It's a tangled web of onetime alliances, betrayals and broken relationships. It's the Los Angeles mayor's race.
Mayor James K. Hahn faces a field of candidates whose political and personal lives have been intertwined for years, so much so that one campaign consultant boasted that his candidate knows his opponent "better than he knows himself."
There's the former police chief, Councilman Bernard C. Parks, who worked with Hahn for years until the newly elected mayor pushed him out.
There's Hahn's rival from the last election, Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, who's mulling a rematch after he lost a harsh contest in which he says Hahn portrayed him "as a gang member and a drug dealer."
And there's Bob Hertzberg, a former roommate and ally of Villaraigosa -- until the two had a bitter falling out four years ago.
Only state Sen. Richard Alarcon seems to come to the race unencumbered by a past conflict with another candidate. He calls most of them friends, though that didn't stop him from entering the race against Hahn because "I don't believe my friend is doing the best job for Los Angeles."
In the small world of Los Angeles politics, it's no surprise that all the leading contenders know each other. But what has many political insiders catching their breath is the complex, intimate and occasionally bitter relationships among these men, Democrats all, who seek the city's top post.
"A writer of a telenovela couldn't have made this one more interesting," said Councilman Eric Garcetti, who has endorsed Hahn, likening the race to the melodrama of Spanish-language soap operas.
With the passions that lie just beneath the surface, Los Angeles could be in store for an unusually vituperative race.
"Everybody is running against former allies, or former enemies, or both," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst and senior scholar at USC.
Hahn, tanned from a spate of outdoor press conferences, demurred when asked about his challengers but appeared unruffled at the campaign ahead. "Campaigns, you know, are not prom dates," he said, repeating a phrase he used three years ago to justify his attacks on Villaraigosa. "The gloves come off in a campaign, you've got to be able to give and take."
The contenders, by and large, share similar liberal to moderate Democratic views. What distinguishes them are their personalities and political styles. And many of them know each other's strengths and failings almost as well as they know their own.
