Hahn Pulls Ahead of Villaraigosa in the Polls, but by What Methods?

Seven points. Seven.

The distance that Jim Hahn has put between himself and Antonio Villaraigosa as they run toward the tape in this Los Angeles mayor’s race--so says a Times poll.

Back in April, on election night, Hahn was 5 points behind Villaraigosa, Band-Aiding a smile over the numbers. Where did that 7 points in seven weeks come from? More like a dozen points, really-- 5 to catch up, 7 to pull ahead; what’s gone into changing minds about these men?

First choice: law and order, the meat and potatoes of the Hahn message. Nothing gets herds of voters to stampede in another direction like the specter of the thug at the door of your own little piece of R-1 paradise. Hahn said Villaraigosa’s voting record on crime is “abysmal.” He said Villaraigosa is likely to be more “sympathetic to the criminal” than to the victim. Voters have paid attention. The San Fernando Valley, where Villaraigosa finished in a dead heat with Republican Steve Soboroff in April--the Valley, by nearly 20 points, is now Hahn land.

Cut to Hahn’s latest ad. It premiered last weekend, and it is a five-alarm barnburner.

Someone chops cocaine with a razor blade. Someone smokes a crack pipe. Villaraigosa appears, in grainy, hidden-camera, Marion Barry-quality footage. His signature is there on a letter asking the White House to pardon a cocaine dealer Villaraigosa believed was wrongly convicted. “Father” is the name of the ad, for the drug dealer’s rich dad, who persuaded Villaraigosa and Cardinal Mahony and Sheriff Lee Baca and a lot of others to intercede on his son’s behalf.

The slope here is so slippery that it is slick--that easy, easy subliminal slide from “you can’t trust him on crime” to “sympathetic to the criminal” to, heck, the guy was a criminal himself once, a gangbanger who has lasered the tattoos from his arms, but who can say whether he has erased them from his heart?

As unpleasant as the “Father” ad is for itself alone, it is even uglier for the memory it resurrects.

In 1969, there was another runoff election for mayor of Los Angeles. Tom Bradley, an African American city councilman, had beaten the mayor, Sam Yorty, in the primary. Yorty went to work to turn Bradley--the UCLA track star, the ex-LAPD lieutenant--into a black-power radical. His campaign ads in the real estate sections of Valley newspapers bore Bradley’s photo, and asked, “Will Your City Be Safe With This Man?”

Between the primary and the general election, Yorty picked up 27 points, and won. People talked about that election for years as the high--the low--water mark of L.A. politics. (Yorty tried the same tactics on Bradley four years later and lost.)

Back to the present, and a pair of curiosities:

One of Hahn’s top Latino endorsements, one that tickled him because it shows his crossover appeal, came from state Sen. Richard Polanco.

If Hahn were running against Polanco instead of Villaraigosa, he could air almost the same commercial. Polanco too wrote a letter to the White House on his Legislature letterhead on behalf of Carlos Vignali. Like Villaraigosa, Polanco too claimed--wrongly, as it turned out--that Vignali had no prior criminal record.

Significantly, Polanco did not argue, as Villaraigosa did, that Vignali was guilty “by association”; he asked only that the White House “carefully review” the case. And like Villaraigosa, Polanco got campaign contributions from Vignali’s rich father: $2,000 two days after the date of the letter, and an additional $10,000 in 1999.

The other curiosity is that if such an ad were being aired about a minority candidate in some other election, Jim Hahn, to his credit, would be the first to denounce it; in this, he is indeed his father’s son.

The 1969 election was a generation ago; Hahn is certainly no Yorty, and the “Father” ad is not the blatant, inflammatory Yorty ad. But it invites comparisons of kind, if not of degree, and when the predictable flak came raining down about the ad, Hahn’s spokesman said, “We stick with the facts.” He is right; the ad’s narration is absolutely factual.

But we are a visual species. Sight trumps sound. I used to assign my journalism students to watch a half-hour of TV news with the sound turned down, and to write down all the facts they saw. There were virtually no facts; images convey sensation, not information.

This is not some fancy that is mine alone. In 1984, CBS journalist Lesley Stahl assembled a devastating report on President Reagan’s ruthless manipulation of news, the pretty pictures and empty speeches. Within moments of its airing, the jubilant White House was on the phone. The pictures were great. Words? Who cares about the words? Nobody listens to the words.

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