Gloves are off in California attorney general campaign

In the final weeks before statewide primary elections, the campaign for attorney general has become a slugfest, with candidates stepping up attacks in the fight to become California’s next top prosecutor.

Rivals have been accused of inflating resumes, going soft on crime, lying on the ballot and being downright incompetent. Campaigns have unleashed a flurry of e-mails and Internet videos, including one whose title gets quickly to the point: “ Steve Cooley is a Loser.”

“It has been a nasty campaign,” said veteran campaign strategist Kevin Spillane, who is working for the Republican candidate, L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley.

At stake in the election is the chance to play a central role in some of the state’s most important and controversial political issues.

The new attorney general will decide how to deal with a federal court order to reduce the prison population, whether to challenge President Obama’s healthcare reforms and how to deal with medical marijuana sales, particularly if voters approve an initiative on the November ballot that would legalize the drug.

“It’s an enormously important position,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine School of Law.

The position also offers a springboard for higher office. Earl Warren, Pat Brown and George Deukmejian made the jump from attorney general to the governor’s mansion. Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, who previously served two terms as governor, is running once more for the state’s top job.

The June 8 primary could also serve as a partial referendum on the state’s “three-strikes” law, which has become the chief issue in the Republican contest, where two rivals are attacking Cooley over the limits he has placed on three-strikes prosecutions. Many political observers consider Cooley, a Republican who has repeatedly won in heavily Democratic Los Angeles County, a strong favorite to win a general election — if he gets that far. But he must first convince Republican primary voters that he is not too liberal to be their party’s nominee.

Meanwhile, San Francisco Dist. Atty. Kamala Harris, the front-runner on the Democratic side, has been battered by scandal after a technician in the city’s crime lab was accused of stealing cocaine. The revelation led to the closure of the drug analysis section of the crime lab and the dismissal of roughly 700 drug cases.

So far, the attorney general’s race has generated lukewarm public interest. Polls have found that large numbers of likely primary voters remain undecided.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty. Voters haven’t even thought about attorney general,” said Michael Shires, an associate professor of public policy at Pepperdine University.

The race has a crowded field of 14 candidates, including nine — three Republicans and six Democrats — who have amassed at least $100,000 to run a credible campaign.

In the GOP primary, two candidates have pitched themselves as conservative alternatives to Cooley, who is generally viewed as a moderate.

State Sen. Tom Harman (R-Huntington Beach) and John Eastman, former dean of the Chapman University School of Law, are hammering Cooley over his approach to the state’s three-strikes law.

Four years ago, Cooley pushed for changes that would have — with some exceptions — limited the law’s 25-years-to-life sentences to criminals whose third strikes were violent or serious.

“It’s a big issue,” said Eastman, who has won the support of several high-profile radio talk show hosts, including Hugh Hewitt. “The supposedly tough-on-crime prosecutor is Steve Cooley, and he was to the left of Kamala Harris on this issue.”

In a YouTube video, “Steve Cooley is a Loser,” Harman’s campaign also accused the L.A. County district attorney of endorsing liberal Democrats for judge and wanting to release hardened criminals.

“I don’t think that that’s dishonest or dirty politics,” Harman said. “We’re just telling the truth.”

Cooley’s campaign has countered, saying Eastman and Harman tried to mischaracterize themselves on the ballot.

Eastman sought to call himself “assistant attorney general,” pointing to his work on a case he was working for the South Dakota attorney general. A judge ordered that he could instead use “constitutional law attorney.”

Cooley’s campaign sued to stop Harman from calling himself “prosecutor/attorney/senator.” Earlier this year, Harman began volunteering for an Orange County district attorney’s office program in which lawyers work unpaid on cases. Harman said he sat in on one hearing. Another judge ordered that the “prosecutor” description be dropped.

“They have blatantly lied, first about themselves and then about Cooley’s record,” Cooley’s campaign strategist said.

On the Democratic side, Harris and former Facebook Inc. executive Chris Kelly are locked in a bare-knuckled brawl.

Kelly, who has pumped nearly $10 million of his personal fortune into his campaign, touts his record as a policy analyst in the Clinton White House and his role as privacy officer at Facebook.

But Harris has accused him of inflating his resume and minimizing his role in Facebook’s privacy policies, which have sparked heated criticism. Privacy advocates recently accused the company of making users’ personal information public without their explicit consent. Kelly says Facebook changed its policies after he left.

Earlier this week, Harris asked the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission to investigate loans Kelly obtained from a private equity firm to help exercise Facebook stock options, which he used to fund his campaign.

“He’s spending unprecedented amounts of money to buy an office here in California for which he’s uniquely unqualified,” said Harris campaign strategist Ace Smith.

Kelly, one of the few candidates not currently in elected office, has dismissed such attacks as “politics as usual” and has turned his sights on Harris.

The two-term district attorney is campaigning on a platform of being “smart on crime.”

Harris has drawn criticism for her office’s failure to notify defendants about the domestic violence conviction of a city crime lab technician now accused of skimming drugs from the lab. A judge rebuked the district attorney’s office last week for not having a written policy to ensure that prosecutors gave defense lawyers information about the criminal backgrounds of police employees.

A D.A.’s spokeswoman said the office was not legally required to have a written policy but created one last month, after the scandal broke.

Kelly’s campaign has highlighted the issue in a television ad and on a website he has devoted to attacking Harris’ record, https://www.kamalafailedoncrime.com.

“To put thousands of criminal cases in jeopardy … is extraordinary malfeasance,” Kelly said.

At a Democratic candidates’ debate last week, former L.A. City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, who is running after a failed bid for attorney general four years ago, also criticized Harris over the crime lab problems.

So far, the other leading candidates have stayed out of the fray. They include three assemblymen: Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), Pedro Nava (D- Santa Barbara) and Alberto Torrico (D-Newark).

jack.leonard@latimes.com