EDITORIAL HAHN'S WAY MAYOR LOSES HIS COOL OVER FAILED PLAN TO RAISE CITY SALES TAX.

IN November, Mayor James Hahn joined with other officials to ask voters throughout Los Angeles County to raise the sales tax to hire more cops. They said no.

This past Wednesday, Hahn asked the City Council to put the same tax hike just for the city on the ballot again. It said no.

And two days later - on Friday - Hahn asked the council to reconsider the proposal. Once more, no.

Three attempts and three rejections later, Hahn has squandered his political capital as surely as he has squandered the city treasury in the past four years. He has bullied, browbeat and bribed holdout council members to give him the issue he thinks will help him win re-election. With no apparent sense of irony, Hahn has condemned City Council President Alex Padilla, who refused to back the measure, with a ``failure of leadership.''

But it is Padilla who offered to work with Hahn to find spending cuts to pay for more police, and Hahn who is abdicating his leadership by seeking a taxpayer bailout for his own failures during the past four years.

Even now, with his third rejection in hand, the mayor still hasn't offered an alternative for funding the cops, even though that's clearly what the people of Los Angeles want.

More outrageously still, Hahn suggested that voters exercise ``the power of recall'' to oust City Councilmen Antonio Villaraigosa and Jack Weiss, who also voted against the measure.

Coming from the mayor who opposed the recall of Gray Davis, this is the height of hypocrisy. Apparently disagreeing with Hahn is a bigger offense than driving California to the brink of bankruptcy.

Not content to embarrass only himself, Hahn even got Police Chief William Bratton into the hysterical act. Raising the specter of the 1965 and 1992 riots, Bratton warned that ``we risk this city going up in flames'' if the council doesn't move forward with the tax-hike vote.

We can understand Bratton's hyperbole - he's new to town, and doesn't realize that the LAPD's problem isn't so much a lack of cops, but a City Hall that would rather feed its special interests than pay for adequate policing.

But Hahn knows this is a city government that's never put the needs of the people first. He just wants to keep it that way, and he can't imagine that six intrepid members of the City Council would get in his way.

Hahn can't stand that he's losing his grip on City Hall as surely as he's losing his cool. Yet all the world can see the toll that criminal investigations, campaign politics and failed policies are having on him.