The Trouble With Garcetti

The rain was falling in sheets on the San Fernando Valley, drenching campaign signs and flying up from under the cars like big, wet rooster tails. No matter. They all came, TV trucks swooshing down Ventura Boulevard, past the mini-mall with the Starbucks and into the waterlogged lot of the Sportsmen’s Lodge (“The San Fernando Valley’s Finest Waterfront Dining”). Big Mo was in the air, had been since the county clerk downtown had made it official: The district attorney of Los Angeles County had a problem on his hands.

The District Attorney, it was noted, was nowhere in sight. He was sequestered, presumably deciding where first to throw his great wads of campaign cash. The Problem, however, was wasting no time. This was Wednesday, and challenger Steve Cooley was in a meeting room holding a news conference that, finally, had managed to attract some serious attention. He blinked into the Klieg lights, a big, saggy-eyed career prosecutor in a shirt and tie, laying into his boss, operating on about three hours of post-election shut-eye. His wife and kids and white-haired mom sat in the audience, transfixed.

“He’s a good guy, believe me, I’d tell you if he weren’t,” joked his sister, an Orange County nurse who kept jumping up to take snapshots: Steve with Warren Wilson, Steve with the guy from Channel 4. “We’re very proud,” his mother beamed, her walker parked in the corner. There was little choice but to take their word for it. Though Cooley had not only drawn Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti into a runoff, but beaten him, vote-wise, not much was known about him. For all his success, The Problem was a virtual unknown.

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This, of course, is the interesting part of this year’s D.A. race, which threatens to end up being downright compelling as the general election campaign rolls, now, into gear. Which is saying something. There is, in Los Angeles County, the tendency to regard the D.A.’s office the way a homeowner regards plumbing--as something you don’t think about unless company’s coming or things start backing up somewhere.

But this has not been a good year for the pipe works of the criminal justice system, though the crime rate has been plummeting. It is as if, with fewer bad guys to dispense with, the system has set itself on self-clean mode. The Rampart scandal, in particular, has drawn unflattering attention to Garcetti, even as he has protested that he’s part of the solution. At the polls this week, people seemed to be casting ballots right and left for Cooley, for reasons that they couldn’t pin down, exactly. “Well, my neighbor put up a Cooley sign,” one Valley woman confided, pulling away from her polling place on Tuesday, “and you know, I’m not unhappy, but I’ve agreed with her before.”

Around Cooley’s polling place, in the picket-fenced, flower-bedded heart of Toluca Lake, people kept stressing the “decency” and “integrity” of any candidate who wasn’t Garcetti--whether or not they knew they had a neighbor in the race. This might not have been so odd had Garcetti’s own neighbors over in Brentwood Park--his wife comes from serious money--not talked the same lingo. “I didn’t vote for him. I voted for one of the other ones--Cooley,” an entertainment executive confided, striding out of the buff-colored mansion where Garcetti had voted that day.

She backed toward her SUV as someone’s maid walked past with a tiny poodle that lifted a fluffy little leg on the box hedge. “There’s just something about Garcetti. Maybe it was the child support thing.” The woman struggled for a moment, adjusting her sunglasses, trying to remember what Garcetti’s child support thing was, exactly. Finally she just came out with it: “I don’t know why. He just isn’t my favorite.”

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Whether the district attorney deserves such tough treatment is, as they say, another story. It’s not as if his record is, on the face of it, actually so awfully bad. It’s not as if he’s accomplished nothing, the shortcomings of his stewardship notwithstanding. It’s not even as if those shortcomings were at the front of people’s minds.

But there is “something about Garcetti”--

something silver-haired and silver-tongued, something that is and is not his fault, something that once made people talk about his “polish” and that now makes them mention his opponent’s “integrity.”

Something that, in this time of “new politics” and “authenticity,” threatens not to come off so well against a smart, schlumpy underling with a white picket fence and a shutterbug sister and a white-haired mom who can’t stop telling reporters how very proud she is.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.