Rivals Court Key Voters on Last Weekend

In a last-ditch appeal to the constituencies they hope will win them the mayor’s office, City Atty. James K. Hahn and former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa dashed around Los Angeles on Saturday, with Villaraigosa bemoaning the tone of the campaign against him and Hahn casting himself as populist candidate up against a well-financed opponent.

Villaraigosa hosted a massive rally early in the day, urging his legions of union supporters to fan out across Los Angeles and persuade voters to cast ballots in Tuesday’s election. But he also used the event to deliver an emotional rebuttal to Hahn’s controversial television ads and obliquely compared the city attorney to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

“Have you no shame?” the former legislator asked of his opponent, echoing the plea once used to denounce McCarthy’s Communist-baiting. Villaraigosa blamed Hahn’s commercials, which feature a smoking crack pipe and grainy footage of Villaraigosa, for exposing the former Assembly speaker’s 12-year-old son to painful taunts.

Hahn said he was very sad if Villaraigosa’s family felt hurt, but defended the ad, saying that it was accurate and focused only on his opponent’s record.

The heated remarks over that issue played out against a frantic and telling day of campaigning by the men seeking to head America’s second-largest city. Hahn concentrated his efforts in the San Fernando Valley and Watts--two areas where he is expected to do well--while Villaraigosa hopscotched around the city trying to put the finishing touches on the coalition he hopes will propel him into office.

By nightfall, Villaraigosa had visited Koreatown, Sherman Oaks , San Pedro, the Crenshaw district, the Westside and Boyle Heights. In an exuberant mood, the candidate at one point plunged out onto Ventura Boulevard to shake the hands of motorists, and later rallied supporters on a San Pedro pier with San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

In contrast to Villaraigosa and his welling emotion, the city attorney was understated, though confident. Near the end of the day, he appeared with his sister, City Council candidate Janice Hahn, and told 200 supporters in Watts: “We have never forgotten our roots.”

The last weekend before election day began with about 1,000 union members gathered outside a mid-Wilshire union hall under gray morning skies and light drizzle to kick off a large-scale get-out-the-vote effort for Villaraigosa, powered by some of the city’s biggest unions.

“Good morning, Los Angeles!” yelled Miguel Contreras, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. “Are we ready to get out the vote?”

“Yes!” roared the crowd, waving a sea of small American flags and Villaraigosa signs.

“We’re four days away, four days from making history to show that working people can make a difference,” Contreras said.

A beaming Villaraigosa pumped his fist in the air, joined on stage by Gov. Gray Davis, Mayor Richard Riordan and more than two dozen elected officials, clergy and union leaders.

When it came time for him to speak, the candidate grew solemn, addressing a Hahn television commercial that criticizes a letter Villaraigosa wrote in 1996 on behalf of a convicted drug trafficker. The commercial shows images of a razor blade cutting cocaine and a crack pipe being held up to a flame, interspersed with images of Villaraigosa.

His son, Villaraigosa told the labor audience, came home from school Wednesday and reported that his classmates had seen Hahn’s commercial and taunted him, saying his father used drugs.

The candidate’s wife told him that the sixth-grade class she teaches in Montebello asked her if her husband smoked crack cocaine, Villaraigosa said to the suddenly silent crowd.

“Have you no sense of decency, Mr. Hahn?” Villaraigosa said. “Have you no shame?”

Those were the same words that Joseph Welch, lawyer for the secretary of the Army, used to admonish McCarthy during the 1954 Senate Army hearings.

While proclaiming himself committed to a positive campaign, Villaraigosa has now compared Hahn to McCarthy and former Mayor Sam Yorty, who used racially divisive tactics to beat Tom Bradley in 1969. Those comparisons--both thick with connotations for those with a sense of history--come at the end of a two-month runoff campaign that has grown increasingly nasty as election day has approached.

On Saturday, Villaraigosa said that Hahn’s “campaign of fear” would not be successful.

“Nothing, nothing will turn the tide of history,” he said, as the audience cheered and applauded. “The hands of time go forward, not backward.”

Later in the day, as he knocked on doors in a Northridge neighborhood, Hahn expressed sympathy for Villaraigosa’s family, but defended his commercial.

“I’ve got a family too,” he said. “Obviously, I feel very bad about anyone hurting his family and I would feel bad about anyone hurting mine.”

But, he added, “Every single one of his ads has been factually inaccurate. My ads are accurate.”

“If I had written a drug pardon letter and somebody ran that ad against me, would somebody say, ‘That was McCarthy-like?’ ” Hahn said. “I think what’s fair is fair. What I have a record on, people have a right to question. What he has a record on, I have a right to question.”

He also said that Villaraigosa was guilty of attack tactics, citing hecklers who disrupted a news conference he held earlier in the week.

Campaign Growing Increasingly Negative

The candidates and their staffs have pressed hard in recent days. Villaraigosa in particular has seemed taken aback by the tone and intensity of the campaign.

“I’m disappointed,” he told reporters Saturday. “I’m hurt . . . and I think the city of L.A. is hurt.”

But Hahn, who has won five citywide elections in Los Angeles, said he was not shaken by the negative exchanges between him and his rival. “You don’t get emotional in politics,” the city attorney said.

During a visit to the North Hollywood Recreation Center, Hahn kicked off his own labor rally, albeit a more low-key one, with several hundred union members, many clad in orange jerseys. The crowd, primarily carpenters and firefighters, gathered on a muddy field and greeted the city attorney with chants of “Go, Jim, go!”

Hahn, who was joined by Councilman Alex Padilla, referred to some of Villaraigosa’s well-heeled supporters as he argued his independence.

“I may not have the billionaires behind me, I may not have the support of the big party bosses, but I have the people,” Hahn said. “We’re going to win the Valley and the Eastside and the Westside.”

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Times staff writer Nedra Rhone contributed to this story.

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