Hahn’s Big Ally? Incumbency

The contours of the Los Angeles mayoral race have sharpened, with incumbent James K. Hahn drawing on the powers of office to strengthen advantages he holds over four challengers -- even as they pound him relentlessly over a City Hall corruption investigation.

The mayoralty has offered Hahn automatic television exposure that none of his rivals can attract, and his power over city government has helped him lock down major sources of support, such as organized labor. He has raised more money than any other candidate.

But with just over six weeks until the March 8 election, Hahn’s opponents are amplifying one another’s attacks on his integrity and portraying him as an uninspiring failure as mayor.

In effect, they have joined forces in laying out a rationale for voters to dump Hahn, and the sparring in recent debates has shed light on the strategy each is pursuing to distinguish himself from the rest of the field.

Two candidates, former Assembly Speakers Antonio Villaraigosa and Bob Hertzberg, have raised enough money to set the stage for what all sides expect to be a brutal television ad battle. It will reach full pitch in late February.

“I don’t think there will be anybody untarnished,” said Hahn campaign ad maker Bill Carrick, who warned that any candidate who runs spots against the mayor will “get it right back in the face.”

A lag in fundraising by two other Hahn challengers, Bernard C. Parks and Richard Alarcon, has made it more difficult for each of them to run a high-profile citywide campaign.

Still, looming uncertainties suggest the the race could change in important ways. Among the biggest questions: Which candidates will be hurt most by the television ad assault? Will labor unions, Indian tribes or other outside forces scramble the dynamics of the race by mounting independent television or mail campaigns, as they did four years ago? Will developments in the criminal investigation weaken Hahn’s standing in what is already a tough reelection fight?

It also is too early to gauge the impact of the candidates’ jostling for support across the city’s complex patchwork of ethnic groups.

Parks, for example, hopes to unite black voters behind his candidacy -- even though they have long been a bulwark for Hahn -- while Alarcon is competing for part of Villaraigosa’s wide base of Latino support from the 2001 election.

For Hahn, incumbency is the main tool at his disposal. In myriad ways, he has used it to enhance his prospects for a second term, most visibly by drawing news crews in recent days to man-on-the-job events, including rainstorm updates on mudslide cleanups and pothole repairs. Anyone who calls 311 to report a pothole gets a taped greeting from Hahn, in English and Spanish, before an operator picks up the line.

On Friday, Hahn’s City Hall office invited the media to cover his next crime-fighting announcement with Police Chief William J. Bratton in Hollywood on Monday. Hahn’s frequent appearances with the popular chief have served to remind voters of the drop in crime on the mayor’s watch, his No. 1 campaign theme.

Other top city officials have also been assets to Hahn’s campaign. Last week, several mayoral aides used their clout among Democratic loyalists to help Hahn block the party from backing Villaraigosa, depriving the Eastside councilman of a top benefactor of his 2001 mayoral run.

Like the labor unions, which also supported Villaraigosa in the 2001 race, Democrats were in a difficult bind: Backing anyone other than Hahn would mean flouting the power of a sitting mayor.

Much of Hahn’s campaign money is also the fruit of incumbency; many of his donors have a stake in business at City Hall.

“Incumbency is a gift from the heavens, and you have to really affirmatively screw up to turn it into a liability,” said Darry Sragow, a Los Angeles campaign strategist unaligned in the mayoral race.

Hahn’s challengers argue that the mayor has done precisely that. All four have tried to taint him by calling attention to the investigation of allegations that his administration traded city contracts for campaign donations.

Most aggressive has been Parks, a freshman city councilman and former Los Angeles police chief who has sought to define himself as a non-politician with a strong law-and-order record.

Although no official in Hahn’s administration has been charged with a crime and the mayor himself denies wrongdoing, Parks often pledges to clean up “corruption” at City Hall. Invoking the graft under Los Angeles Mayor Frank Shaw in the 1930s, Parks accused Hahn last week of running a government “far more corrupt than we’ve had since the Shaw administration.”

“We all know what happened in the Shaw administration,” Parks told Democrats at a party meeting Tuesday night. (Voters recalled Shaw in 1938.)

For Alarcon, a San Fernando Valley state senator, the investigations are the foundation of his showcase campaign proposal, a ballot measure to put a $100 cap on campaign contributions from developers or city contractors.

But the attacks from Alarcon and Parks are apt to gain little exposure because neither has raised enough money to buy more than minimal television advertising time.

So more troublesome to Hahn, who had $2.4 million on hand at the end of December, are the shots coming from Villaraigosa and Hertzberg, who each had $1.6 million in the bank.

Following Alarcon’s lead, Villaraigosa has pledged to release his own proposal to toughen city ethics laws. On his campaign website, he describes City Hall as “paralyzed by the corruption scandals.”

“I don’t want ‘pay to play,’ ” he told the Democratic gathering on Tuesday. “I want to open up City Hall to you.”

More broadly, Villaraigosa has painted Hahn as a failed leader with a paltry record of accomplishment. Implicitly, he has invited contrasts between what some see as his magnetic personality and the mayor’s low-key style. “Leadership,” Villaraigosa told business leaders Thursday at a mayoral forum downtown, “is about electing someone who can inspire you that we can do better.”

David Doak, Villaraigosa’s media strategist, described Hahn’s record as “a millstone around his neck.”

“People understand that this is a guy who hasn’t moved strongly to lead the city and has not advanced a strong agenda for the city,” Doak said.

Offsetting any edge that Hahn might have through incumbency, he added, is the “sideshow of scandal that is swirling around his political operation.”

As for Hertzberg, his emphasis at recent campaign stops has been his policy agenda, mainly proposals to break apart the Los Angeles Unified School District, block tax increases and ease traffic with such steps as barring rush-hour road construction.

Nonetheless, Hertzberg faulted Hahn at a Sherman Oaks forum Wednesday for hiring a top fundraiser from his 2001 campaign as the deputy mayor overseeing the city’s airport, harbor, and water and power agencies. The deputy mayor, Troy Edwards, has since resigned.

“What kind of a message does that send to anybody?” asked Hertzberg, who went on to suggest it was inevitable that campaign donations would influence city contracts at those agencies. “Come on. It set the tone in a way that was just inappropriate.”

In response, Hahn has lumped together the two former state lawmakers, Villaraigosa and Hertzberg, as “Sacramento politicians,” an unpopular label among voters. Hahn has stressed that both accepted millions from supporters who sought favorable treatment from the Legislature. His campaign has gone out of its way to note the more controversial donors, such as the failed energy giant Enron.

Hahn has also accused the two of shortchanging Los Angeles on state aid needed for police and fire protection.

“It was wrong for Sacramento politicians to take that to balance their budget mess,” Hahn said at a mayoral forum earlier this month.

As for the leadership question, Hahn argues that his support for dumping Parks as police chief and his campaign against Valley secession show that he makes tough decisions “regardless of the political consequences.”

Those arguments are likely outlines for the television ad brawl to come. But multiple-candidate assaults can have unpredictable results: Each of the three well-financed contenders faces the risk of getting into a direct fight with one opponent, which could offer the third a chance to advance.

“In multi-candidate fields, you have to be careful about getting into negative wars,” said Doak, the Villaraigosa strategist.

Of the three, Hertzberg faces perhaps the most difficult challenge in building support, because he is the least well-known. Hahn has held elected office for 24 years, and Villaraigosa gained national prominence as a mayoral contender in 2001, but most Los Angeles voters know little or nothing about the former Sherman Oaks lawmaker.

Moreover, Hahn has an incentive to keep Hertzberg from defining himself on his own terms: Hertzberg’s presumed political base of Valley residents, Jews and Republicans, are crucial voting blocs for the mayor.

“No other candidate will allow self-promoting Bob Hertzberg ads that go unchallenged,” said Carrick, Hahn’s media strategist.

Beyond the television ads, the large field of candidates means it could take less than a third of the vote in the March election to win a spot in the May runoff, which elevates the importance of campaign mail and telephone calls to voters.

“A lot of this turns on fairly precise, intelligent targeting of the voters,” Sragow said. “And a lot of that happens below the surface.”