Washed It!

Hundreds of people filled a church near South Los Angeles and spilled out into the streets for an emotional Mass on Wednesday celebrating the life of a popular fifth-grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary School who committed suicide in the Angeles National Forest.

Tearful relatives, colleagues and students remembered Rigoberto Ruelas as a dedicated educator, who steered children away from gangs, helped them overcome academic difficulties and inspired them to aim for college.

“He wasn’t just a teacher to me, he was a second father,” said 13-year-old Karla Gonzalez, who broke down and sobbed when she took her turn at the microphone. She said Ruelas helped her learn English when she arrived from Mexico and bought her books to read. “I will always be grateful to him,” she said.

Many of those at Presentation Catholic Church in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood expressed anger at The Times for posting on the Internet the rating he received in a database. The Los Angeles teachers’ union has said that it learned from Ruelas’ family that he was depressed about his score when he disappeared last week. His body was found Sunday in a ravine in the Big Tujunga Canyon area, about 100 feet below a bridge.

Using a system known as “value-added” methodology, the newspaper analyzed seven years of student test scores in English and math to determine how much students’ performance improved under about 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers. Based on The Times’ findings, Ruelas was rated “average” in his ability to raise students’ English scores and “less effective” in his ability to raise math scores. Overall, he was rated slightly “less effective” than his peers.

Ruelas’ brother, Alejandro, told “AirTalk” on KPCC 89.3 FM on Wednesday that it was unfair of The Times to post the information. “He’s not a mayor,” he said. “He’s not the president. He’s not a public worker.”

But when asked by radio host Larry Mantle what his brother had said about the scores, Ruelas indicated that was not the kind of subject Rigoberto discussed. “I don’t know if he felt he didn’t want to burden anybody,” said Alejandro Ruelas, who has declined to speak to The Times.

He said he was unaware of any personal problems in his brother’s life. Asked whether he believed that Ruelas took his life out of frustration with the scores, he said the family was still gathering information from his colleagues.

“The little feedback that we are getting right now is that that school wasn’t the healthiest place to be working,” Ruelas said. “The people who are supposed to be helping them as far as administrators, principals are using this kind of scores also to bully and harass.”

Miramonte Principal Martin Sandoval said Monday that he gave little credence to the method used by The Times and had not discussed ratings with his staff.

“Numbers come and go,” Robert Lopez, a former Miramonte principal, said at Wednesday’s memorial Mass. “I have a completely different impression of what value-added means. It means coming in early and opening up the door, allowing students to come in for help when they need it.”

Ruelas’ mother, Rita, spoke for the family when she offered impassioned thanks to all those who attended the service. “He was your son, he was your brother,” she said. “He was there with you for all of those years.”

Many then walked to the nearby school for a candlelight vigil in front of an improvised memorial wall decorated with handwritten messages, drawings, flowers and balloons.

A funeral Mass will be held Tuesday at St. Emydius Catholic Church in Lynwood.

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

carla.rivera@latimes.com
Hundreds celebrate life of L.A. teacher who killed himself

The well-trod sidewalk beside a busy urban boulevard is an unlikely place for a young man’s memorial, but there it is, chained to a signpost outside a furniture store: a man’s bicycle painted ghostly white. Flowers cover the frame and snake up the signpost, and a rust-colored shawl is tied carefully to the handlebars.

For months after her son Asif’s death on the adjacent street, Lizi Rahman would visit the bicycle at least twice a week. Sometimes she would stand in the middle of the wide, buzzing avenue and visualize Asif, 22, riding alongside the buses, trucks, cars and other cyclists.

“When I go there, it’s like I see him,” said Rahman, who still can’t believe that anyone could have missed her nearly 6-foot-tall son as he pedaled home one afternoon in February 2008. But a truck driver hit and killed Asif, and the so-called ghost bike erected in his honor is now one of nearly 70 in New York City, planted near the spots where riders were killed.

The practice began here in 2005 after 28-year-old Elizabeth Padilla died beneath the wheels of an ice cream delivery truck in Brooklyn. It was started two years earlier in St. Louis, where volunteers began erecting ashy white bikes to remember fallen cyclists. Now, there are ghost bikes in as many as 134 cities in 35 states and 21 countries, according to http://www.ghostbikes.org, which tracks the activities of the volunteer groups that maintain the bicycles.

Few have as many ghost bikes as New York, and as with most things that occupy precious public space in this overcrowded city, they have caught the attention of city officials. In June, the Department of Sanitation said it planned to remove “derelict” bikes, including ghost bikes, saying they denied other bicyclists parking spots and could block sidewalks or streets.

The department backed down this month after biking advocates argued that ghost bikes are memorials, not abandoned piles of steel. But people like Mary Beth Kelly, whose husband, Carl Henry Nacht, was killed while bicycling, said the battle showed the difficulties of getting the city to spotlight the hazards cyclists face, even as it encourages cycling and creates new bike lanes.

“We are trying to make New York a more livable city, and that means alternative means of transportation have to be made available and safe,” Kelly said. “These bikes serve as reminders that we’re only halfway there.”

The challenge of keeping growing numbers of bicyclists safe is not confined to New York, where commuter cycling has more than doubled since 2005. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa broke his elbow in July when he crashed his bike while avoiding a taxi that pulled in front of him. City biking advocates said the incident underscored their demands for more bike lanes and better enforcement of laws to prosecute drivers who endanger cyclists.

According to ghostbikes.org, there are at least seven ghost bikes in Los Angeles, in addition to smaller collections of bikes in Newport Beach, San Clemente, San Diego, Bakersfield and Fresno. The latest Los Angeles ghost bike was erected in February 2010 in memory of Ovidio Morales, 34, who was hit and killed by a driver while riding his bike in Compton.

Nationwide, the bicycle fatality rate has topped 700 annually since 2004. In 2008, the last year for which figures are available, the number was 716, including 42 in New York and 109 in California, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Lizi Rahman hadn’t heard of the ghost bikes before her son was killed in New York, but now she views them as a way of raising awareness among pedestrians, cyclists and drivers. She still visits Asif’s ghost bike a couple of times a month, and she keeps an eye on it when she drives by to make sure it hasn’t been knocked over. She notices when someone has left flowers or other mementos.

The scarf appeared recently. “It’s nicely wrapped around the front,” Rahman said. “Someone who loves him, adores him, came and in his memory put a scarf around it.”

Such gestures are common for the ghost bikes that dot New York’s five boroughs. With their white frames and tires and garlands of flowers, the bicycles are startling amid the gray and black of the city streets. Passersby sometimes stop abruptly, then move closer to read the signs that accompany each one. Rahman and Kelly say the bicycles could save lives by reminding people of the hazards on New York’s crowded streets.

But not everyone who has lost a loved one to a cycling tragedy embraces them. The parents of 8-year-old Alexander Toulouse still try to avoid the Brooklyn intersection where their son was killed by a post office truck in 2008, and they declined the invitation to attend his ghost bike’s unveiling.

“Alexander Toulouse. 8 years old. Killed by a truck. Sept. 6, 2008. Rest in peace,” the sign on the white children’s bicycle reads. On the anniversary of his death, someone left a cup filled with colored daisies on the sidewalk beside the bike.

“It is a good idea to highlight cycling fatalities,” Alexander’s father, Chris Toulouse, said in an e-mail, but he said ghost bikes were no substitute for the city making drivers more aware of bike lanes and making cyclists more diligent about obeying traffic rules. And for him and his wife, at least, they are more of a painful reminder than a pleasant memorial.

Though most ghost bikes are old and donated by bike shops, the bicycle memorializing Nacht is one the doctor used for commuting. It replaced the original donated ghost bike, which was smashed by a car even though it was off the street and beside a designated bike path that skirts the Hudson River in Manhattan.

Nacht and Kelly were pedaling along the popular path in June 2006 when a police tow truck turned onto the path from the street, hitting Nacht.

“That bike has particular meaning to me,” Kelly said of the current ghost bike, which she offered to volunteers after the first one was wrecked. Nacht would have turned 61 on Sept. 10, so Kelly did what she always does to memorialize his birthday: She visited his old bike and filled its basket with flowers.

But memories are only part of the reason Kelly says the ghost bike must remain. “It has a very important message, which is that cyclists even on a bike path cannot be protected enough,” said Kelly, who like Rahman was active in the campaign to preserve ghost bikes.

They are resting more easily now that sanitation officials have changed their tune, but Leah Todd of the Street Memorial Project said there could be battles ahead as the number of ghost bikes grows to match the number of bicyclists killed.

“I’m never confident that there will be a last fight,” Todd said.

Police, meanwhile, announced the death of another cyclist on Sept. 11: a 23-year-old woman run over by a city bus after being knocked off her bike by a driver who opened a car door into her path.

tina.susman@latimes.com
‘Ghost bikes’ stand in memory of fallen cyclists

For months, the budget crisis in Los Angeles has hamstrung and frustrated the city’s homicide detectives. With no money to pay for the long hours of overtime they typically work, LAPD officials saw no choice but to force detectives to take time off from the job. Cases started taking longer to solve or going cold.

The LAPD’s struggles weren’t lost on Robert Clark, an FBI assistant special agent in charge of the bureau’s anti-gang efforts in Los Angeles. Clark’s concern grew as he watched the number of gang-related killings in the city’s violent southern swatch spike in early summer. With agents, cash and equipment to spare, Clark approached LAPD officials with an unusual offer to help.

The results were striking: More than two dozen homicide cases were solved during a first-of-its-kind collaboration of the two agencies.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said veteran LAPD homicide Det. Sal LaBarbera. “We were able to clear cases at a pace that we never would have been able to hit. Twenty-seven homicides in three months? That’s unheard of.”

Though the FBI and LAPD have collaborated before, officials from both agencies said the speed with which the improvised idea came together, the scope of the assistance and its immediate effect were unprecedented.

Named Operation Save Our Streets, the effort began July 1 and teamed six FBI agents with a few dozen LAPD homicide detectives who work in some of the city’s bloodiest, most gang-saturated neighborhoods. With the agents came half a dozen vehicles, badly needed computers and hard drives, and access to the FBI’s forensic laboratory and surveillance equipment. Most importantly, Clark ponied up money to cover the LAPD detectives’ overtime costs, allowing them to forgo the department-wide policy that sends officers home on forced leave when they accrue too many hours of additional work.

The money “kept us working — allowed us to stay at it unrestricted, in the way we need to. Without it, we would have been stuck keeping regular office hours,” LaBarbera said.

The effect of the LAPD’s overtime policy on homicide cases was first reported in The Times in April.

At the start, detectives and agents focused on 13 recent killings in which the detectives believed they had strong leads and a good chance of quick arrests. Within weeks, however, the scope of the project expanded as the agents began joining detectives when they rolled out to fresh crime scenes, as well as helping with cases going back several years. In all, the teams worked on 78 homicides, LaBarbera said.

Often forced to wait for the LAPD’s overworked crime lab to process DNA evidence and conduct other forensic tests, LaBarbera said, detectives got quicker results from the FBI’s lab. Advanced cellphone tracking technology was available, as were surveillance vans outfitted with equipment not owned by the LAPD.

The case of Shavonna Jones, a 30-year-old woman allegedly shot to death by her estranged husband on May 22, underscored the reach of the FBI. LAPD detectives had spent several weeks chasing dead ends throughout the region, but lost the husband’s trail.

On information they gathered from prison inmates who knew the man, FBI agents were able to trace him to an area outside Minneapolis. Calls to the bureau’s Minneapolis field office resulted in his arrest Aug. 12.

“Would we have solved the case? Probably, but it would have taken three or four times as long,” LaBarbera said.

Arrests were also made in Nevada and Arizona. The oldest case solved went back two decades. In all, agents and detectives interviewed more than 250 witnesses and suspects, served more than two dozen search warrants and made 20 arrests, according to LAPD officials. In a few cases, the suspects whom police concluded were responsible for the killings were found to have died.

If there was a downside to the collaboration, LaBarbera said, it was that it was a stark reminder of what LAPD detectives might be able to do with more resources.

“There shouldn’t be a cap or a limit when it comes to somebody’s life,” he said. “If it were my kid, I’d want 1,000 people out there working around the clock.”

joel.rubin@latimes.com
FBI and LAPD join forces to solve more than two dozen homicide cases

PARACHINAR, Pakistan (Reuters) – NATO helicopters from Afghanistan attacked a militant-infested border region of Pakistan on Thursday, killing three Pakistani soldiers, a Pakistani official said, a raid that is certain to raise tensions.

A spokeswoman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, however, said none of its helicopters had crossed into Pakistani airspace.

Pakistan has said it would consider “response options” if NATO forces continued to violate its sovereignty.

On Thursaday, two NATO helicopters attacked Teri Mangal village in Kurram, an ethnic Pashtun tribal region in the Pakistani northwest, a Pakistani security official said.

“The helicopters shelled the area for about 25 minutes. Three of our soldiers manning a border post were killed and three wounded,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.

Thursday’s attack if confirmed, would be the fourth cross-border raid in recent days, which comes just as the United States steps up strikes by unmanned drone aircraft in Pakistan’s North Waziristan.

ISAF spokeswoman Major Sunset Belinsky said the helicopters targeted militants in Afghanistan’s eastern Paktia province, opposite Kurram, and they did not cross into Pakistan.

But Pakistan military officials had informed ISAF that their border forces had been struck in the attack, she said in a statement.

“ISAF is working with Pakistan to ascertain if the two events are linked. The matter remains under investigation,” she said.

A Pakistani security official said authorities had stopped trucks carrying supplies for the NATO forces in Afghanistan at a checkpost in neighbouring Khyber region after the incident.

“Yes, the NATO supplies have been stopped. It has been done locally,” he told Reuters.

The rugged border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan is seen by Washington as a critical battleground in its fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Though many analysts believe that the strikes by unmanned U.S. drones are carried out with the tacit approval of Pakistan, any border incursions by foreign troops is a highly explosive issue in Pakistan where anti-American sentiments run very high.

In 2008, Pakistani troops had fired on US military helicopters and forced them to return to Afghanistan after Pakistan army chief General Ashfaque Kayani said Pakistan would not allow foreign troops on its soil.

The latest series of raids began last Friday when two NATO Apache helicopters killed 30 insurgents on Pakistani soil after a rare manned pursuit across the border from eastern Afghanistan. It followed an attack by militants on a remote Afghan security outpost in Khost province, NATO said.

On Saturday, two Kiowa helicopters returned to the area and killed another four. Monday saw another possible border violation, with six militants killed in Kurram, a Reuters reporter in the area said. But an ISAF spokesman said it was “near the border,” rather than in Pakistan.

ISAF said in a statement issued late on Sunday that helicopters crossing into Pakistan were following its rules of engagement.
Pakistan says 3 soldiers killed in NATO strike

North Korean state media released a photograph on Thursday of the reclusive state’s leader-in-waiting Kim Jong Eun.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il anointed his youngest son as successor this week, promoting him to senior political and military positions. The photograph showed senior North Korean leaders in a group.

North Korea publishes photo of Kim’s youngest son

The U.S. Labor Department issued a critical report on enforcement of workplace safety in California on Tuesday and ordered the state to fix myriad problems, including poor training of safety inspectors and delays in responding to complaints.

Federal officials took aim at the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health, saying, among other things, that inspectors do not always review a company’s history statewide before deciding whether to cite it for repeat violations. They also found that the division’s appeals process “falls short.”

The problems found with California’s program were “relatively serious, especially with the appeals board,” said Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health.

The Labor Department’s review mirrors many of the findings of a Times investigation last fall that found the division’s appeals board repeatedly reduced or dismissed penalties levied by health and safety inspectors, even in situations in which workers died or were seriously injured.

The Times highlighted the case of Bimbo Bakeries USA, where nine employees have lost parts of fingers or a limb in several California plants since 2003. After most of those accidents, investigators found that baking machines did not have proper guards to prevent employees from reaching in to dislodge dough that got stuck. It is not clear that inspectors recognized the problem as a pattern across the plants.

Many of the penalties levied by the Cal/OSHA were dismissed or reduced on technicalities by judges working for the appeals board, so the company wasn’t required to immediately fix hazards.

The Times focused on several serious examples, including the case of a worker on the Golden Gate Bridge, Kevin Scott Noah, who plummeted 50 feet to his death.

A Cal/OSHA investigator concluded that the contractor had not provided employees with scaffolds; it issued three “serious” citations and a $26,000 fine, records show.

The contractor appealed on the grounds that Cal/OSHA had issued the citations to Shimmick Obayashi, the name listed on the company’s business cards. The company’s full name was the Shimmick Construction Co. Inc./Obayashi Corp.

An administrative law judge tossed the case out, writing that Cal/OSHA had failed to determine the company’s legal name.

Candice Traeger, chairwoman of Cal/OSHA’s appeals board, could not be reached Tuesday for comment

Workplace safety advocates hailed the federal government’s action, saying it underscored that safety in California has been suffering for years.

“I don’t think people realize how broken our system is,” said Gail Bateson, executive director of Worksafe, a nonprofit that advocates for workers.

But Len Welsh, the chief of the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, took issue with some of the more than 40 findings about his division.

“They got a lot of stuff frankly wrong, and embarrassingly so,” he said. For example, he said, one finding accuses the division of not opening investigations into seven fatal accidents quickly enough. But another finding says there were two such accidents. When his office questioned the findings, federal officials couldn’t explain the discrepancy, he said.

Cal/OSHA and the appeals board have 30 days to respond to the report and develop corrective plans.

The general review of California’s program was part of a larger examination of all 25 U.S. states that run their own workplace safety programs under the jurisdiction of the federal program. Serious problems were also found with Hawaii’s program, which could be taken over by the federal government.

jessica.garrison@latimes.com
Cal/OSHA ordered to improve workplace safety

The candidates vying to be California’s next governor had their first face-to-face debate Tuesday evening, a polite but contentious exchange in which Republican Meg Whitman and Democrat Jerry Brown largely stuck to their campaign stump scripts, questioning each other’s fitness to lead the state and accusing their opponent of being beholden to campaign contributors.

Whitman repeatedly hammered Brown for his union ties, saying he would be unable to renegotiate pension contracts after labor unions spent millions of dollars propping up his candidacy.

“He will bring people together — it will be a meeting of all of the special interests and the unions who are there collecting IOUs from the campaign they have funded,” she said before 750 audience members in the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis. “I will not owe anything to anyone and I will do what is right for the people of California.”

Brown countered that Whitman has received $25 million from wealthy contributors who would directly benefit from her plan to eliminate the state capital gains tax, which he said would blow a $5-billion hole in the state budget.

“This is a little bit like the kettle calling the pot black,” he said. “That $5 billion comes right out of the general fund…. It’s from schools, from kids, from teachers … to the most powerful and big campaign contributors.”

Brown and Whitman are locked in a tight race, which is remarkable because of Whitman’s record-breaking spending and Democrats‘ double-digit voter registration advantage in California. Interest in their first matchup was intense, with more than 130 journalists covering the event, serving outlets as far away as China, Germany and Japan. A couple hundred protesters milled outside.

The most amusing exchange occurred when a moderator noted that Brown twice ran for president when he was governor previously and asked what would prevent him from doing so again.

“Age,” Brown said. Then he grinned and continued: “Hell, if I was younger, you know I’d be running again.”

But “I now have a wife, I come home at night, I don’t try to close down the bars in Sacramento like I used to do when I was governor of California. I’m going to spend more time in Sacramento and get it done,” he said. “So don’t worry about that; I’m in for the duration here.”

Much of the exchange focused on which candidate is best prepared to fix the state’s flawed government and to spur economic growth and job creation — the billionaire former corporate chief who says her business experience will help right California, or the longtime politician who says his decades in public service mean he alone can bring together the state’s dysfunctional legislators.

Brown said he thought long and hard before deciding to run, and chose to do so because he believes his political experience could help the state weather its current hardships.

“I care a great deal about public service. I think it’s honorable. I’ve lived in this state all my life, I love it, I voted here all my life,” he said. And “God willing,” he added, he would die in California.

Whitman responded that shaking up the status quo takes a new approach.

“My view is if we’re going to change the direction of the state, we have to do it very differently,” she said. “My approach is anchored in focus. I want to do three things really well to restore the faith of the people in California can have in their government.” She said she wanted to cut government spending, create jobs and fix schools.

They also discussed immigration, with Brown favoring a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally and Whitman opposing. And Whitman reiterated her apology for not voting for much of her adult life.

The meeting, sponsored by Capital Public Radio, NBC’s KCRA-TV in Sacramento, the Sacramento Bee and UC Davis, was the first of three debates scheduled before the November election. The next one is Saturday in Fresno.

seema.mehta@latimes.com

Brown, Whitman go head-to-head in first debate

A federal judge Tuesday blocked the execution of convicted rapist and murderer Albert Greenwood Brown, saying there was “no way” the court could conduct an adequate review of California’s new lethal-injection procedures before the death sentence was to be carried out Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in effect reversed his Friday decision that the execution could go forward if the state gave Brown the option of dying by a single-injection method used in other states, rather than the three-drug cocktail prescribed by California’s new regulations.

Earlier today, Fogel had asked attorneys to weigh in on the state’s new procedures for carrying out lethal injections, including how similar and different they are from the older rules that the judge had previously found to be flawed.

Time has become a crucial factor in whether Brown will be put to death this year.

The attorney general’s office has said that the state’s supply of a key drug that renders condemned prisoners unconscious will expire on Friday and that further executions would have to wait until at least next year, when new supplies are expected.

Brown was convicted of raping and killing a 15-year-old Riverside girl in 1980.
Judge blocks California’s first execution in five years

The day after Jesse Kelly won the Republican primary in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, Democratic incumbent Gabrielle Giffords went on the air with a lacerating attack. Noting that Kelly said he ultimately wanted to eliminate Social Security, Giffords’ television ad warned that Kelly “is a risk we can’t afford.”

Kelly, a construction manager with no political experience, had made the mistake of venturing into the mine-strewn politics of Social Security. No matter that he said he would preserve benefits for current retirees. The fact that he once described it as “the biggest pyramid scheme in history” gave his rival the equivalent of cannon fodder in a district where nearly one-fifth of the population is older than 65.

Kelly is now running his own ad vowing to “honor our commitment to seniors,” trying to fend off a line of assault that Democrats are stepping up throughout the country. It’s one of the few consistent themes in Democratic campaign commercials in a year when the party has otherwise eschewed a national message.

Accusing Republicans of wanting to do away with Social Security is a well-worn trope for Democrats. But a slew of “tea party”-backed candidates who have called for privatizing or eliminating the program have given Democrats fresh ammunition at a time when they are on the defensive about healthcare reform and the economic stimulus.

The strategy allows Democrats to link their rivals to former President George W. Bush, who sought to allow younger workers to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in the stock market.

“And because it has also become a rallying cry among some of the tea party movement … it’s an indicator of how far to the right and how extreme a position the Republican candidates are taking,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has devoted the majority of its spots to slamming House GOP candidates on the topic.

Republicans, however, complain that their rivals are distorting their position.

“There have been numerous fact-checks and editorials calling out Democrats for their Social Security attacks,” said Paul Lindsay, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Democrats are desperately trying to scare seniors.”

“This is what a Democrat says when they’re losing an argument,” said Grover Norquist, president of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform. “If they’re saying this, it means they don’t have anything else to say.”

Nevertheless, Norquist advises GOP candidates to steer clear of Social Security on the campaign trail: “It’s too easy to demagogue.”

Indeed, it’s a testament to the political thorniness of the subject that most Republicans are strenuously avoiding it now that the primaries have passed. While Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) proposed personal retirement accounts for younger workers in his “Roadmap for America’s Future” economic plan this year, the GOP “Pledge to America” released last week does not address how to reform Social Security, whose outlays will regularly exceed its revenue beginning in 2016, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

But Democrats are still feeding off comments made by their GOP rivals earlier in the year. In Nevada, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid weaves it into nearly every spot he runs against Republican Sharron Angle, who has backed away from earlier statements that she would phase out Social Security. A commercial for Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) includes footage of GOP rival Ken Buck calling Social Security “a horrible policy,” words Buck later said he regretted.

A commercial for Rep. Baron P. Hill (D-Ind.) spotlights a clip of GOP challenger Todd Young calling the program “a Ponzi scheme.” And a new ad by Democratic challenger Tarryl Clark argues that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) views seniors as addicts, noting that she said she wants to “wean everybody off” Social Security.

“In the past, the Democrats had to strain and work hard to convey the risk of a Republican victory to Social Security,” said Lawrence Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota who studies the program. “This year, it’s low-hanging fruit … because there are prominent Republicans running for the Senate and House who have very publicly and clearly raised questions about future of Social Security.”

But in some races, Democrats have taken more generic comments by GOP candidates as evidence of their antipathy to the entitlement. In Wisconsin, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has run three ads asserting that former prosecutor Sean Duffy, the GOP nominee for an open House seat, supports a plan to privatize Social Security. “Sean Duffy may not be worried about his retirement security, but the rest of us are,” stated one, featuring images of the onetime star of MTV’s “The Real World” climbing into a purple SUV.

As evidence, the committee cited Duffy’s endorsement of Ryan’s “Roadmap” plan. But Duffy has never explicitly voiced support for personal accounts, and on his campaign website he states, “I have not and will not endorse privatizing Social Security.” The Democrats’ campaign committee said Duffy was merely trying to backtrack.

It remains to be seen whether the Democratic fusillade will pay off for them at the ballot box. Evan Tracey, president of Campaign Media Analysis Group, a division of Kantar Media that tracks political advertising, said the party was hitting Social Security particularly hard in this cycle because the passage of healthcare reform took away one of their traditional critiques of the GOP.

“The Democratic message is — let’s face it — fear-based and designed to get seniors worried about their Social Security check,” he said. “That’s as common as Republicans calling Democrats liberals. I don’t know if anybody has presented a real argument that’s going to connect with voters.”

matea.gold@latimes.com
Democrats campaign on GOP threats to Social Security