Race for D.A. Turns Expectations Upside-Down

No autographs--no autographs, please.

A simple “You were right” will do.

Months ago, I predicted it. Just watch this district attorney’s race, I said. As election day and the poll numbers get closer, someone will play the party card.

Sure enough, in this last week before the election, Los Angeles County D.A. Gil Garcetti has snagged “You go, Gils” from Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Gray Davis, Democrats both. Two more ranking Democrats, Sen. Barbara Boxer and state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, make it a foursome. Nine members of Congress and 25 state legislators, again Democrats, bring up the rear.

And in a county that is home to two Democratic voters for every Republican, Garcetti’s campaign is airing a TV ad asking darkly of his opponent, “What do you really know about Republican Steve Cooley . . . ?”

Then, I fished around in my mailbox the other day and found two conservative campaign slate mailers that Cooley paid to appear on. One identifies him as a Republican. The other lists Cooley’s police endorsements but not his political party membership, and unblushingly identifies itself as both “Non-Partisan Candidate Evaluation Council” and “Your Conservative Voting Guide.”

The one certain place you won’t see these guys’ party identities is on the ballot; you wouldn’t know it from their scorched-earth-and-vitriol campaign, but the district attorney is a nonpartisan office.

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Everything about this is upside down--the D.A.’s race, and the ripples beyond it.

Go figure: Cooley the Republican attacks Garcetti the Democrat for being too hard-core and practicing “functional racial profiling” in enforcing the three strikes law. Garcetti the Democrat goes after Cooley the Republican as a repeat plea-bargainer who’s soft on “even chronic drunk drivers, child abusers and drug dealers.”

Cooley the onetime reservist cop hammers Garcetti for not being tougher on cops and stopping the snowballing Rampart outrages right in the courtroom. Garcetti says it was the cops who made Rampart, not the D.A.’s office. Cooley looks at Garcetti and sees a vindictive, do-nothing D.A.; Garcetti regards Cooley and sees a “scary” wolf in lamb’s clothing who will dismantle crime prevention programs in favor of throwback, throw-the-book-at-’em lawyering.

Some of this is mirrored in the courtroom where four cops are on trial for alleged Rampart misdeeds, where the ordinary roles and rules are up-ended.

A couple of public defenders who went to court just to take in the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of it all were so slack-jawed in amazement at the inverted course of events that a bailiff finally came over to them and whispered to them to cut it out--the jury could see the looks on their faces.

How odd it all seemed--the judge treating the deputy D.A.s like defense attorneys and treating defense attorneys like D.A.s, prosecutors sticking up for their gangbanging witnesses, cops as sullen under prosecutors’ questioning as they usually are under defense attorneys’ cross-examination.

“It’s like that Superman cartoon,” said one public defender, “the reverse universe, where everything is backward.”

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Maybe it’s not necessarily the man (for a man it has always been). Maybe it’s the job of D.A. that just chews people up and spits ‘em out. A million cases a year, the nation’s second-biggest public law office--it’s like riding a rattlesnake.

With the possible exception of the county sheriff, the D.A. is the most visible and best known county official--all the more so because big, messy trials have become the region’s way of checking its own pulse. Last election, it was the O.J. Simpson acquittal, and it very nearly sank Garcetti. This time, Rampart has dropped into the opponent’s lap.

And Garcetti has made himself inextricably identified with the office, riding its highs and sliding into the trough of its lows.

In contrast, the five county supervisors, each of whom represents about 2 million people--more than a member of Congress--fly well under the radar.

Theirs is a universe where incumbents have job security second only to God’s--no L.A. county supervisor has been defeated in 20 years. But Measure A, right below the district attorney’s race, would add four more supervisors to the Big Five.

This proposal to make nine supervisors where there are now five has split the Big Five themselves; the guys, the three male supervisors, stand against it. The other two, the women, are for it.

Something akin to this same proposal lost in 1992; it would be an upside-down world indeed if it passed this time around.

And it would prove beyond question that public officials are the only beings to propagate asexually.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com