Mayor Escalates Attacks on Rival

In a move to blunt the momentum of Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa’s campaign to unseat him, Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn went on the attack Friday, saying voters could not trust his challenger to “tell the truth.”

Hahn accused his rival of making contradictory statements to different crowds during the 2001 mayoral race on whether he would keep Bernard C. Parks as police chief. He called it part of “a pattern now with this guy where you can’t believe what he says.”

“This election is about trust,” Hahn told reporters at his Miracle Mile campaign headquarters. “And I’m fed up with some guy who thinks he can say one thing to one crowd, another thing to another crowd, deny it, and then say, ‘Well, that was all in the past.’ ”

Hahn’s offensive capped a week of significant gains for Villaraigosa, who won endorsements from the county Democratic Party on Tuesday and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) on Thursday.

The party, which took the rare step of snubbing an incumbent Democratic mayor, could spend a large sum of money on Villaraigosa’s behalf. And Waters, who has substantial influence among black voters, has put her formidable South Los Angeles political operation at Villaraigosa’s disposal for the May 17 runoff.

Darry Sragow, a campaign consultant unaligned in the mayoral race, said Hahn has taken the predictable approach. “When you are an incumbent in trouble -- and the mayor clearly is -- you have one strategy available, and that is to dice and slice your opponent,” he said. “You fundamentally have to say, ‘I may not be great, but my opponent is totally out of the question.’ ”

Referring to the 2004 presidential race and the 2002 California gubernatorial contest, Sragow added: “George Bush did it to John Kerry, Gray Davis did it to Bill Simon.”

In the March 8 election, Hahn lagged 9 percentage points behind Villaraigosa, who finished first with 33%, followed by the mayor, who won 24%.

Villaraigosa responded to Hahn’s attack Friday by calling the mayor “desperate,” saying that he “will say and do anything to get elected.”

“Jim Hahn is at a point in his campaign where his support is slipping throughout the city,” Villaraigosa said while dishing up macaroni and cheese to the homeless on skid row. “So what you do is you demonize the other guy. You attack his character. You call him names.”

At another stop downtown Friday, Villaraigosa picked up the endorsement of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts union. To stem the loss of movie production to other states and countries, Villaraigosa said the city should offer police, fire and paramedic services at reduced rates and waive some location fees.

If Hahn’s effort to cast Villaraigosa as untrustworthy is successful, it could offset one of the mayor’s biggest liabilities: the criminal investigation of his political fundraising and city contracting practices. All of the mayor’s top challengers in the election’s first round made the inquiry a central line of attack.

A Villaraigosa television ad, which followed a scathing Hahn spot, was especially caustic. It cited a grand jury subpoena of Hahn’s personal e-mail, “corruption in his administration,” Hahn “scandals” that led three appointees to resign and a “Hahn fundraiser charged with money laundering.”

On Thursday night, Hahn scratched his public schedule for Friday morning to hold the news conference attacking Villaraigosa instead. Aides had invited the media to Tarzana, where Hahn and Police Chief William J. Bratton were to tout a drop in crime in the San Fernando Valley, but switched plans and summoned reporters instead to the mayor’s campaign headquarters.

There, with blue-and-orange campaign signs as his backdrop, Hahn zeroed in on one of his own top political problems -- the ouster of Parks as police chief in 2002 -- and tried to turn it against Villaraigosa. Hahn’s outspoken support for replacing Parks, who is black, led to the collapse of his once-solid political base of African Americans.

Standing before a cluster of microphones, Hahn held up a cassette recorder and played a tape of Villaraigosa criticizing Parks during a March 2001 mayoral debate in Granada Hills. Villaraigosa is heard lamenting legal liability costs for police corruption in the Rampart scandal that erupted on Parks’ watch. “I’d like to be a partner with Chief Parks -- I just don’t think that he’s the right person for the job,” Villaraigosa said.

Hahn contrasted those remarks to Villaraigosa’s statement at a Crenshaw High School mayoral debate two months later. The mayor pointed to two easels displaying enlarged news articles on that debate, in which Villaraigosa said: “As mayor of this city, I am committed to working with Chief Parks.”

Hahn’s apparent intent was to suggest that Villaraigosa tailored his remarks one way for a largely white crowd in the Valley and another way for African Americans in South Los Angeles -- both crucial voting blocs in the current campaign.

Hahn also played a videotape of a television news report from this week in which Villaraigosa denied that he took contradictory stands on Parks during the 2001 campaign.

“I’m watching TV last night, and I watch this guy get up there and not tell the truth again,” Hahn said. “You know what? I’m sorry. I’m not going to let him keep doing this stuff.”

Hahn also hammered Villaraigosa for telling voters in his council district that he would serve a full four-year term and not run for mayor.

“This is about trust,” Hahn said. “It is about character. I want this election to be held on those terms.”

The mayor’s ire extended to the Los Angeles Times. “Every day I’ve tried to do something positive since the runoff, his campaign has come up with something negative against me -- if you haven’t noticed,” he told a Times reporter. “I don’t see you writing about that in your little newspaper.”

At his skid row campaign stop, Villaraigosa was asked to explain his remarks on Parks four years ago.

“If I changed my mind, I’m not the first person in America to do that,” he said. “The important thing here is Jim Hahn fired Bernard Parks, not Antonio Villaraigosa.”

Parks, who finished fourth in the election, has yet to make an endorsement in the runoff. He plans to meet with Villaraigosa this weekend and with Hahn on Monday.

Villaraigosa accused Hahn of trying to “shift the blame for that firing on me” and said his own comments on Parks were “not relevant.” He did not explicitly say whether he would have kept Parks as chief.

“This is a man who fired Bernard Parks, who did so in a way that disrespected his many decades of service to the city of Los Angeles, but also disrespected certain promises he had made to a community,” Villaraigosa said. “The idea that I am now responsible for that is absolutely ludicrous.”

Villaraigosa’s campaign released a collection of comments that Hahn made about Parks in the 2001 race. Alleging a “record of deceit on this issue,” the statement charged that after leaving the impression “that he would consider reappointing Bernard Parks and then breaking his word -- how can we trust Jim Hahn?”