They Write Often, but They’re Not Pen Pals

“Dear Mayor Hahn,” the letters usually begin.

And often, that’s where the civility stops.

This campaign season, the candidates for Los Angeles mayor are not only using blogs, streaming videos and other high-tech political tools, they have also resurrected a dying art form: the letter.

To stir up a little voter interest in the March 8 election, the four best-known challengers to James K. Hahn have been sending him poison-pen missives. And Hahn has fired off a few himself.

About 20 letters have been e-mailed, faxed or hand-delivered in the last few months, and the pace has picked up in recent weeks.

“It’s an effective way of raising the issues that otherwise would get lost,” said Ace Smith, campaign manager for Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, who also ran in 2001 against Hahn.

The mayor’s team mocks the letters, which are often distributed to the media before Hahn receives them, as a transparent cry for attention. But lately, his campaign aides have been penning some rather sarcastic notes of their own.

The barrage of correspondence between Hahn and his most formidable challengers -- Villaraigosa, state Sen. Richard Alarcon, former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg and Councilman Bernard C. Parks -- has touched on a variety of city issues. But two feature most prominently. One is crime, which has emerged as the chief policy debate in the campaign. The other is the county and federal investigation of city contracting, which Hahn’s opponents have seized on as a way to question the mayor’s leadership and, more obliquely, his integrity.

“Dear Mayor Hahn,” Parks wrote last week, “I have repeatedly pleaded with you to release any information that you may have concerning the federal and county grand jury investigations that are currently destroying the reputation of our once proud city.”

Tallying up Hahn’s fines from the city’s Ethics Commission, Parks wrote: “The list of counts against you is something that I haven’t seen since my days at the Los Angeles Police Department. Judging by this rap sheet, you either have total disregard for the law or you’re trying to break some sort of record.”

He signed the letter, “Respectfully, Bernard C. Parks.”

Villaraigosa took up a similar issue last month, urging the mayor in a letter to release records detailing his relationship with two campaign contributors who are under federal investigation for alleged mortgage fraud.

“You continually claim that you have ‘nothing to hide,’ ” Villaraigosa wrote. “If this is indeed the case, please be prompt in releasing your records. I’m sure that you share my view that we must once again restore public trust in the mayor’s office.”

Hahn’s campaign strategist Bill Carrick dismissed the letters as pathetic ploys from candidates who are “desperately starved for media attention.” “These people are running a negative campaign against Jim Hahn,” he said. “They think the best way to get into the paper is to attack the mayor.”

Smith sees it differently. “This is a way of trying to punch through the clutter,” he said. “The reality of a mayoral campaign is that there is no way, especially in a crowded primary, for there to be as much coverage of everything every campaign wants covered.”

In a city where television advertising can cost a mayoral candidate $300,000 a week, paper is cheap, and e-mail is cheaper.

Hahn’s campaign is also not above issuing a sharply worded letter when it suits its purposes.

Earlier this month, a beaming Villaraigosa bounded to a lectern in front of the Department of Water and Power building to release his environmental plan. Lurking in the audience was a Hahn operative, who smiled slyly as he handed reporters a letter to Villaraigosa that excoriated him for his ties to Cadiz Inc., a firm that pushed an environmentally controversial plan for water storage in the Mojave Desert.

Last week, Hahn campaign’s communications director, Julie Wong, wrote a letter to Hertzberg, a Sherman Oaks lawyer. The occasion was the unveiling of Hertzberg’s “Commuters’ Bill of Rights,” a 10-point transportation plan, on morning drive-time radio.

The letter took the former Assembly speaker to task for presiding over legislation that allowed money for local transportation projects to be diverted. “We are sending you a Los Angeles Commuters’ Bill for $850 million of taxpayer money that has been and is being diverted from our transportation needs to pay for the budget mess you left in Sacramento,” Wong wrote.

“An invoice is attached. Payments can be made to: the Taxpayers of Los Angeles.”

Within hours, Hertzberg’s communications director Matt Szabo responded with his own letter, furiously denying the charges and dinging the mayor for failing to show up for votes on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees local transit.

“Thank you for your sudden interest in traffic congestion issues,” Szabo wrote. “Attached for your convenience is the invoice submitted in error to Mr. Hertzberg. Please return it to your research department for fact checking.”

“It’s nice to see that ancient art of correspondence brought back into politics,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a Cal State Fullerton political scientist who has written extensively about Los Angeles.

Sonenshein said the letters are essentially gussied-up news releases that allow candidates to attack one another in a form that has “more credibility because it looks like you’re talking right to the person.”

In the last five months, Parks has been the mayor’s most frequent and most virulent correspondent, writing him at least six times in letters that often run several typed pages.

He kicked off the writing campaign Sept. 9, when he asked the mayor to eliminate the LAPD’s short workweek, a schedule that allows officers to work three 12-hour days. Parks opposed the schedule when he was chief, but Hahn maintains that it gives the department flexibility to deploy officers to crime hot spots and has improved officer morale.

Hahn responded with a snippy note of his own, attacking Parks’ five-year tenure as police chief.

“When you left the LAPD, officers were fleeing the department and homicides in your own district had been steadily increasing for three years,” Hahn wrote. “Perhaps you and I disagree, but I do not want to return to the days of fewer officers and higher crime.”

These letters are not likely to be preserved for their political importance, as was the erudite correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson that lasted on and off for five decades.

But Eric Jaye, who until recently was a media consultant for Parks, said the letters could nonetheless be making a positive contribution, on a smaller scale, to the public policy discourse in Los Angeles.

“In a world of 15-second sound bites, it is somewhat quaint, and something you should applaud, that candidates sit down and write each other to try to articulate their policy differences,” he said.

“By virtue of its form, it attempts to be a reasoned argument, and in Los Angeles and everywhere, we need more reasoned arguments and fewer sound bites.”