James Hahn Inspired by Dad in Run for Mayor

While the rest of the field mulls its options from the sidelines, Los Angeles City Atty. James Hahn--guided by the memory of a father who infected him with a love of local politics and whom he buried just over a year ago--is running for mayor.

Never mind that the election is more than two years away. Hahn’s campaign, which capitalizes on his citywide office and what may be Los Angeles’ most revered political name, already is unabashedly underway. He presses the flesh in community meetings and at prayer breakfasts across the city, and his schedule is packed with lunch meetings, four to five a week, in which he sounds out Los Angeles’ civic leadership about support for his run.

“I’ve made a decision,” he said in a wide-ranging interview. “Other people, I think, are still in the mode of thinking about it.”

Hahn’s decided to seek the city’s top office last year, not long after the death of his father, legendary City Councilman and county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn. Kenny Hahn died in 1997, having succeeded in much of what he set out to do, but having failed in his half-hearted effort to talk his son out of a life in politics.

“I rebelled,” Hahn said with a smile.

The father served Los Angeles for 45 years. He inspired the love of constituents by tending to their problems, filling their potholes, always fixing. He became the rare white politician to command the affection and loyalty of a largely black and Latino constituency through years of racial turmoil. When Martin Luther King Jr. made his first visit to Los Angeles, the senior Hahn was the only elected official--white or black--on hand to welcome him.

Learning to ‘Kenny-Hahn-ize’

The son is different, and yet he shows flashes of his father. Where the father was ebullient and outgoing, the son is more reserved. Boyish in his mannerisms and physically bigger than the senior Hahn, James Hahn nevertheless can stand at the edge of a crowd and attract little notice. He waits to be noticed before saying hello.

He brings weaknesses and strengths to the campaign. Hahn’s public speaking style can border on dull, but he is more compelling in smaller groups. His management of the city attorney’s office has been criticized, but he has recently surrounded himself with quality aides and associates. He has coasted through some elections but recently demonstrated that he can be tough, too. Few if any people think of him as evil or corrupt, but he also fails to inspire much of the fierce devotion that so many felt for his father.

Today, Hahn works for the first time without his father’s advice. But there is a sense in which Kenny Hahn is part of every James Hahn campaign.

Not a day goes by, James Hahn said, that someone does not approach him and tell him how much Kenny Hahn meant to Los Angeles. Sometimes, he added, the day will start to wind down and no one will have mentioned his father.

“But then, just when I think no one will,” he said, “someone comes up to me and tells me how much my dad did for them.”

Even though it has been more than a year since his father died, James Hahn--who once rode with Kenny Hahn in parades and proudly arrived at football games on his father’s arm--still mists a bit when he thinks of him. He talks of how proud his father was of the visible signs of government’s constructive presence--in freeway call boxes, a new hospital, a road with newly filled potholes.

“I always admired what my dad did because you could see it,” he said. By contrast, the work of the city attorney seems almost invisible--court victories, settlements, management decisions.

“I would come in here every day, and I was working hard, but I couldn’t see it,” he said, adding that he then moved to put assistant city attorneys closer to the people, assigning them to community tasks such as gang injunctions. “I’ve tried to Kenny Hahn-ize the office. . . . Now, you can go back to some of those areas of the city and you can see the difference.”

He smiled at that, talked about how it has made him and his staff proud to work in his father’s tradition. And then he sat forward, propping his elbows on his knees, his posture boyish but his intensity real.

“People are always telling me: If you’re only half as good as your dad, you’ll be great,” he said. “I’d love to be half as good as my dad.”

Seeking Out Community Leaders

But James Hahn methodically makes his own mark. His father’s reputation helped give him a solid base among the city’s African American voters, and James Hahn has earned that support in the years since. He is a moderate liberal, a proponent of gang injunctions and community policing. He remained a stalwart supporter of former Police Chief Willie L. Williams even after the rest of the city leadership had thrown in the towel.

Even his critics credit Hahn with assembling a strong group of advisors--one that includes Chief Administrative Officer Matt Middlebrook, Chief Deputy City Atty. Timothy McOsker and political consultant Bill Carrick, each of them among the best at what they do.

As he builds a support base, the list of those invited to chat with Hahn is cobbled together from his own long experience, from the suggestions of advisors and others, and from a story that appeared last year in The Times, in which 24 leading Los Angeles citizens offered their views about the problems facing the city. Typical of his diligence, Hahn took that story, listed the people named and set out to confer with each.

A year later, Hahn has sounded out the ideological and ethnic spectrum of influential Los Angeles. Among those he has consulted are former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Eastside priest Greg Boyle, Chamber of Commerce President Ezunial Burts, Police Commission member Gerald Chaleff, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund chief Antonia Hernandez and skid row activist Alice Callaghan.

Some of those invited to lunch with Hahn have delivered their encouragement, others have held their thoughts in check. A few say they were all but offered commission posts or other inducements if they would join up as early supporters of Hahn for mayor.

The meetings serve two purposes, according to Hahn and his advisors: They arm the city attorney with a broad sense of the problems facing Los Angeles and cutting-edge ideas about how to tackle them, and they open doors for Hahn, once he announces, to call on those same people for their support.

“This is a major effort,” said one Hahn advisor. “You have to build a strong foundation for a run like this, and that’s what he’s doing.”

Although crafted principally as a political strategy, the outreach campaign already has helped shape one major city policy.

During a key moment in the debate over proposals to reform the City Charter, Hahn stepped in and helped broker a compromise on the hotly debated question of when the new document, if approved by voters, should take effect.

Hahn surprised some critics of Mayor Richard Riordan by essentially siding with the mayor and cutting a deal that would give Riordan a year to govern the city using the new rules included in the revised charter. In return, Hahn got the mayor’s promise to add a few lawyers and aides to the city attorney’s office.

Hahn’s commitment to that deal in part grew out of his meetings with the civic leaders, some of whom strongly supported the earlier implementation date and helped persuade Hahn that it was in the city’s best interests.

Advantages to Being Front-Runner

The city attorney’s determined early campaign also has profound political implications in the coming run for mayor. If he is successful in buttoning up support early, it could make it harder, or even impossible, for less certain candidates such as county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa or City Councilwoman Laura Chick to jump into the campaign late and still build a credible base of backers.

Carrick, who managed Hahn’s reelection campaign for city attorney and is advising him on a run for mayor, stressed the benefits of soliciting support early. Moreover, Carrick said Hahn’s approach to the campaign combines some of his father’s political sense with his own.

“Jim is a sort of wonderful combination of his father’s retail political qualities--to reach out and talk to a lot of different people and listen to them and know every nook and cranny of the city--and of very contemporary politics,” Carrick said. “He knows you also have to have a bigger message. You can’t just practice pothole politics. He’s a very serious campaigner.”

Nowhere was that more evident than in 1997, when Hahn faced one of the most formidable challenges of his political career.

Ted Stein, an outspoken, well-connected lawyer and Riordan’s close friend, decided to take aim at the city attorney. Stein ran with Riordan’s endorsement, often appeared in public with the popular mayor, significantly outspent the incumbent and ran a tough campaign.

Hahn did not take that campaign lightly. As it got underway, a few key members of the city’s legal establishment, usually reliable supporters of the incumbent city attorney, defected to Stein’s camp. For a while, it seemed that Hahn’s career was in serious jeopardy.

But those close to Hahn say he rose to the challenge. He campaigned relentlessly and did not flinch from confrontation, either with Stein or with Riordan.

In the end, Hahn did not just beat Stein. He trounced him.

“In a sense, Ted Stein did Jim Hahn a favor,” said one political observer. “He made him get serious.”

Hahn won 217,000 votes in that citywide race, nearly as many as Riordan himself. He beat Stein in 14 out of 15 council districts, decimating him in South Los Angeles and other predominantly minority areas and beating him even on the whiter Westside and more conservative San Fernando Valley. Stein carried just one council seat, in the city’s most conservative area, and in that one, the challenger won by less than 1,000 votes.

Easy to Underestimate, Tough to Beat

Reflecting on such numbers, some strategists suggest that Hahn is the Gray Davis of Los Angeles politics, easy to underestimate and difficult to beat, hard working and serious about running, immersed in the detail of political strategy. Though not surrounded by a hard core of long-term loyalists, he also is not burdened by a wide range of enemies.

“He’s been underestimated,” said attorney George Kieffer, a longtime confidant. “That’s a mistake.”

Like Davis, Hahn also has weaknesses. He is not a riveting speaker, he tends to talk in cliches--reflecting without specifics, for instance, on “the fractured Los Angeles” and the need to build unity amid diversity--and he lacks the strength to muscle potential financial contributors into chipping in to his campaigns. In addition, his family name, though one of the city’s best, was not enough to propel his sister, Janice Hahn, into a congressional seat.

And there have long been questions about his management of the city attorney’s office. Riordan and other city leaders complain about the size and frequency of legal settlements reached by the office. Some blame Hahn and his deputies for choosing to cut too many deals rather than fight cases in court.

Still, it is hard to find anyone who genuinely dislikes him.

“I know better speakers, I know better fund-raisers,” said Joe Cerrell, a veteran of Los Angeles politics. “But you can’t zap him personally. . . . I don’t think I’ve met a more sincere guy.”

Today, those close to Hahn see a somewhat different candidate than the one who has run in--and won--five Los Angeles citywide elections, a feat no potential opponent in the coming campaign can match.

Once, Hahn seemed less substantial, more drawn to office-holding than to governing, less clearly distinct from his father’s legacy. But today’s Hahn seems weightier, more serious. Advisors and others offer no clear explanation for the shift, but they all see it, and they say the events of 1997 hold the key: first, the victory over Stein; then, more searingly, the death of Kenny Hahn.

“His father died, and 5,000 people came to his funeral because he helped their lives,” Carrick said. “There was such an outpouring of sentiment, and for Jim, that led to a real period of reflection. He saw the power of making a contribution and it added to his determination to do that. . . . And he realized he’d have to be very methodical to succeed.”