Opinion: Can Steve Cooley take yes for an answer?

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The editorial board predicted last month that Steve Cooley, Los Angeles County district attorney and California attorney general hopeful, would react tepidly to a potential Times endorsement of his candidacy in the GOP primary. Our editorial was written in response to the Cooley campaign’s distribution of an earlier piece in which the board noted with dismay that L.A. County sends more people to death row than any other county in the country. We didn’t name Cooley in the death penalty piece, though his folks believe, evidently, that Republican voters see a critical editorial in The Times as a battle scar. Hey, it worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So it wasn’t all that surprising to see, given our endorsement of Cooley last week, an e-mail from his campaign land in my inbox earlier Monday (here’s a screen shot) pointing supporters to a post by a purportedly nonaffiliated conservative blogger declaring the D.A.’s Republican opponents ‘unelectable.’ The post includes this dig at The Times:

It’s highly unlikely that Cooley welcomed the LA Times endorsement -- the Times has a long history of animosity towards and bias against Republicans. Indeed Cooley has born the brunt of their negativity over his 10 years as LA’s ‘top cop.’ However, the unescapable fact is that despite the Times’ best efforts and influence amongst Los Angeles liberals, Cooley has succeeded on beating Democrat challengers 3 times now in the hotly contested District Attorney races.
Before distributing this post, Cooley hadn’t yet explicitly disowned The Times’ endorsement; I say ‘explicitly’ because in an e-mail sent to supporters the day the editorial board endorsed him in the GOP race (here’s a screen shot), his campaign wrote in the subject field, ‘Times Endorses ‘Too-Law-and-Order’ Cooley,’ as if to highlight the fact that the Republican D.A. was still at odds with the supposedly sheepish liberals at the L.A. Times. Whatever works.

(And for the record, the endorsement described our view of Cooley as ‘too conventionally law and order,’ a more qualified take on his approach to law enforcement than his campaign portrayed by misquoting the editorial.)

Back to the blog item: In its e-mail Monday, the Cooley campaign merely points to the post as an outside piece. But reading the blog’s grand total of seven posts -- five of which are dedicated to either praising Cooley or tearing down his opponents -- raises suspicion, hence my earlier reference to the author as ‘purportedly nonaffiliated.’

-- Paul Thornton