GOP hard-liners take aim at Cooley

Like so many other things, self-destructive, litmus-test politics is a trend that began here in California, and its consequences have helped make the state increasingly ungovernable. That hasn’t stopped the true believers among California Republicans, who may be the only people in the political universe still clinging -- albeit unwittingly -- to Lenin’s iron dictum for party discipline: better fewer, but better.

Take, for example, the potentially nasty primary campaign shaping up around the race for state attorney general. Since the days of crusading state prosecutors Earl Warren and Pat Brown, the office has been viewed as a steppingstone to the governor’s mansion. This time around, the Democratic primary looks like the 405 Freeway at 5 p.m. on a rainy Friday. The announced candidates include a Facebook executive and three state assemblymen, and the likely front-runner -- San Francisco Dist. Atty. Kamala Harris -- categorically opposes capital punishment, which puts her out of step with a majority of California voters.

The GOP, on the other hand, so far has a compact field of three candidates: former Chapman University Law School dean John Eastman, a conservative constitutional law scholar who once clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas; state Sen. Tom Harman of Huntington Beach, a onetime law partner of former Gov. George Deukmejian; and Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley.

Normative political calculation would make Cooley the Republican front-runner. He’s the longest-serving L.A. district attorney in 70 years and, as a Republican, has been elected to countywide office three times by an overwhelmingly Democratic constituency. He’s also run one of the largest local law enforcement agency in the country -- more than 1,000 prosecutors, 300 investigators and about 600 other employees -- and what amounts to one of the country’s biggest law firms.

In a recent interview, former L.A. County Dist. Atty. Bob Philobosian, now an influential Republican activist and lobbyist, called Cooley “everything a district attorney should be -- a natural leader, ethical, honest, candid, innovative, hardworking and inspirational.” As a consequence, Philobosian said, Cooley has earned “equally high marks from defense attorneys, victims rights groups and police agencies.”

Los Angeles County Public Defender Michael Judge calls Cooley somebody with whom he can “disagree without being disagreeable” and gives him high marks “for political courage.”

In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of California Republican politics, however, none of this matters -- nor does the fact that most uninvolved political professionals think that if Cooley makes it to the general election, he’ll be the odds-on favorite. Cooley is under attack from his party’s right wing for deviating from partisan orthodoxy on the “three strikes” law, a litmus test for the state GOP’s red-meat eaters.

Like many criminal justice reforms enacted through initiative, the three-strikes measure lacks any sense of proportionality. A defendant can be sent away for life if the third strike is for a violent felony or a minor property crime. Cooley has attempted to address that irrationality by imposing internal rules for third-strike prosecutions. As a result, prosecutors under Cooley’s supervision don’t seek third-strike convictions for minor offenses that do not involve violence, injury to a victim, firearms or other deadly weapons or a large quantity of drugs. In 2006, Cooley backed an unsuccessful statewide effort to reform the three-strikes measure along those lines.

As a consequence, GOP activist and victims advocate Mike Reynolds -- who was one of the original initiative’s authors -- has declared Cooley unfit for the party’s nomination. In a widely circulated Internet commentary, Reynolds wrote: “I cannot say it any more clearly -- Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley should absolutely not run for attorney general. Many of his liberal, pro-criminal rights positions -- particularly his aggressive history of attempts to weaken ‘three strikes’ with criminal-rights Democrat Sen. Gloria Romero . . . make him completely unsuitable for the office . . .”

Reynolds, by the way, is a Harman supporter, and both his website and Eastman’s are quick to draw attention to their differences with Cooley over three strikes. Both may have all sorts of serious philosophical or policy quarrels with L.A.’s D.A., but the notion that Cooley, a career prosecutor, former reserve Los Angeles police officer and son of an FBI agent, is in any way soft on crime or “pro-criminal” is nonsense.

Reynolds’ attack on Cooley reflects precisely the penchant for extremist purity that has consigned California’s Republican Party to the margins of state politics in recent decades. When a party allows its internal deliberations to feed on this sort of willful fantasy, it undermines the entire system’s integrity.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com