Strategies Take Shape in D.A. Race

With seven months remaining before the November election, the outlines of the race for Los Angeles County district attorney are beginning to come into focus.

Incumbent Gil Garcetti has already shown glimpses of a campaign strategy that relies on a pincers attack on challenger Steve Cooley: assailing him from the right as soft on crime, and from the left as being too conservative for Los Angeles County voters.

Cooley, a top deputy to Garcetti, can be expected to portray himself as an effective, moderate and honest alternative to his boss, whom he has depicted as a failed prosecutor who lacks integrity.

No one who pays attention to local politics expects the race--between two bitter rivals who work in the same office but have barely spoken in years--to be particularly dignified or even civil.

“If it gets down and dirty, which I suspect it will, I think we’ll see the unearthing of the real Cooley and the real Garcetti,” said H. Eric Schockman, associate dean of political science at USC.

The early March primary has left an unusually long gap before the November runoff, and the campaign is not expected to shift into high gear for some time. Cooley has been pushing for early debates with Garcetti, but the incumbent seems to be reluctant, as he was in the primary campaign.

He refused then to debate Cooley and a second challenger, Barry Groveman, saying he would wait for the general election campaign. The day after the primary, Garcetti said he would debate Cooley “as often as he wants.”

But several organizations have since proposed debates, and Garcetti has so far refused to accept any invitations before September.

“I think that’s too late,” said Gerald Fogelman, president of the San Fernando Valley Bar Assn., which is trying to arrange a debate this spring. “I don’t want to get involved in a 60-day blitz. I think the public should be educated all along.”

Garcetti’s campaign consultant, Bill Carrick, said Garcetti would agree to debates, but only selectively. “I think you could drag this out and have 400 of these things, and it’d be meaningless,” he said.

For now, both candidates are consumed with raising funds for what could be the most expensive district attorney’s race ever. Both are aiming at more than $1 million.

Carrick insisted that he hasn’t even begun to plan the campaign’s strategy. “It’s so long between now and then, and this is all being played out in changing public events,” he said.

But the outlines of Garcetti’s strategy were on display in his primary fight against Cooley, who placed first in the three-way race. In his public comments since, Garcetti has tried to tattoo the challenger as a right-wing extremist who is, paradoxically, soft on crime.

Garcetti, a Democrat, recently wrote a letter to his donors in which he charged that “my opponent in the general election is a partisan, conservative Republican and disgruntled employee who would return the D.A.’s office to the 1950s, when the D.A. sat back and waited for cases to be brought to him. He does not believe that the D.A. has a role in crime prevention. I couldn’t disagree with him more strongly.”

Cooley is a Republican whose political role model is former state Atty. Gen. and Gov. George Deukmejian. Cooley has argued that Garcetti is wasting resources on some of his crime-prevention programs, at the expense of the core mission of prosecuting criminals.

The race is officially nonpartisan, and some warn that Garcetti might fail if he tries to turn it into a de facto partisan contest. Schockman noted that, in the 1993 mayoral campaign, former City Councilman Mike Woo tried to tar Richard Riordan as a Republican extremist. Riordan won.

Still, at the least, Garcetti can be expected to get out the message to Democrats that Cooley is an old-fashioned prosecutor who doesn’t support proactive efforts--an anti-truancy program, for instance--to stop crime before it starts.

To Republicans, Garcetti has another message: Cooley has been a “failed prosecutor with a soft-on-crime approach.” That claim is based on Cooley’s record in prosecuting three-strikes cases.

Unlike Garcetti, Cooley has insisted that the district attorney’s office prosecute only serious, violent felonies as third strikes. As head deputy in charge of the San Fernando Valley branch, he had the highest rate of plea bargains in potential three-strikes cases of any head deputy in the county.

As for Cooley’s strategy against Garcetti, Cooley consultant John Shallman said, “It’s no great mystery.” Cooley needs to improve his name recognition and let voters know about his accomplishments, in effect inoculating himself against Garcetti’s attacks.

The challenger, Shallman said, needs to let voters know “why you can say ‘yes’ to Steve Cooley and not just ‘no’ to Gil Garcetti . . . We’re going to go out and show people that everywhere he goes, [Cooley] has a bit of a Midas touch--he succeeds.”

Cooley starts with one huge advantage: The results of the primary election, in which Garcetti finished second with 37% of the vote, suggest that nearly two-thirds of the county’s voters are dissatisfied with the incumbent prosecutor.

Looming over everything will be the long shadow of the Rampart police corruption scandal, which both sides will try to exploit. Cooley has already accused Garcetti of failing to uncover or swiftly prosecute the corruption mess, and Garcetti has been trying to demonstrate that he has responded appropriately and professionally.

Political consultant Rick Taylor, who ran the campaign of Garcetti challenger John Lynch four years ago, said he thought Rampart would favor Cooley. “It’s going to be something that Cooley doesn’t have to spend money on. . . ,” he said.

Taylor says the race will be won in the San Gabriel Valley, where Garcetti had strong support in 1996.