Two days after winning a spot in the Los Angeles mayoral runoff, Antonio Villaraigosa stood before a bank of TV cameras and vowed to root out "the waste and fraud infesting our city departments."
At his side was City Controller Laura Chick, who pledged support for Villaraigosa and challenged the propriety of public contracts awarded by his opponent, Mayor James K. Hahn.
"The question is, who's benefiting -- that's the work of the federal and county grand juries," said Chick, whose audits helped spark criminal investigations of alleged trading of city contracts for campaign donations.
Those remarks at Villaraigosa's campaign headquarters in Boyle Heights on Thursday were part of a push by Hahn's challenger to keep the mayor on the defensive.
Yet even as Hahn prepares to strike back, the mayor is grappling with a difficult question: Have his political troubles grown so large that voters will not believe him when he attacks Villaraigosa?
"He's going to have real credibility problems," said Thomas Hollihan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at USC.
Negative campaigns always run the risk of backfiring. But for Hahn, that risk is unusually high, Hollihan said, because of his low popularity rating -- a majority of voters held an unfavorable view of him -- and the frequent charge by opponents that he hit Villaraigosa below the belt in an ad during the runoff four years ago.
"There will be more skepticism," he said.
Hahn has often denied there was anything wrong with his 2001 television ad faulting Villaraigosa for seeking the early prison release of a convicted drug trafficker whose father gave him campaign money. While not disputing the facts of the ad, critics said its images -- a crack pipe and grainy pictures of Villaraigosa -- stoked prejudices against Latinos.
Hahn reprised that attack in the run-up to Tuesday's first round of voting in the mayoral race, pounding Villaraigosa and another rival for writing "official letters to get a convicted crack cocaine dealer pardoned." This time, the ad did not show a crack pipe.
Villaraigosa, who was slow to react to the 2001 assault, responded immediately with his own blistering spot on "corruption," "contracting scandals" and alleged "money laundering" by a Hahn fundraiser.
Since Tuesday, when he squeaked through the first round with 24% of the vote, Hahn has largely shunned attacks on Villaraigosa. Yet even as he focused on promoting his record on crime and jobs, Hahn has hinted at the more hostile engagement ahead.
