SUP. MARK Leno has a reasonable argument to make in favor of electing him to the state assembly. I don't agree with it, but it's a reasonable argument.

Leno says that he would use his moderate politics to get along with his colleagues and would use his fundraising ability to rise to a leadership position. He promises to focus on a few initiatives that he might actually be able to accomplish (and no, transgender rights at the state level are not on the immediate Leno agenda).

Me, I prefer that San Francisco send someone to the assembly who's going to push the edge of what's possible, who's going to try to move the progressive agenda forward. But there are plenty of people who might buy Leno's line. So why does he need to attack Harry Britt?

The point is, he doesn't. But as Savannah Blackwell reports on page 13, Leno's campaign is preparing a series of nasty, personal assaults on Britt, many of them so stupid they're hard to take seriously. (Do you really think Britt voted for a Republican for governor?)

Harry Britt has a long history in public office and a long voting record. I'm sure there's stuff there Leno disagrees with; that's fair game. But the sleaze that Leno's campaign consultant, Robert Barnes, is loading up in the hit-mail catapult just makes Leno look like a jerk.

The same goes for Kimiko Burton, who, as Melissa Houston reports on page 18, has less of a case to make for her election but plenty of money to spend trying to do it. There are some real issues in the public defender's race – among other things, the two candidates have a very different view of how aggressive the office should be in taking cases to trial. But you can expect Burton's camp to try to smear Adachi over an e-mail he altered when his former boss, Jeff Brown, left office, and to use that to accuse him of a lack of ethics.

I'm not going to act like some sort of civic purist and denounce negative campaigning; there's a point to using negatives to show why your opponent doesn't deserve the job. But they ought to be relevant. Why did Leno vote against regulating ATM fees? Why did Britt endorse John Molinari over Art Agnos for mayor in 1987? You wanna hit them for that stuff, go ahead. But hit above the belt.