The New Model Hahn May Get More Mileage

In a Los Angeles City Hall dominated by news of Mayor Richard Riordan and the City Council, it’s easy to forget about the cautious, reserved City Atty. Jim Hahn. But he may have the brightest future of them all.

For he not only survived Mayor Richard Riordan’s effort to unseat him in last spring’s election, but he routed the mayoral choice, attorney Ted Stein. Now he’s looking with new confidence to a future he believes may include a race for the Democratic nomination for state attorney general next year or even for mayor in four years.

Term limits will force Hahn out of his current job in 2001, but he said, “I don’t believe my life in politics will be over in four years.”

When we sat down in his office Tuesday, Hahn looked at me at first as if he thought I was up to no good. He’s on guard, even suspicious, in interviews, afraid of getting stung. But he relaxed and soon was delivering his message with the skill expected of a member of one of Los Angeles’ most famous political families.

His father, retired Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, combining sophistication with an unerring, homespun popular touch, elevated the grubby ins and outs of local politics to an art form.

Unlike his father, Jim Hahn is not a natural.

For much of his tenure, he has been a diffident, overly cautious city attorney. The office has seemed adrift, rather than being on the cutting edge of policy debate, as it was during the administration of City Atty. Burt Pines. Nor did he wage high-profile battles, such as City Atty. Ira Reiner did against corporate polluters.

Under Hahn, the office faded out of the news and he seemed content to take the path of least resistance, to merely hold on to his job.

But the furious challenge from Stein shook him up. For a year and a half, Hahn traveled the city, speaking and raising money almost every night and on weekend days, drawing on inner strength even some of his supporters didn’t think he had.

“I think I proved to a lot of people who didn’t think I could do it that I have the ability to run that kind of a campaign, to run at that energy level for that period of time,” he said. “I proved I can do it. Did I like it? Nobody really likes it. But I think I know I can do it now. I think I proved that.”

The new aggressiveness is reflected in his attitude toward his major project, an effort to seek and enforce injunctions against gang members. The injunctions ban gang members from congregating in groups of two or more; using pagers or cellular phones; fighting in public and engaging in other activities that terrorize their neighborhoods. Deputy City Atty. Nicole Bershon and Deputy Dist. Atty. Lisa Fox, working with Los Angeles police, recently began a new effort against the 18th Street gang.

Hahn is taking credit for the injunction strategy. “We invented the tool,” he said. Hahn told me he was unhappy that in a column about the injunction earlier this week, I wrote about the district attorney’s office and neglected to mention that the city attorney was involved.

To Hahn, the injunctions are good policy. He hopes they free neighborhoods from the gang terror that imprisons residents in their homes at night and prevents them from organizing to lobby City Hall for better services. The injunctions, he said, are “community organizing tools to empower neighborhoods.”

And they are good politics, especially for someone considering running for attorney general, as some of his supporters want him to do.

“I think he is in great political position in almost a unique way because he has enormously high name recognition and he has favorable ratings in the state’s largest city,” said Bill Carrick, who managed Hahn’s reelection campaign. “He has a name and base that most politicians would love to have. I think he would be a formidable candidate if he ran for mayor or attorney general.”

Political consultant Rick Taylor, who doesn’t work for Hahn, said: “I think he is the next attorney general if he decides to run. He has proven he is a heck of a campaigner. He had a tough campaign. He raised significant funds. It is a light field and Hahn will shine in that field.”

His main obstacle in the Democratic primary would probably be state Sen. Bill Lockyer of Hayward, who has been energetically accumulating campaign funds.

But legislators usually have rough going as statewide candidates, partially the result of television’s failure to cover the Capitol. As a result, Northern Californian Lockyer would have to spend much of his money trying for the Southern California name identification that Hahn already has.

Hahn said attorney general is “certainly a job I’m qualified to do.”

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Is this a new Hahn, a tougher, more determined model?

We’ll see in the months ahead, as he navigates through the tricky legal and political shoals of enforcing the gang injunction and then decides whether to step into the swifter, deeper currents of state politics.