EDITORIAL HAHN'S NEW LOW DESPERATE MAYOR ATTACKS VILLARAIGOSA FOR DEFENDING HIS MOTHER.

DURING the final mayoral debate on Saturday morning, Mayor James Hahn said he is ``an agent of change'' and his rival a supporter of the status quo.

He must be joking.

Then Hahn reached 28 years into the past to come up with an accusation that Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa was charged with a crime and benefited from the constitutional guarantee of due process after getting into a restaurant tiff to protect his mother.

Hahn must be desperate, too.

It would appear that, with three weeks to go before the runoff election, the mayor has lost all sense of proportion - or maybe just all sense.

Hahn actually had the gall to compare the current local and federal investigations of possible corruption in his administration with a 1977 misdemeanor assault case in which Villaraigosa got into a fight with a man annoying his mother and sister - a charge that was dropped after a jury deadlocked 11-1 for acquittal.

Bringing it up in the context of Hahn's unrelenting claims that the councilman is soft on crime only serves to underscore the panic that appears to have gripped the Hahn re-election campaign.

Imagine the glee that Hahn's political strategists must have felt when they unearthed this ancient tidbit about Villaraigosa - an item that already was in the public record, much like the letter Villaraigosa wrote for a convicted drug dealer and other worn-out charges.

You can almost see the Hahn team scrambling to find a way to fling this mud in the final mayoral debate, which was broadcast on Spanish-language television, and make it seem like a logical and reasonable deflection of any remarks about the ongoing public-corruption investigation of Hahn's administration.

On the scales of justice, a 28-year-old assault charge that was dismissed is not the moral equivalent of an 18-months-long public-corruption probe. It is simply a tool in Hahn's continuing suppress-the-vote strategy that narrowly got him into the runoff in the March 8 primary. We can only hope that the full due process of law applies to everyone in the Hahn administration, including the mayor himself, and that the investigation is thorough.

The other Hahn strategy - to claim he is the agent of change - is laughable. Hahn's predecessor, Richard Riordan, got the City Charter reformed, created neighborhood councils and won public support for bond issues for libraries and to rebuild the city's infrastructure. Riordan's achievements are about 90 percent of the changes Hahn claims credit for.

Hahn, an agent of change for Los Angeles?

Sure, chump change.