Government
Sep. 26, 2003
Hallinan Chases a Threepeat
SAN FRANCISCO - The campaign for district attorney is getting interesting. Incumbent Terence Hallinan has opened a 9-point lead over rival Bill Fazio, and Kamala Harris is newly in double digits, according to a recent poll.
Incumbent Terence Hallinan has opened a 9-point lead over rival Bill Fazio, and Kamala Harris is newly in double digits, according to a recent poll.
With a third of voters still undecided, the job remains up for grabs six weeks before Nov. 4, as the challengers attack Hallinan on his domestic-violence prosecution record.
Harris, a political neophyte, looks electable for the first time, according to a veteran analyst of local elections, professor Richard E. DeLeon of San Francisco State University.
"I wouldn't write Harris' candidacy off now, as I was primed to do earlier," DeLeon wrote last week in an e-mail response to questions about the race.
The new numbers have Hallinan ahead with 33 percent, Fazio at 24 percent and Harris with 12 percent.
The poll of 600 voters, conducted in late August by Oakland's Evans/McDonough Co., was commissioned by SFSOS, a local quality-of-life lobby that is outspokenly hostile to Hallinan.
Fazio's campaign manager, Duane Baughman, disputes the published result, arguing that the SFSOS poll's 4.4 percent margin for error could account for his candidate's apparent slippage.
A June poll commissioned by Fazio showed Hallinan at 31 percent, Fazio at 27 percent and Harris at 9 percent, he said.
Few then thought Harris had a chance. Now that has changed, said DeLeon, the chairman of his university's political science department and the author of the 1992 book, "Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975-1991."
"If her numbers keep rising, at some point the 'electability' factor will fade in voters' calculations and a lot of them, especially the large pool of undecideds, will take her candidacy seriously, too, without fear of wasting their time or their votes," DeLeon wrote.
Despite that assessment, DeLeon believes the more likely outcome of the Nov. 4 vote would be a reprise of the Hallinan-Fazio December runoffs of 1995 and 1999. Those races proceeded along classic liberal-conservative lines, with Hallinan's victory margin thinning in 1999 to just under nine-tenths of a percentage point. Out of 208,654 votes cast, Hallinan got just 1,820 more than Fazio, or 50.4 percent.
If it's Hallinan-Fazio again in December 2003, voters who backed Harris in November will switch to Hallinan in the runoff, DeLeon calculates. "If we get Fazio-Hallinan Part III, I can't see Harris' votes going to Fazio," he said in a telephone interview.
The wild-card scenario of a Hallinan-Harris runoff would present liberal voters with a dilemma. "That would be interesting," DeLeon said. "It would cause great gyrations within the left."
If it's Fazio vs. Harris in December, "she'd have a good chance of winning," DeLeon believes.
One key endorsement showed how part of Hallinan's liberal base may be migrating to Harris. The 850-member San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs' Association voted to back Harris along with left-wing mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez, a former public defender who now serves as president of the Board of Supervisors.
The deputies liked Harris' crimestopper attitude.
"Prevention is better than fighting crime, and Kamala was very up front with us about working with children to keep them out of court," said SFDSA President Dave Wong. "And Matt treated us like we're all working together to improve the city."
Harris and Gonzalez on the same endorsement list represents a notable linkage, DeLeon thinks.
"That combination struck me," he said, "because putting her in tandem with arguably the most hard-line progressive in the mayor's race helps her gain esteem by association. It has to put her in greater favor with the left in San Francisco, and it's a factor that made me take her more seriously."
An appeal to the left remains the best way to succeed in San Francisco politics, a reality that works against Fazio's perceived conservatism and may have led him last year to abandon his longstanding support for the death penalty.
Still, even in San Francisco, it's hard to run for district attorney without sounding like a prosecutor.
During a Sept. 13 candidates' forum, Fazio said he would back police drug stings targeting buyers as well as sellers, according to an account published by San Francisco Examiner reporter Adriel Hampton. That put him to the right of Hallinan and Harris, who emphasize their pro-medical marijuana positions, a stance Fazio also holds.
Fazio hopes to target outsiders who come into the community to buy drugs. "If we make a few well-reported arrests, word gets around and there will be less of that," he said in an interview last week. "It's a matter of supply and demand."
DeLeon's recent research emphasizes the decline of Mayor Willie Brown's influence in San Francisco politics and the enduring liberal nature of the city's electorate.
Both trends are central to the district attorney race, given Brown's endorsement switch this year from Hallinan to Harris and the efforts of the candidates to align themselves with liberal positions.
DeLeon cites a national study identifying San Francisco as the nation's capital of progressivism, "not only at the level of local government policies and programs, but also at the level of public values and political culture."
That's why Hallinan's one-page campaign Web site, unlike the elaborate productions of his rivals, contains little more than a photo of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat, and her endorsement quote: "I am proud to support America's most progressive district attorney."
And it's why Fazio stresses that his campaign is attracting liberals.
"The demographics are changing," he said. "People are demanding responsibility and accountability. I talked to a group in the Mission recently that self-identified as progressives who voted for Terence last time but are sick of his ignoring quality-of-life issues. They want someone who will help take back Dolores Park."
When candidates deviate from liberal positions, they feel obliged to offer justifications.
Harris, during the candidates' forum, gave a thumbs-up to Proposition M, the anti-panhandling proposal on the November ballot, Hampton reported.
That move could undercut her appeal with liberals, so campaign manager Jim Stearns explained she believes the measure will give her options for putting people into services. "She wants to do something compassionate for street people," he said.
DeLeon said Harris is on the right track in wielding the domestic-violence issue to come after Hallinan, following the disclosure that his deputies plea-bargained with batterer Elbert Flowers, freeing him after two years in county jail to again allegedly assault a girlfriend, this time with a hot iron.
On Sept. 4, a week after the San Francisco Chronicle described the plea bargain, Harris stood on the steps below Hallinan's office at the Hall of Justice to denounce his record of prosecuting batterers.
Harris - using 5-year-old statistics - blasted Hallinan's domestic violence conviction rate of 27 percent and asserted she'd do better.
Harris' first mailer features a tearful woman with a black eye and the headline, "Enough is Enough!"
The 27 percent figure is misleading because it is based on the number of police arrests rather than on the number of cases charged by prosecutors, said Dave LaBahn, executive director of the California District Attorneys Association in Sacramento.
"It's much more fair to ask how many convictions a DA gets out of the cases he charges," LaBahn said this week. "Some arrests we never even see."
By that measure, Hallinan's domestic violence conviction rate in felony cases is 73.5 percent, according to figures supplied Tuesday by the Criminal Justice Statistics Center in Sacramento.
The statewide conviction rate in felony domestic violence cases is 83.6 percent, the statistics center reported. The numbers are for 2001, the most recent available.
Sharon Woo, the managing attorney in Hallinan's domestic violence unit, said the San Francisco conviction rate improved over the last year to about 80.5 percent.
Politically, however, Harris may be on the right track. "I think her recent focus on domestic violence was a brilliant tactical move," wrote DeLeon, "especially [her] targeting the women's vote and slamming both Hallinan and Fazio in a race which has been all too machismo and mano a mano in the past.
"Cracking down on domestic violence is one of those hard/soft positions, like prosecuting hate crimes, that can simultaneously appeal to both law-and-order conservatives and bleeding-heart liberals."
The Hallinan camp lashes back at Harris for unfairly exploiting a painful issue.
"Four years ago, when the statistics she uses were current, Kamala Harris was an enthusiastic endorser and contributor to Terence Hallinan's campaign for reelection," said Hallinan campaign director Marc O'Hara.
At the time, Harris was a deputy prosecutor in Hallinan's shop.
"She knows how focused his office is on diversion and on prosecuting cases other DAs dismiss," O'Hara said. "She can gussy up the stats all she wants, but it's an ugly, stupid lie to attack Terence Hallinan on domestic violence."
Fazio announced he'd have "zero tolerance" for domestic violence defendants. He cites his record dating from the 1970s of prosecuting domestic-violence homicides as first-degree murder instead of as manslaughter, as was then customary.
Hallinan retorts that his foes ignore his aggressive use of diversion programs. He points proudly to a plaque on his office wall from the city's Commission on the Status of Women praising him for tripling the number of prosecutors in his domestic-violence unit.
"His philosophy of a holistic approach to violence against women benefits all of San Francisco's communities," the citation reads.
Harris campaign director Jim Stearns claims that Fazio and Hallinan are running scared.
"There's a clear, linear progression in her campaign, a pattern of growth in her numbers," he said. "These guys started with very high name recognition but they're not building on it."
An unreleased March poll by the Harris campaign showed her then at 8 percent, Stearns said. "She's on a roll," he added, asserting that newer unreleased polls put her as high as 14 percent.
A possible negative for Harris is her complex association with Mayor Willie Brown, a former boyfriend and current endorser, DeLeon said.
In a chapter on San Francisco politics published this year in a book titled, "Racial Politics in American Cities," DeLeon describes what he calls a powerful anti-Willie Brown backlash that culminated in the November 2000 election.
Voters ratified development restrictions opposed by Brown and, voting by district over Brown's objection, elected an 8-to-3 supermajority of slow-growth, anti-Brown supervisors.
"At the end, Mayor Brown's political machine was in ruins," DeLeon wrote.
That outcome makes his endorsement of Harris for district attorney an equivocal gift, DeLeon believes, because voters arguably remain skeptical of Brown's leadership in a turbulent era when district elections and economic decline continue to roil local politics.
So the challenge is for Brown to effectively back Harris without alienating voters.
Yet it may be hard to keep his fingerprints off the campaign. A former Brown appointee, Rebecca Prozan, last week joined Harris to handle her day-to-day scheduling.
Prozan, who worked on Brown's Recreation and Parks Commission, at his office of community relations, on his elections task force and as his liaison to the lesbian and gay community, more recently graduated from Golden Gate Law School.
She said she put a job at Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith on hold to help Harris. "I've known Harris for eight years. It was my decision to join her campaign," Prozan said. Only after she signed up did she inform Brown, she added.
In San Francisco's small political universe, overlapping loyalties are inevitable. Some might be invaluable to a first-time candidate.
"If Willie Brown can keep his money in and his face out of the campaign, Harris might have a chance to become better known and judged on her merits during this molten, recombinant phase of San Francisco's political evolution," DeLeon wrote.
John Roemer
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