from telling the truth,” Carrick said, adding: “Somebody who wants to vote for us because they don’t want to vote for a Mexican American, we don’t want their ... vote. That’s the truth. We’re not going to do anything to encourage people in any way, shape or form to see our campaign as a vehicle for expressing those feelings.”

Citing Hahn’s “lifetime record of being deeply committed to diversity” and civil rights, he said, “We have nothing but an absolute commitment to running a campaign that’s going to be about issues and people’s positions and their public records, and nothing else.”