Anonymous Jim

Ouch. Harold Meyerson leads today's LA Weekly column with a great Jim Hahn anecdote. Recently, he writes, four Stanford academics studied the effect on voters of a politician's appearance by showing students a picture they described as a candidate for the state legislature named "Tom Steele." Well, Steele was actually our mayor — and no student recognized him, nor did the Washington Post. Meyerson writes that this faceless-ness is letting Hahn change his stripes in the waning days of the runoff campaign:

Since Hahn’s identity is so unformed and malleable, just now his consultants are morphing him into some reactionary Tom Steele to bring out whatever’s left of the old Sam Yorty vote. The only precincts in L.A. politics where Hahn could surge in the next two weeks are those filled with Republicans and elderly African-Americans. So Hahn has raised the issue of citywide gang injunctions, and even taken up the cause of restoring the cross on the county seal, as vehicles to bash Villaraigosa for once having headed the Southern California chapter of the ACLU.

Attend a Hahn event in the white enclaves of the San Fernando Valley just now and you might grow confused as to what decade this is. Hahn’s Valley supporters constitute a waxworks of the Valley’s conservative past: There’s Bobbi Fiedler, the anti-busing activist from the ’70s; George Deukmejian buddy Robert Philibosian, who was briefly D.A. in the ’80s; onetime electeds Hal Bernson and Paula Boland. Villaraigosa has the support of the Valley’s current centrist leadership: Bob Hertzberg, Republican Assembly Member Keith Richman and, in an endorsement last Sunday, the Daily News. He has the present; Hahn has the past.

Meyerson, of course, is a Villaraigosa booster from way back. Also in the Weekly, by Robert Greene: Hahn's best weapon left might be former Bob Hertzberg consultant John Shallman, who is "trying now to re-elect the mayor with an independent campaign on behalf of a coalition of pro-Hahn labor groups including construction unions, public employee unions, home-care workers and others." Greene also says the questions raised about Florida campaign donors were a blow to Villaraigosa:

Since Hahn came in a distant second on March 8, the race appears to be Villaraigosa’s to lose. The rub is that Villaraiogosa appears to be capable of losing it.

Through no positive effort of Hahn’s, the Villaraigosa campaign suffered a severe setback last week with a report by David Zahniser of the Daily Breeze on the candidate’s fund-raising from employees of two Florida companies involved in the airport concessions business...

The implication — and there is no direct evidence of wrongdoing at this point — is that these companies may have been making a play for airport-concession contracts in L.A., splitting the contribution into $1,000 increments and making them in the name of their employees to remain in compliance with campaign-contribution limits. That would be money laundering, and it would be illegal.

But it still wouldn’t implicate Villaraigosa — unless it could be proven that the money was given in exchange for a Villaraigosa promise. That, of course, would be pay-for-play, the very thing that Villaraigosa has made the cornerstone of his campaign against Hahn.

Campaign press:
• State teachers union pumps in $500,000 for Villaraigosa, shattering records for so-called independent expenditures. With Hahn also getting big union bucks, Ethics Commissioner Bill Boyarsky says: "I think the independent expenditures have made the reforms meaningless for a major race with a lot on the line."
• Villaraigosa has skipped almost half the sessions of his council education committee, and Hahn has missed 35% of the meetings of his MTA committee. Times.
• Councilman Dennis Zine is jumping from Hahn to Villaraigosa, Rick Orlov reports in the Daily News. He tested the waters back during the primary.
• Bob Hertzberg, in a Q-and-A with CityBeat's Dean Kuipers, blames his loss on last-minute phone calls aimed at convincing Valley voters to stay home: "There were two separate polls that had me ahead. It was literally in the last 48 hours."