Garcetti Appeals to Democrats for Support

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti has a simple math problem: He won 37% of the votes in his second-place finish in the March primary, meaning that almost two-thirds of the voters preferred someone else.

To win a third term, Garcetti will have to do some multiplication between now and a November runoff with challenger Steve Cooley, who finished first March 7 with 38% of the vote. In that quest, Garcetti reached out Tuesday to some core constituents at Junior’s restaurant in Westwood, a power-breakfast hub in Westside liberaldom.

Garcetti may be running for reelection to a nonpartisan office, but there was nothing nonpartisan about his appearance before about 25 members of the Los Angeles County Young Democrats, who greeted the prosecutor enthusiastically.

As a Democrat running against a Republican challenger, Garcetti knows that one key to a third term in office lies in Los Angeles County’s nearly 2-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans. While not ignoring the GOP and conservatives, Garcetti appears to be doing what he can to shore up his base.

His schedule this week includes an American Jewish Congress dinner and a tribute to Cesar Chavez and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. As with his talk to the Young Democrats, an influential group of young Democratic professionals, Garcetti can be expected to touch on his Latino heritage--he is of Mexican descent--and on his record’s more progressive aspects.

For instance, at Tuesday’s breakfast, after being introduced by his son, Eric Garcetti, the district attorney launched into a speech that emphasized his family background and the high priority he puts on crime prevention programs, his campaigns against domestic violence and hate crimes, and his efforts to hire and promote women, minorities, gays and lesbians.

“That’s the difference between me being D.A. and my opponent being D.A.,” Garcetti said. Under Cooley, “We would literally go back to the ‘50s in terms of the atmosphere in the office.”

Among more conservative voters, Garcetti has been known to attack Cooley as being soft on enforcing the three-strikes law, which mandates life terms for three-time felons. But asked by the Young Democrats to compare his three-strikes record with Cooley’s, Garcetti spoke only about his own record, which he characterized as being firm but flexible.

Overall, his message seemed well-received.

“I have to say, after hearing him talk about crime prevention and hearing him talk about the root causes of crime, that seems to me to be a very Democratic way of talking about it,” said the group’s president, Evelyn Jerome. “And so, while it’s not a partisan race, his way of looking at crime in those terms is very appealing to me.”

While Garcetti insists that he is not partisan, he has already begun to portray Cooley, one of his top deputies, as a partisan, right-wing Republican.

“I’m not a partisan Democrat as district attorney,” Garcetti said after his Westwood speech, “and I think Cooley will make it a partisan office.”

Cooley strongly denied Garcetti’s charge.

“This office must be different, it must be nonpartisan,” Cooley insisted in an interview. “Now, what I think his advisors must be telling him is, you have to take advantage of being a Democrat in a predominantly Democratic county and portray Cooley as the partisan Republican guy. I think they’re going to be very surprised by the broad--very broad--nature of my support.”

Cooley said he expects to receive endorsements from prominent Democrats in the course of the campaign. “I’ve got strong support within the Mexican American Bar Assn.,” he added. “The L.A. Weekly, for God’s sake, endorsed me.”