Stein Pins Hopes on TV in City Attorney Race

After a year of speaking about issues to any group that would listen, novice politico and aspiring Los Angeles city attorney Ted Stein knows his voice did not carry very far.

Polls tell him that with less than three weeks to go until the city election April 8, not many Angelenos even know who he is.

So Stein has had to accept the idea that his chances of unseating incumbent James K. Hahn hinge more on the effectiveness of his television commercials than his presentation of issues.

Those commercials, scheduled to begin airing today, not only seek to define the 46-year-old lawyer and real estate developer as someone worthy of public trust. They also seek to persuade voters that Hahn, a three-term incumbent, is unworthy.

Even Stein acknowledges that this is an uphill fight. He says that William Wardlaw, a behind-the scenes political advisor he shares with Mayor Richard Riordan, warned him from the start: “You will have to convince people of a need for a change of city attorney and that you are the person to make that change.” By contrast, Stein recalls, Wardlaw told him all “Jimmy Hahn just has to convince people that you are a piece of s---.’ ”

In an interview last week, Hahn indicated that Wardlaw gave Stein good advice. The fight over the normally low-key city attorney’s office is shaping up as an expensive and nasty one.

Hahn suggested that he will use his own commercials, which have not yet been taped, to portray Stein as a potentially dangerous, unknown quantity. Even Stein’s occupation as a developer, Hahn insinuates, raises too many questions about him to be worth the voters’ gamble.

Judging by interviews with the candidates and some of their handlers in the last week, Hahn’s biggest weapon will be Stein’s largest political regret: his failure to promptly pay property taxes on two apartment buildings he co-owns. Stein instead decided to pay the taxes on the installment plan, with penalties and interest--all totally lawful. The buildings, he said, had fallen on hard times and were not generating their usual revenue.

Hahn will deride the choice by suggesting that it shows Stein’s priorities are awry: How could Stein afford to pony up $200,000 for his own campaign, but decide with his partners not to pay $100,000 in taxes when they were due? Stein has since paid his portion of the bill.

Stein will counter by alleging that Hahn is ineffective and unworthy of another term.

He will cite statistics showing that civil liability settlements paid by the city have soared sixfold during Hahn’s 12-year stewardship. And he will argue that Hahn runs a criminal prosecution team that loses 40% of its jury trials involving the most serious misdemeanors.

Hahn says the liability settlement surge is part of a nationwide trend and blames the jury losses on inadequate police investigations of misdemeanors, stemming from a lack of resources.

“Do you think we could go back to the police [in a car break-in case] and say, ‘Did you take fingerprints?’ ” Hahn said. “They’d just laugh at us. . . . But jurors have seen TV. . . . They want to know where the fingerprints are.”

Hahn views the city attorney’s office as “the nuisance crime fighter.” He is particularly proud of innovations such as using injunctions to drive gang members off troubled streets and pooling community, police, building and safety and sanitation department resources under the guidance of his office to clean up certain drug-ridden blocks.

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In speaking to community groups, he also cites a commitment to prosecuting domestic violence, saying he revived a dormant domestic violence unit at his office and made it the largest of its kind in the country.

How vulnerable is Hahn?

According to the polls, not very.

Surveys taken in recent months by both campaigns, and by The Times, show Hahn with a giant lead.

The Times Poll in January found Hahn outpacing Stein 52% to 13% among likely voters.

Stein takes heart, however, from his own campaign’s more recent surveys, which indicate that Hahn’s strength may be wide but not deep. These surveys show that when Hahn supporters hear Stein’s messages, enough may defect to Stein to tighten the race.

After reviewing these surveys last week, Stein, a millionaire, decided to pump some of his own money into his campaign.

Stein will have a substantial monetary advantage over Hahn. The incumbent agreed to limit his spending to $990,000 to be eligible for public matching funds. Stein decided to forgo the matching funds and has already raised more than $1.2 million.

Stein is now expected to attach himself as much as possible to the coattails of the popular Riordan, whose endorsement he received last week.

Riordan, who appears to be cruising to his own reelection, has already tried to raise more money for Stein to use on television commercials and direct mail.

The mayor sent out a letter over the weekend inviting people to attend a $1,000-a-plate breakfast for Stein at a private club downtown. Riordan explained in the invitation that he endorsed Stein “because I need someone I can count on to help move the city forward, fight crime and protect taxpayers’ dollars. . . . My goals for the next four years require a city attorney who’s fighting for the right things for this city.”

Riordan is a central character in the first Stein commercial, which tells voters they have a choice between a ticket consisting of Riordan and Stein and a ticket consisting of Hahn and Riordan’s opponent, state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles).

In fact, Hayden and Hahn are running independently--and are not on the same ticket.

The commercial’s narrator casts it as a message from “Los Angeles police,” although the printed text makes it clear it is actually a message from the principal police union, which has endorsed Stein. Asserting that police back Stein because Hahn lets violent criminals return to the street, the narrator cites city attorney jury trial losses--not mentioning that jury trials account for fewer than 1% of the cases the city attorney’s office prosecutes.

Paradoxically, officials of the same police union have acknowledged that last year they urged Hahn to run for Los Angeles County district attorney--an office that prosecutes more serious violent crimes.

Stein and Riordan have an association that goes back several years. Stein volunteered for Riordan’s first campaign in 1993, becoming the mayor’s senior policy advisor and later serving in an appointed role as president of the city’s Airport Commission.

As a candidate, Riordan had expressed hope that the city could lease Los Angeles International Airport to a private operator that would pay hundreds of millions of dollars in annual rent, which could then be used by the city to hire more police.

That scheme did not work out. But Stein is credited as the driving force behind successful efforts to generate more modest revenue by raising landing fees for airlines and persuading the federal government to approve transferring $58 million from an airport account into the city’s general fund.

In his attempt to persuade the federal government to transfer the funds, Stein hired a friend of President Clinton as a lobbyist, arranging for him to be paid $49,500--$500 less than the amount that would have required approval of the Airport Commission and would have invited scrutiny by the City Council. The Clinton friend, Webster Hubbell, was later indicted by the Whitewater grand jury.

Hahn intends to try to use the Hubbell hiring as evidence that Stein has poor judgment.

Hahn’s attacks on Stein--delivered in press releases and three debates--have kept the challenger off balance and unable to focus attention on what he considers the key issue in the race: Hahn’s record.

“In retrospect, I was very naive about what politics is about,” Stein said. “I thought we would debate the real issues of the campaign--our competing visions to bring the city attorney’s office into the 21st century. . . . I never thought this would be a campaign about who hired Webster Hubbell, the property tax thing. I was ill-prepared for it.”

Stein has pressed for more debates. But Hahn has adopted the common front-runner’s stance of keeping debates and public appearances to a minimum. Polls tell Hahn he does not need unrehearsed exposure, which can prove costly if it results in a gaffe.

The two candidates have very different styles and appear to have quite different temperaments.

Hahn, 46, gives the impression of being low-key and self-contained.

Stein, 48, is intense, sometimes growing so passionate that, while seated, he reaches out and jabs a listener’s knee as he makes his point.

The child of German Jews who fled from the Nazis in the 1930s, Stein grew up in Stockton, where his parents ran a used car lot. A magna cum laude graduate of USC who went on to Loyola Law School, he is a former deputy district attorney who says he won 19 of his 20 jury trials before becoming a criminal defense lawyer.

He gave that up quickly, he said, because he felt uncomfortable winning an acquittal by confusing the victim in a gang rape case so badly that she identified the police detective investigating her case as her assailant.

Stein then became a civil practitioner, representing small developers and eventually becoming one himself.

He considers himself a moderate Democrat whose first political venture was as a planning commissioner appointed by former Mayor Tom Bradley. The appointment was made at the behest of lawyer and civic activist Dan Garcia, with whom Stein had worked on a civil lawsuit.

Stein met Riordan, who was a parks and recreation commissioner, during that era. And when the multimillionaire lawyer and venture capitalist decided to run for mayor, Stein decided the city could benefit from Riordan’s “more businesslike approach.”

Stein lives in Encino with his wife, a former schoolteacher who now serves as a paid member of the city’s Board of Public Works. They have two daughters who attend Stanford University.

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Hahn is the son of Kenneth F. Hahn, a colorful legend in local politics who represented South-Central Los Angeles as county supervisor for 40 years. The elder Hahn is a folksy, backslapping, pragmatic liberal who paid meticulous attention to fixing potholes as well as fighting for civil rights.

He raised his son in the Crenshaw district. James Hahn, who graduated magna cum laude from Pepperdine University and went to Pepperdine Law School, now lives essentially on his city attorney’s salary in a tract house his wife inherited in San Pedro. They have a 7-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son. The daughter attends public school.

Hahn has been elected to citywide office four times--once as city controller and three times as city attorney. “I love public service,” he said. “It’s a kick being able to put your ideas into practice and seeing if they work.”

Among Hahn’s biggest assets are his reputation for personal decency and the strength of his father’s name. The pull of that name remains so strong that a few years ago it carried a mid-level but unrelated appraiser in the county assessor’s office named Kenneth P. Hahn to victory as the county assessor. To take full advantage of the name, Hahn spells out his middle name on the ballot, listing himself as James Kenneth Hahn.

The Stein campaign may try to use this to its own advantage.

Stein political consultant Harvey Englander says a poll of likely voters in January showed that Hahn still depends too much on the name cachet of his father, rather than his own identity.

Forty percent of those polled said they had a favorable opinion of James Kenneth Hahn, the consultant said. But only 26% had a favorable opinion of “Jim Hahn.”

Two-thirds of those polled said they had no opinion of Jim Hahn or had never heard of him.