Garcetti Race in Trouble, Analysts Say

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti is up against almost insurmountable odds in his battle against challenger Steve Cooley, and will need to wage a brutally negative campaign if he is to have any hope of winning the Nov. 7 election, a spectrum of political analysts said Monday.

“If I was Gil Garcetti, I would probably start packing,” said one local political consultant, Steven Afriat, after a Los Angeles Times poll showed Garcetti trailing challenger Steve Cooley by 37 percentage points. The poll also showed that many voters are unhappy with Garcetti’s handling of the Rampart police corruption scandal.

At a news conference in his office meeting room, a subdued Garcetti admitted that he was troubled by the survey results. “Is it over?” he asked jokingly as he stepped before the familiar phalanx of reporters and television cameras.

“Hey, you know, let’s be truthful, I don’t like the poll,” he added. “But I also know that there are seven months before the election. Truly, Rampart is changing every day. And I am convinced that, come November, people will see that we handled this professionally, appropriately and in the right way.”

The poll, published Sunday, showed Garcetti trailing Cooley 55% to 18%. The poll results suggested that most voters were favoring Cooley because they disapprove of Garcetti, not out of support for the challenger. Roughly half said Garcetti’s handling of Rampart would make them less likely to vote for him.

The district attorney has been repeatedly criticized by Mayor Richard Riordan and Police Chief Bernard C. Parks for what they believe is his sluggishness in bringing cases against allegedly corrupt police officers in the Rampart anti-gang unit.

“I understand that voters are frustrated and dismayed and impatient. I’m impatient too,” Garcetti said Monday. But he added, “Even though I voice this impatience myself, I realize that we have a different legal and ethical responsibility than the police have.”

He added that he expects to decide by the end of this month whether to bring charges in the first of the Rampart cases. He said he needs to act quickly in that case because the statute of limitations is about to expire.

Garcetti was elected district attorney in 1992, after his predecessor, Ira Reiner, stepped aside in mid-campaign when he realized he had no chance of winning. Garcetti was popular at the outset, but suffered a series of setbacks, most notably his office’s loss in the O.J. Simpson case in 1995. He barely won reelection in 1996, despite facing a little-known, underfunded challenger, Deputy Dist. Atty. John Lynch.

Now he is facing another of his top deputies, Cooley, who begins the race with little more name recognition but a much larger war chest than Lynch. Cooley came in first in a three-way March 7 primary, throwing him into a runoff with the second-place incumbent.

In an interview Monday, Cooley stopped just short of calling on Garcetti to abandon the race and follow in Reiner’s footsteps.

“Ira Reiner . . . is held in high esteem for not continuing a fruitless campaign nor stooping to negative campaigning,” Cooley said. “Gil Garcetti could do the system a lot of good if he could follow his example.”

Garcetti sidestepped a question about whether he intends to stick out the campaign. “I will remain the district attorney,” he said. “There’s a lot to do.”

Political analysts say Garcetti has few tenable choices. If he wants to stay in the campaign, his only alternative is to go sharply and relentlessly on the attack against Cooley, and hope that Cooley makes some blunders.

“He has to go really negative and he’s got the money and the campaign talent to do that,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at Claremont Graduate University. “Whether it works is another question, but I don’t see what else he can do.”

She added that she could not recall another incumbent ever coming back from such a deep deficit to win an election.

Political consultant Joe Cerrell said he was sure there have been equivalent cases of political resurrection, although he couldn’t remember any specific cases.

“I’ve seen people come out of the graveyard and win elections,” he said. “You never take anything for granted. Considering how far away the election is, it’s a great wake-up call for Garcetti.”

Could Garcetti win? “Oh yeah,” Cerrell said. “Is it easy? No. But it can be done.”

Afriat, who does consulting work for local Democratic candidates, was asked what he would do if Garcetti were his client. “I would probably put most of my focus into opposition research. I would try to find that one, two or three terrible things about Cooley that will turn voters off.

“You know, has he blundered any cases in the district attorney’s office? Has he made any outrageous statements?. . . . You really need to dig up stuff on this guy.”

“If this guy’s clean, Garcetti’s got a problem, because Garcetti’s not going to be able to turn it around based on his record.”

Garcetti has paid $11,000 to a Eugene, Ore., political consulting group with extensive experience in opposition research, and he has already begun attacking Cooley as a “disgruntled employee” and “partisan Republican” who, as head deputy in the San Fernando Valley bureau of the district attorney’s office, was soft in enforcing the three-strikes law against career felons.

Cooley, who is a registered Republican, denies that his politics influences his work and defends his enforcement of the three-strikes law as reasonable and within the policy guidelines set by Garcetti.

Afriat said Garcetti’s attacks on Cooley’s Republican roots might work in another kind of race, given the county’s Democratic voter edge, but not in a nonpartisan race for district attorney. “If all you’ve got is that the guy is conservative--even very conservative--it’s not going to be enough,” he said, “because even moderates probably want their prosecutor to be conservative. In issues of criminal justice, being conservative is not a bad thing.”

Cooley now needs to show “that he is of the stature to do the job,” Republican political consultant Arnold Steinberg said. If Cooley responds badly to Garcetti’s attacks or otherwise blunders in the campaign, “it’s possible that people would hold their noses and vote for Garcetti.”

Possible, but not likely, Steinberg added. Referring to Garcetti, he said, “If the poll is anywhere reasonably within range, he’s nearly in a hopeless situation.”