Challenger Ladenburg tries to put spotlight on attorney general's race

Attorney General Rob McKenna is a rising star among Washington state Republicans.

What McKenna, 46, lacks in charisma, he makes up for in smarts, ethics and political instincts, his supporters say. As one of three Republicans holding statewide office, he's seen as a future candidate for governor or U.S. senator.

"If Dino Rossi doesn't win there will be a lot of pressure on McKenna to run for governor," said Todd Donovan, a political-science professor at Western Washington University.

That's the problem with McKenna, says John Ladenburg, his Democratic opponent in this year's race for attorney general.

"Rob is a very accomplished politician. He's very good at getting his name in the paper. But he's issued more press releases than subpoenas," says Ladenburg, Pierce County's executive and former prosecuting attorney.

Ladenburg, 59, argues that he has the expertise -- as a trial lawyer and manager of county government -- to do a better job.

McKenna responds with a smile and a jab. "I think John is the only person in the state who thinks being attorney general for four years is not a qualification to run for attorney general in Washington state."

Back and forth they go, two combative lawyers who are different from head to toe.

McKenna, an Army kid raised in Germany, Thailand and Bellevue, is lanky, boyish and erudite. Ladenburg, who grew up in Tacoma, is stocky, gray-templed and pugnacious. McKenna wears conservative black shoes with laces; Ladenburg prefers cowboy boots with steel-tipped toes.

Ladenburg says he'd be an "activist" attorney general, more like California's Jerry Brown.

McKenna says he's been plenty active and recites his results on issues from identity theft and predatory lending to winning cases in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ladenburg's critique

The crux of the debate between Ladenburg and McKenna is about what the Attorney General's Office should do.

The office is the state's largest law firm, McKenna likes to say, with more than 500 attorneys. Their chief duty is to represent state agencies in lawsuits and legal issues, unsexy work that McKenna compares to being a corporate counsel.

While less than 1 percent of its lawyers practice criminal law, the office also handles consumer-protection cases -- going after mortgage lenders for deceiving borrowers or car dealers for breaking the state's lemon law -- that can put the attorney general in a spotlight.

"It's a great way for an incumbent to get statewide visibility on popular issues," Donovan says.

McKenna's public profile, and the fact he's avoided a scandal, make Ladenburg's challenge difficult. But that hasn't stopped him from lobbing one shot after another at the incumbent.

Washington ranks among the worst states in the country for identity theft, and Ladenburg says McKenna hasn't done enough to deter thieves. He says he'd create high-tech task forces geared to attack the problem for what it is -- an interstate web of organized crime, not methamphetamine addicts rummaging through your garbage for sensitive documents.

He's knocked McKenna for touting an investigation of gas prices that was really just a study. McKenna stumbled from the start, he says, by trumpeting an investigation before he began one.

"That's like telling a crack house you're coming a week before you search the house," Ladenburg says. McKenna should have quietly subpoenaed industry officials, grilled them under oath and probably sued them for price-fixing, he says.

He has criticized McKenna's appearances in public-service announcements, saying they amounted to self-promoting campaign contributions that should be prohibited. Ladenburg says he'd push for a law, if elected, that would bar candidates from appearing in such spots during an election year.

He's chided the attorney general for not suing the nation's largest mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial Corp., saying he would have joined California and Illinois in a suit accusing the company of misleading borrowers.

Most recently, Ladenburg has maintained that McKenna can't objectively carry out lawsuits against the state Republican Party and the Building Industry Association of Washington because of McKenna's ties to the two groups. (The builders spent $181,000 to back McKenna's 2004 campaign, and Luke Esser, head of the state GOP, worked for McKenna.) Ladenburg wants McKenna to hand over the cases to independent counsel.

McKenna fires back

McKenna's response to many Ladenburg charges is a grin that's almost a smirk and a counterpunch.

Yes, Washington state does rank 13th worst in the nation on identify theft, McKenna says. But those rankings are based on reports to the Federal Trade Commission. Washington state encourages those reports while Mississippi, which ranks best in the country, does not.

Plus, Washington's ranking has improved while he has been attorney general and the total number of cases has declined about 15 percent since 2005, according to the FTC. One of the reports Ladenburg cites about Washington's identity-theft problems actually praises McKenna as an innovator in fighting the scourge.

McKenna says his gas-price study found no evidence of price-fixing, so he had no grounds to subpoena anyone. He also noted that former Attorney General Slade Gorton sued the oil industry decades ago and settled for an amount that "basically paid for the cost of the investigation" and no more.

On suing Countrywide, McKenna had responded for months by saying, "how do you know we won't?" Then he stressed that his office doesn't comment on investigations. On Monday, McKenna revealed that the state had been investigating Countrywide for 18 months, had threatened to sue, and had reached a settlement with the company's new owners, Bank of America, that would provide an estimated $200 million in relief to 10,000 Washington borrowers who were misled by Countrywide's deceptive practices. Washington was one of 11 states in the $8.4 billion settlement with Countrywide.

A complaint about McKenna's public-service announcements was recently dismissed by the state Public Disclosure Commission. McKenna calls the complaint by the state Democratic Party "ridiculous" and "hypocritical" because Gov. Christine Gregoire has appeared in similar ads.

On Ladenburg's contention that he shouldn't handle lawsuits against the builders group or the state GOP, McKenna notes that when Gregoire was attorney general she prosecuted a Democratic Party committee and one of her supporters, the state teachers union -- and she won settlements totaling $680,000 in those cases.

"The lawyers handling [current] cases are the same lawyers that handled Chris Gregoire's cases. They're very good, they're very objective and they will secure large penalties and fines where justified," he says.

McKenna also says that Ladenburg has had his own conflict-of-interest problems.

Ladenburg encouraged Pierce County and the state to spend almost $1 million on a program to treat methamphetamine addicts with a new drug called Prometa. He later bought $2,700 worth of stock from the company that makes Prometa, an investment County Council members criticized.

Ladenburg maintains he did nothing wrong in buying the stock after lobbying for the funding. His ownership was legal and properly disclosed to state watchdogs. And he has sold the stock, he says, because it "just didn't perform."

Out of the spotlight

Ladenburg acknowledges he faces an uphill battle in the last month of the campaign, which has been overshadowed by the contentious governor's race.

McKenna has raised $1.67 million to Ladenburg's $519,000.

McKenna also ran ahead of Ladenburg in the Aug. 19 primary by 14 percentage points and even got more votes in Pierce County, where Ladenburg's family has lived since the 1880s.

Ladenburg blames that showing on low primary turnout in Pierce County and says he's banking on a surge of Barack Obama voters to carry him to victory. "This is a wild-card year, and I feel excellent about it."

Donovan, the professor, notes that "it's really hard for a challenger to get traction" against an incumbent attorney general and it will be even harder for Ladenburg to cut through the din of the most expensive governor's race in state history.

Bob Young: 206-464-2174 or byoung@seattletimes.com