The Race for Mayor Is Turning Inside Out

In the home stretch before the May 17 election, the two candidates for Los Angeles mayor have reversed roles on the campaign trail.

Mayor James K. Hahn, an incumbent who has spent more than 23 years as an elected city official, has suddenly begun portraying himself as a maverick outsider.

He has promised to pursue surprising new initiatives, including a citywide injunction against gangs and more mayoral control over public schools.

As the front-runner, meanwhile, Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa talks broadly about the need for a visionary leader, one untarnished by corruption probes.

He has rolled out one high-profile endorser after another, including former Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry and former Lakers star Earvin “Magic” Johnson, to create a sense of momentum.

Both approaches have potential pitfalls.

An incumbent who suddenly heralds big ideas at the end of his term opens himself to questions about why he didn’t act earlier. A challenger who stakes his campaign on abstract ideas like leadership can find himself without solid ground to fall back on if he trips.

Last week, Villaraigosa coasted into the kind of revelation that no candidate wants to confront so close to an election: He found himself explaining $47,000 in questionable contributions from Florida by saying the donors want a better L.A. The district attorney decided to launch a preliminary inquiry to determine whether the contributions were laundered.

The contretemps could blow over, or it could settle over the Villaraigosa campaign like smog and obscure the candidate’s sunny message.

Villaraigosa has soldiered on. Today, he is to launch a “leadership tour,” which his campaign says is designed to show that he is a leader while the mayor is not. In the last few days, he has rolled out more endorsements: Kerry and City Council president Alex Padilla, a prominent Hahn defector.

On Saturday, when Kerry joined Villaraigosa for a rally, the councilman returned to the theme that he has a grand vision for the city that is far beyond Hahn’s aspirations.

He also reprised initiatives he offered earlier this year, including a plan to extend subways and light rail to the beaches and Los Angeles International Airport.

“My opponent says, ‘Antonio, that’s all well and good, we’re doing what we can, but I think it’s a little too much pie in the sky,’ ” Villaraigosa said Saturday. “I’m running for mayor because I won’t accept mediocrity, and neither should you.”

Villaraigosa had an 18-point lead over Hahn among likely voters in the most recent Times poll.

“Villaraigosa’s strategy is: Sit on the lead. Don’t make any waves. Don’t lose any votes and go out and get as many broad-based endorsements as possible,” said Republican strategist Allan Hoffenblum, who is not affiliated with either side in this race between two Democrats.

Hoffenblum said Villaraigosa is running a “vanilla” campaign and added: “They’ve been very successful.”

In the last several days, Hahn spun out few new ideas, happy to stay out of the way as bad news engulfed his opponent.

But in the weeks leading up to Villaraigosa’s stumble, the mayor seemed transformed into a one-man think tank, releasing one proposal after another to change the city.

“All of a sudden, as we get closer to the election, Hahn needs to fight back against the charge that he hasn’t provided bold, visionary leadership,” said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State L.A.

The tactics represent somewhat of a switch of playbooks from the first round of the mayoral election, in which Villaraigosa finished first on March 8 and Hahn came in second, hair-raisingly close to elimination.

In the months before that election, Villaraigosa released one major policy initiative after another.

In addition to calling for an expansion of mass transit, he called for guaranteed health insurance for newborns and touted environmental proposals that include turning the Department of Water and Power into a cutting-edge “green power” utility.

The councilman also appeared at numerous candidate forums and bitterly criticized the mayor for only attending six.

Hahn, hammered by his major opponents as a do-nothing mayor, offered himself as a steady but not flashy leader who is reducing crime.

Now, it is Hahn who demands that Villaraigosa show up at more debates, while the councilman has turned down all but five of the invitations.

No longer content to merely tout a record that he complains the media has ignored, the mayor began unveiling major policy proposals that took many by surprise.

And in the last televised debate, Hahn introduced the idea that Villaraigosa was the candidate of the “status quo,” while he was the candidate who would transform City Hall.

Hahn startled many on the City Council and in Hollywood by announcing in mid-March that he intended to compensate film companies up to $15 million a year to keep production in Los Angeles.

Eleven days later he revealed that he wanted a citywide injunction to forbid gang members from congregating within the city’s roughly 470 square miles. The plan, which legal scholars and gang experts have said they believe may be unconstitutional and unworkable, also gave Hahn the opportunity to point out that Villaraigosa opposed a gang injunction in the 1990s.

Then, last month, Hahn said he wanted the mayor to have the power to appoint at least three school board members and to start his own charter schools.

When Villaraigosa responded two days later that he, too, thought the mayor should have more control over schools, he offered few specifics, saying that he supported a commission that would draft a new governance plan for the district.

With his recent initiatives, Hahn may help blunt criticism that his administration thinks small, but he also risks reminding voters that his first four years included few dramatic plans. Villaraigosa has labeled the mayor “desperate” and ridiculed the proposals as unrealistic promises.

“There is a great deal of skepticism in voters anyway about what candidates say and what they deliver,” said Xandra Kayden, a senior fellow at the UCLA School of Public Affairs.

The mayor said he waited until after the March election to float these major initiatives because it was hard to get a fair hearing from the public when he had four challengers.

“It was difficult to break through the noise,” he said, adding, “The problem I had in the primary is the gang of four was saying everything was terrible, and of course that’s not true.”

Hahn said his latest initiatives are linked to accomplishments of his first term. “What we are trying to do is build on the success of the first term,” he said.

The mayor, however, has done little to move his proposals forward. A spokesman for the mayor’s office referred questions about these city proposals to Hahn’s political campaign.

Kam Kuwata, a political strategist for the mayor, said Hahn has asked the city attorney for a report on how to create a citywide gang injunction, and the mayor has released a city budget that includes money for five additional gang prosecutors to enforce a citywide gang injunction.

Hahn’s budget for next year, however, does not include money to provide tax breaks to film companies, although it calls for the city to develop the program.

The Villaraigosa campaign has dismissed the proposals as 11th-hour thrashings, repeatedly pointing out that if the mayor felt so strongly about citywide injunctions and control over the schools, he could have acted earlier in his first term.

As he strives to become mayor, Villaraigosa has devoted much of the last few months to portraying himself as someone who has support from a diverse coalition across the city, from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) to Assemblyman Keith Richman (R-Northridge).

Eighteen of the 31 press releases his campaign posted on his website since the March election tout endorsements. Many endorsement events, such as the one with Johnson, are also designed to show that he is snatching high-profile players from Hahn.

His campaign points out that he has released proposals on such issues as airport security and education, but they have often taken second billing to the likes of Johnson.

Villaraigosa’s focus on broad themes such as leadership has also opened him to mocking attacks from Hahn that Villaraigosa is “an empty suit” who is all rhetoric and no results.

But Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College and the founder of the Progressive Los Angeles Network, said Villaraigosa’s strategy is the best available to him.

“If you deal with the worst intersections, you sound like Hahn,” he said. “If you talk about a vision of a better L.A. and where you want to lead people, you sound like a utopian radical.

“So the way to cut the difference is to run a campaign where you do a little bit of both, but you mainly talk about leadership and character.”