San Francisco Politics archives
There aren't very many occasions when The San Francisco Chronicle gives me a chance to write something nice. But this Sunday they did just that.
EARN, a local organization that helps low-income families save money to buy homes, got a glowing write-up in the paper. It's a good thing, too because EARN - which has the top ad over there on the right hand side of the page - is having a fundraising drive this month. It's one of two San Francisco non-profits raising money in a "competition" sponsored by Amazon.com
Now, there's almost nothing harder than asking someone to give money in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But efforts to get low-income families into housing are among the most neglected here in San Francisco, indeed across California. So EARN's work - while it won't directly help folks like those evacuated and left homeless by the hurricane - will start a lot of local residents on the path to middle-class stability.
So if you can give something, please consider a donation: Click the button on the right and learn more.
Heather Gold, comedian, cookie-baker and Lesbian, has served up her take on San Francisco's Gay Pride Parade.
The parade's tomorrow. You can read her essay today.
For those of you who don't understand quite what Gold is getting at, the San Francisco Bay Guardian serves up this plaintive whine.
As they say on college finals: Compare and contrast.
It's not worth asking what took them so long (the answer is fear. Fear of not having enough money to run for office) but the San Francisco Board of Supervisors finally voted to stand up to Residential Bully, er Builders Association Chief Joe O'Donaghue and condemn his and his members' sexist diatribe against Acting City Building Inspector Amy Lee.
What did Residential Bully Joe do? Turned right around and called Supervisor Aaron Peskin – not a tall man – an "angry dwarf." Then he called Peskin, who sponsored the legislation, a "Heinrich Peskin." Peskin's Jewish and O'Donoghue's reference was to Nazi henchman Heinrich Himmler, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Nice guy O'Donoghue. I'm related to racist blarney-spewing creeps like this and it's enough to make me choke on my corn beef and cabbage. Good thing St. Patty's isn't for almost another year.
The vote was unanimous. But Supervisor Chris Daly – another of the city's fashion statement "progressives" who likes to use the "f-word" when addressing the audience at public hearings and other events -- said he had to think long and hard about voting in favor of the measure.
Here's his conversation with The Chron:
Daly, a usual O'Donoghue ally, said he had written up a list of people he thought were equally worthy of condemnation.
"The list was quite long," Daly said. "I thought about putting forward a series of resolutions condemning a series of San Franciscans that I think have acted in bad faith."
Instead, he gave his yes vote Tuesday along with a word of caution against "opening up floodgates on whom we condemn and whom we don't."
Hmmm. Imagine that. Now, I had a black kettle around here. Where'd I put it?
It seems that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors resolution condemning San Francisco political bully Joe O'Donoghue has gotten referred to committee. In other words, the board couldn't or wouldn't vote to tell O'Donoghue and his trash-talking sexist membership to be more civil in public.
You remember Joe, he's the guy who doesn't think pregnant Amy Lee should run his precious Building Inspections Department. Of course, she's been on the job now for six years and this is her third kid but there's a white guy who wants the gig and Joe and his buddies think he should have gotten the nod.
Who pulled the measure to condemn O'Donoghue? Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who represents Noe Valley and the Castro. Dufty, whose political support in San Francisco comes from the city's business-minded gay community and downtown – the same group that's behind Mayor Gavin Newsom -- says he's worried about the wording in the resolution.
Well, here's some wording you can really worry about, Bevan. Substitute the words "gay" and "homosexual" for the words "women" and "pregnant" in the comments made by O'Donoguhue's thugs. Things sound very different now, don't they, to you and your supporters?
Here's an example from the testimony made against Lee:
One self-employed builder took the mike to say he knows how debilitating homosexuality can be because his wife is gay and she can no longer help him with his billings.
"My wife refers to it as 'gay brain.' Her mind is on other things, '' he said. "I ask you today, are you going to replace this man with 'homosexual brain'?
"That's not disrespect. That's just a metaphor. But when you're gay, that's all the hormones are about. I'm just making the point.''
And yet another man: "The facts are I was there when my kids were born. I know what goes on. You don't have to be a homosexual to understand. Amy is going to have to take some medical leave. What's going to happen then?''
Here's another reason to stay up at night, Bevan: Noe Valley, San Francisco's yuppie central, has a lot of two-career families. That's a lot of working women who have to put up with different versions of what the RBA was dishing out for most of their professional lives. Let's hope they have good memories.
Amy Lee, the San Francisco Building Department worker who found her ability, her professional credentials and her pregnancy on trial, accused by the jerks at the Residential Building Inspectors of being unable to do her job because of her pregnancy, got the job.
In the meantime, San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin has put forward a resolution calling for the board to condemn O'Donoghue and his buddies for the remarks they made during her confirmation hearing.
I got a better idea: Stop taking this man's money, put him out of the influence peddling business. When you run for public office in San Francisco make a point of refusing to play ball with Joe O'Donoghue and the other bullies in the Residential Builders Association.
Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle offered up a great illustration of why I have such increasing contempt for the movement that styles itself as "progressive." In this most self-consciously progressive of cities, it's a movement – actually, it's a fashion statement – run by hypocrites who tailor their politics to suit their needs all the while claiming higher moral ground because, well, because they're good people.
During San Francisco's last mayoral election – the one that featured art-loving hipster Matt Gonzalez against slick rich guy Gavin Newsom – there was a lot of talk about how Gonzalez's progressive "values" would be good for the city. This was a joke. All you had to do was take a look at where Gonzalez money and support was coming from. To fund his campaign, Gonzalez picked up some interesting friends, among them head of San Francisco's politically powerful Residential Builders Association, Irish tough-guy Joe O'Donoghue.
Continue reading "The Blarney Stone of Misogyny" »
This week's eWeek column is – gasp – about the blogging controversy here in San Francisco.
Last week, I took a post here on the site and turned it into a column. It was an example of how stand alone journalists can syndicate their work for other, larger publications. That trend continues today; this week's column is a wrap-up of the blogging "regulation" story, which I am convinced, now more than ever, was local politics played on the 'net through bloggers' megaphones.
They came, they saw and they passed two pieces of legislation.
Never a group to say "enough," the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed its ethics and campaign finance legislation twice today. One bill has all the faults the blogosphere has derided. The other doesn’t. One – the faulty one – will move toward passage and be voted on again next week. The cleaned-up version will move toward passage, too. Only it has to go to the city's Ethics Commission for review.
Continue reading "Pajamas:1. Politicos:2" »
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will take up its campaign and election law reforms today. The measure is not expected to pass – go ahead, blogosphere, breathe a sigh of relief – but it's not going to get pulled either. Instead, there's going to be a lot of back and forth over what it means and who it will effect, which supporters hope will assuage critics. There'll be some talk about future amendments but I wouldn't hold my breathe on that.
Continue reading "Watching Sausage Get Made" »
It would be nice to say that the ethics and campaign spending legislation that's been proposed here in San Francisco by Supervisor Sophie Maxwell is an April Fool's joke.
Sad to say, it's not. It's just poorly thought out. And even more clumsily drafted. And it has a history. A not very pretty one.
Some, like my colleague at the Personal Democracy Forum, Michael Bassik, are screaming that the legislation would regulate blogs and bloggers. I've read it and I’m not so sure. And I'm someone who's on record as favoring full disclosure of payments made to anyone during a campaign. If you blog for bucks on behalf of a candidate, you should disclose that. So should the candidate. I'm not going to hit the hysteria button. Not just yet.
But I am going to point a few fingers. San Francisco's Board of Supervisors are reacting to a nasty bit of business that was transacted during this late election. Two members of the board were targeted for defeat by the city's business community – specifically, loudly and with no-holds-barred -- by SFSOS and its founder Democratic activist Wade Randlett.
Continue reading "Who's Foolin' Who?" »
1) There are many reason to like Keith Olberman. He has nice suits. He runs a TiVo-friendly newscast. He turned down the chance to anchor Martha Stewart's jail break. And his show's coverage of Michael Jackson's trial is thoroughly, completely and utterly over-the-top. As it should be. Olberman's also funny. And smart. But there's another good reason. When he leaves the anchor chair, he lets a smart-mouthed broad – a woman just like him -- sit in. It's nice.
It would be nicer, however, if Olberman's blog actually linked to something in his sometimes amusing "Bloggerman." Hyperlinks, baby, they're the pinetar of on-line writing.
2) This site is a Michael Jackson Trial-free zone.
3) Seen Matt Smith's last column in our local free SFWeekly? It's about the tense relations between the city's downtown business community and the so-called "progressive" element of city politics. A nice local issue, not a lot of new ground covered unless you’re a Democrat living outside San Francisco with a passing interest in the post-Silicon Valley career of once high-flying Democratic pol Wade Randlett.
Randlett, subject of Sarah Miles' book "How to Hack A Party Line" – a book known less formally as "Wade's World" -- has been running an outfit called SFSOS. I've been on the warpath once or twice about the group for their race-baiting "wedge issue" politicking. Now Smith weighs in detailing the monkey business Randlett's been up to this past year or so. Smith's a bit out of date, however. Financier Warren Hellman and Sen. Dianne Feinstein are no longer SFSOS backers.
4)Chuck Thompson, long-time announcer for my beloved Baltimore Orioles died earlier this week. I'm sure he had his hat on when he went, too. Speaking of which, opening day here at Giant's stadium is coming up......
There is no way on God's green earth that San Francisco School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman is going to stay in her job very much longer.
It's a shame. Anyone who can turn around the Washington, D.C. public schools deserves more of a fair shake than Ackerman got from the city's so-called "progressive" community. But her inability to read San Francisco's racial politics – translation, the city's increasingly vocal Asian community – is partly at fault. While former School Board member Heather Hiles was around, she got Ackerman's back. But Hiles didn't get elected to the spot Mayor Gavin Newsom gave her so Ackerman's been on her own lately.
Continue reading "Some Rumors Are Too Good to Die" »
The Chron's John King's crusade for a beautiful bridge to span the San Francisco Bay isn't getting very far. The pols have pretty much said we're getting a "freeway on stilts," an ugly low causeway instead of the soaring piece of architecture some – that's me – were hoping for.
Sigh.
Here's a picture from The New York Times of a beautiful soaring bridge in France across the Tarn Valley. It's big. It's beautiful. It cost $520 million and it was privately, not publicly, funded.
The "old Europe," eh?
This could be interesting. The make-up of the panel I'm on Thursday evening at the Commonwealth Club's Inforum has changed to include Steven Hill from the Center for Voting and Democracy, the group evangelizing in favor of "instant run-off" voting and other voting reform efforts.
IRV is fine theory but a bad, bad idea in practice. Made popular by the New America Foundation's Ted Halstead and Michael Lind in their book, "The Radical Center," IRV is supposed to encourage the development and popularity of third parties by creating a system that – theoretically – distributes votes to a variety of candidates and does away with Republican and Democratic party dominance.
Continue reading "Irregular Voting" »
There are some times when I just miss old-school politicians like Willie Brown.
Today is one of them. The San Francisco Chronicle's John King is back in the swing of things with a piece on the beleaguered Bay Bridge rebuilding project, the one that's taken what feels like a million years, cost a billion dollars and only just started construction. That one. King's making the case that public works projects like the bridge – which will span the San Francisco Bay from Yerba Buena Island to Oakland – should be attractive.
Continue reading "Oh, Beautiful" »
This is how screwy San Francisco's instant run-off voting really is: it's so screwy you can't even build a good contest around it. Well, wait. You can build a good contest. You just have to constantly revise the winner's list.
Because of the various changes in the voting machine and tabulation software, Usual Suspects Alex Clemens has now announced five – that's one, two, three, four, five – different winners to his contest to name the first-cut vote tallies received by winners. And the way things are going, he might have a few more awards to give away before the day is done.
Continue reading "IRV Debacle" »
Alex Clemens, a friend of this site and an all-around good guy, is hosting a San Francisco election contest over at his news junkies' website, The Usual Suspects The winner gets lunch at Aqua – and, one assumes, some free advice – from Alex and his talented colleagues at Barbary Coast Consulting.
It ain't gonna be an easy win, however. To get your free lunch you have to call the city's Board of Supervisors races, giving percentages for how much of the hugely screwed up instant run-off voting tally each winner will receive. I can't think of a better way to illustrate just how wacky and unworkable this whole thing really is. Winners in these tiny supervisor districts – and I really mean District 5 with its shopping carts of candidates – will get into office with well below 50 percent of the vote.
Oh, yeah, and there are some rules and a little bit of fine print and you've got to enter by 5 p.m. Tuesday so get cracking.
The big excitement here in San Francisco – other than the growing conviction that instant run-off voting is a disaster waiting to blow up in the faces of the "progressives" who proposed it in the first place – is the School Board race.
It would nice to say we have a school board race that's focused on students, quality of education, or, oh, I dunno, decent cafeteria food but no, we have a race about money and power and pretty much anything but the kids.
Continue reading "Big Money Board" »
Apart from the tag-team electioneering that's going on in District 5 – 50,000 registered voters, 22 candidates – this election has been kind of quiet here in San Francisco.
How come? Voter burn-out, says one local sage. Last year's mayor's race and the run-off took their toll on volunteers and the pros. So did the statewide recall of Gov. Gray Davis. The biggest fight is between Newsom's supporters in the business community and the mayor himself with recently appointed District 7 supervisor Sean Elsbernd caught in the middle.
Continue reading "Be Sure and Send a Postcard" »
Chapter One: Doing It
Vote. If you live in California the registration deadline is Monday.
Vote. If you live in San Francisco, the deadline to request your absentee ballot is Oct. 26, a week from Tuesday. And the polls in City Hall are open all day until the election.
Vote. If you are a registered voter and want the chance to win $100,000 sign up for the VoterorNot contest being run by the guys over at HotorNot.com. The contest carries a no-spam guarantee. Promise.
Continue reading "Voting Round Up. It's Time." »
It's pretty clear that soon-to-be-former Secretary of State Kevin Shelley is going to need more lawyers that he, in years in politics, can count. Apart from the federal investigation, he's now got trouble with the state.
And there is no way that Shelley only accepted one check one time in his office. No way in hell. It was a habit, the kind that politicians get into when they have been in office and in power for too, too long. You want an argument against term limits? Here's one. If Shelley had stayed in the Assembly he'd have done a lot less harm and gotten caught a lot faster. This floating from office to office, racking up the campaign contributions, scrambling for favors, eyeballing the next "win-able" contest is not politics as usual. And term limits plays a big role.
Continue reading "Cherchez La Femme?" »
The San Francisco hotel lock-out started yesterday and well, things are awfully quiet, no? That our Democratic mayor is ducking the whole matter is even more intriguing.
Given the city's history of labor strife, this is both surprising and interesting. And it's not a good sign for labor coming as it does on the heels of the grocery lock out down south that ended with the unions far from victorious.
Continue reading "The Fading Union Label" »
It looks as though our pals on the Left here in San Francisco have found a well-dressed good-looking moderate Democrat -- one not named Gavin Newsom -- to kick around.
For the past two weeks, "Trail Mix," the SFBay Guardian's political gossip column has featured items on the same man and the same organization: SFSOS and its CEO Wade Randlett. The weekly column has three items at the most so this is some kind of real estate commitment.
Continue reading "Water Seeking Its Own Level" »
So the Sacramento Bee editorial series was just the beginning of the media campaign to unflood Hetch Hetchy, the valley that holds San Francisco’s water. You were warned, weren’t you?
If SFWeekly’s Matt Smith is any guide, we’re about to see a classic Big Media roll-out of a campaign designed to make poor, environmentally conscious San Francisco look bad. You’d think it would be tough. This is, after all, the home of the Sierra Club.
Continue reading "Fish Gotta Swim" »
California’s ballot initiative process has gotten a bad name. For lots of good reasons. Hot button issues are put on the ballot to draw voters to the polls, a cheap reliable get-out-the-vote tactic that accelerates partisan bickering. Or politicians use the initiatives to cover expenses, allying themselves with one idea or another as a fundraising scheme.
But why should politicians have all the fun?
Continue reading "In Turn-Around" »
It’s the dog days of summer. The Republican National Convention is dominating the news.
Here’s something you don’t want to miss: Two stories about how private companies, interacting with California government agencies, seem to have, uh, cheated.
The first, from the AP courtesy of The Bee talks about Chevron’s influence on the California Performance Review. The second, from the San Francisco Examiner, tries to find out which bone-head in which San Francisco department let the developer – contrary to the plans approved by the city – tear down more of the structure than permitted.
Continue reading "Cynical Creations" »
The Sacramento Bee, picking up where the Sierra Club has never really left off, has started a series of editorials calling for the dismantling of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir.
Constructed at the turn of the century when Californians were just beginning their fight to subdue nature, construction of the dam which flooded the Hetch Hetchy valley is said to have broken California conservationist John Muir’s heart. “No holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man,’’ Muir said, condemning the project.
Continue reading "Ms. Rogers, Mr. Astair" »
Well, well, well, Gov. Terminator ain’t gonna pay for no stinkin’ bridge. The $2.3 billion in cost over-runs, he says, are the San Francisco Bay Area’s to worry about.
Oh my. Oh dear. Call me cynical – it’s okay, I can take it – but I smell a little old-fashioned political payback here. The kind that leads to naming names and assigning specific blame for cost over-runs.
Continue reading "A Long Ride Off a Short Bridge" »
As a public service, since political referees Matier and Ross are on vacation, Politics From Left to Right is providing a few little insider tidbits to help you make it through the dog days of August.
Think that fight between the strippers, the cops, and the D.A’s office is over? Guess again. The San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women is gonna have a look at strippers’ working conditions. There’s a hearing set for Aug. 25. Could be an, er, eyeful.
Continue reading "Channeling Matier & Ross" »
Comedian and San Franciscan Robin Williams says he lives here because it’s one of the remaining human wildlife preserves. Amen, brother, amen.
This weekend, a young man in San Francisco, a young man who sleeps on a futon, keeps his computer on the floor of his bedroom and who gives interviews to local TV crews in his boxer shorts, got a lot of attention for creating a video that shows him being “beheaded.”
It’s a fake, of course. And now the young man – who was once one of 30 , that’s right thirty, three-zero – people saying they’re running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, claims the “beheading” was a test to see how well the Internet works. Sure it was. Let’s not talk high tech. Let’s talk Frat House Tricks Gone Bad.
The young man, Ben Vanderford – who Craigslist says had a fundraiser back in April at the Pot Club – has taken down his “campaign web site. But don’t be fooled. San Francisco district elections are as much name-recognition contests (this link is no longer active) as anything else so this dummy has a shot, now that he’s famous, at doing well in the November election. Only about 23,00 people actually vote in his district and well, let’s just say that Vanderford’s probably wasn’t the only Pot Club fundraiser.
You see what old fashioned Liberals living in San Francisco are up against? Lady Godiva impersonators, guys who pull beheading pranks, politicians who herd sheep at home and other silliness, too frequently occurring, to mention.
But, really, how could you live anywhere else?
San Francisco’s self-styled Progressives got the one-two punch this week. And, honestly, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of power-mad, holier-than-thou pains in the butt. Particularly since the take-down appear in pubs known for their liberal slants.
SFWeekly’s Matt Smith details a series of fights over land use in the Mission on a woebegone tract of land south of Market in and around the Armory. In a truly Progressive community this would be seen as short-sighted, underhanded, and just plain silly. Local landowners say they plans to develop property is being thwarted so “non-profits” can buy from them at an artificially lowered (by the SF Board of Supervisors) price.
Continue reading "Knock 'em Dead" »
Seen the new SF Examiner on-line? Pretty! Someone should tell their web monkey to update the page before 10 a.m., but othewise the Ex is doing a good job of creating a web presence.
They beat the Chron on a pretty regular basis so if you’re interested in San Francisco city politics – and yes, I know some of you could care less, take a number, okay – TheEx is a good place to go. This week, P.J. Corkery, who joined the paper (again) in mid-June, got the City Hall scoop of scoops, answering one questions that’s been plaguing City Hall for years: when will Supervisor Tony Hall get a real job.
Corkery, who has proved a cause close to my heart -- that “gossip” columnists can indeed make and break news -- gets followed by, count ‘em two, Chron stories. One, dissing Hall’s credentials. Matier and Ross take a trip down memory lane and blame, er, point a finger at Newsom’s political consultant Eric Jaye as the mastermind (or leak, depending, eh?).
This not-so-cockamamie idea -- it’s gotten endorsed by Assemblyman Leland Yee -- San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez has to allow non-citizens to vote in the city’s school board elections might have some interesting ramifications.
One of which could be the ejection of the Green Party from city politics.
Continue reading "Do It. It'll Backfire" »
Speaking of the “bloody mess” that the November ballot is expected to be, it feels like it’s getting easier to talk about what’s not going to be included, rather than what is.
As of right now, there’s a good chance that the Candlestick Park renaming, the sale tax, and some budget issues might all go directly to the voters in the fall. That’s on top of the shopping list that’s being sent around from Sacramento. And let’s not forget the referendum on the Iraqi War. The Voter’s Guide is in danger of looking a lot like the phone book.
Continue reading "What's Left to Ask?" »
To grandstand or not to grandstand, it seems, is the eternal question down at San Francisco City Hall.
Whether San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly will nobly decide to go along with the rest of the board tomorrow and vote in favor of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s budget and suffer the slings and arrows of the San Francisco Bay Guardian or whether he will oppose them and urge a tax increase on the city’s businesses, is the drama du jour.
Continue reading "Center Stage" »
Get out your reading glasses. Even if you don’t wear ‘em. By the time you’re finished with the November ballot, you’ll be seeing double, if not triple. There’s the presidential election, a bunch of state offices, a U.S. Senate race, and a loonnnnnng list of state and city ballot initiatives.
Dan Weintraub runs down a list of the ballot initiatives that have been certified at the state level. This is 'clip and save' territory -- you're not likely to get such sharp descriptoins of the ballot line-up anywhere else.
And here in San Francisco, we’ll get to vote on the Iraq War! (this link is no longer active) Like that's going to lose? In San Francisco? I mean really. The slightly more pressing -- not to mention realistic -- needs imposed by the city budget and housing bond? Well...finally, some progress. A compromise housing bond -- $200 million -- has been approved for the ballot.
And they say -- I say, fool that I am -- that city politics are getting moderate.
Why oh why is it taking so much time – and so much agita – for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to pass its much-discussed, much-wanted, much-agreed-upon (in principle) housing bond?
Because this is San Francisco, that’s why.
And the bullying tactics of the city’s self-styled progressives are in full swing. Supervisor Chris Daly is doing a consistent imitation of basketball coach Bobby Knight (a man who, according to author John Feinstein had no use for Daly's almost alma mater, Duke University, but felt happiest when he used the word “fuck” to describe 1)astonishment, 2)aggression 3)enthusiasm 4)anger and 5)delight). Irish class warrior Joe O’Donoghue is blowing smoke. Every one else is trying to remain civil.
Continue reading "A House. A Home. A Big Fight." »
Lady Godiva, the original, rode through the streets of Conventry naked as a protest. And the modern day version who appeared briefly at a San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ meeting last week had something similar in mind.
Continue reading "Mystery Solved; Godiva Talks. Maybe Too Much" »
Except for the weather, a toasty 80 degrees yesterday -- San Francisco's back to normal. So of course a naked woman – the Lady Godiva of affordable city housing? Someone not quite right in the head? A prankster? All of the above? -- shows up in City Hall in the middle of a Board of Supervisor’s meeting on, er, a hotly contested housing bond issue headed to the November ballot.
Continue reading "Too Darn Hot" »
The press roll out has been steady and sure – Pete Ragone displaying once again all the tricks he learned in the Old Country (Washington, D.C.) – and finally San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s budget has arrived.
In a nice bit of psychic journalism, The SF Guardian (This link is no longer active.) doesn’t like it sight unseen. The Ex (This link is no longer active.) says it’s a good start and The Chron’s Rachel Gordon, who is allowed to write about money but not marriage, sums up the cuts and tax increases.
Here’s what looks like the biggest sticking point: Extending the payroll tax to LLCs and LLPs. That’s lawyers, venture capitalists, hedge funds, CPAs and the like, big Newsom supporters all. At least one lobbyist – who heard the screeching at one big law firm – says he can see a professional corporation exodus to Oakland.
Probably not Oakland. If they go, they'll follow the money to Silicon Valley, where office space is, for now, cheap and taxes are low. San Francisco's more and more the bedroom community of choice for the valley; this is just another step on that ladder.
It's another reason -- as if we need one -- why the state's tax structure needs to be overhauled. Right now, San Francisco depends on tourists and businesses to pay its bills. That's not a stable tax base; not as stable as that which would be provided by a fair and equitable property tax system. Prop. 13 doesn't just kill schools by depriving them of property tax revenue, it set the stage for a series of municipal bidding wars -- if you don't like a payroll tax move to San Mateo! -- that are as wasteful and ineffecient as the government taxing and spending that Prop. 13 was supposed to keep in check.
Welcome to the new San Francisco, the city of political harmony.
Hard to believe but that’s the best way to read the latest polls presented to us today by The SF Chronicle’s Matier and Ross.
Continue reading "The City of Brotherly Love By the Bay" »
This web log has a few rules.
One of them is that I don’t post unless I’ve got something to say. And these days, well, apart from repeating my disgust with the situation in Iraq, I don’t have anything new to say. And least nothing I’m ready to publish.
Continue reading "Something Happenin' Here Con't." »
The simmering tension of the last San Francisco election between the lace curtain Irish – that’s the “Newsom family” for those of you not up on your Irish class warfare terminology – and the city’s active and strong workingmen's unions, the foundation of its progressive politics, are coming front and center this time around. [See correction below on union stuff]
Continue reading "The Fighting Irish" »
A few weeks ago, The San Francisco Chronicle tried to write about a Chinatown feud and did its usual lousy job explaining the politics of the city’s Asian population. The word “byzantine” was used. Couldn’t see that cliché coming, could you?
Continue reading "Chinatown Done Right" »
So much for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s supporting a ballot measure calling for San Francisco School to end its desegregation plans. Her official spokesman couldn’t wait to get on the record and say no! no! no! we had nothing to do with the idea being floated by SFSOS, never saw it, don’t know about it, don’t want anything to do with it.
Continue reading "Heading for the Hills" »
Just when it was looking like San Francisco politics were getting kinda boring -- what with a mayor we could all (almost) support and his most electable opponent going off in a poorly timed snit of self-pity (This link is no longer active.) that pulled the rug out from under the city’s “progressives,” – along comes SFSOS.
SFSOS, a civic organization run by long-time Democratic operative Wade Randlett with backing from wealthy business guys like Gap founder Don Fisher and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has focused on San Francisco city schools. The group is proposing a ballot initiative – an advisory one – that would conceivably, maybe, someday after the lawyers are done, do away with the city's desegregation program and end the cross-town journeys some kids make to go to school every day. The reasons? Schools are so good throughout the city, says Randlett, the balancing that was once needed in schools isn’t necessary any more.
Continue reading "Save Our Schools" »
So Green Party Board of Supervisor President Matt Gonzalez says he’s going into private law practice? He wants to disengage from politics? Odd. In character. But odd.
And weirder still, he makes his announcement the day before a piece of legislation he says he’s the most proud of is ready for its second vote before the board? Huh? What’s up with this guy? Sand-bagging – himself and other so-called Progressives – is his favorite game, isn’t it?
Continue reading "Stop Making Sense" »
The Fagan family -- former police chief Alex and his son, now disgraced cop, Alex Jr. -- really know how to protect their good name, don't they?
The two got into some kind of public brawl in Scottsdale, Ariz. over the weekend and the dumber Fagan -- Jr. -- got arrested. That's right. The fomer police chief -- the guy who fought to keep his job -- and his son were fighting. In public. And they were drunk.
How dumb is that?
The fight apparently started when the two rocket scientists were discussing the dumber and younger Fagan's involvement in the street brawl known as "Fajitagate." Fajitagate -- the fight where Alex Jr. is alleged to have beaten up a Union Street bartender for a late-night dinner of left-over (and probably not very warm) Mexican food -- helped Alex Sr. out of the police chief's job.
Alex Sr. is such a bright light he probably thinks it's his kid's fault he didn't get to keep the big job with the big pension. And how dumb is that?
Man. Just when it was looking as though being a progressive Liberal wasn’t some sort of redundant joke – what the Sentinel is calling the Gay Marriage Rebellion -- the San Francisco School Board has to come along and, well, embarrass everyone.
The school board has been debating a plan to ban irradiated meat from school cafeterias. It’s been debating this plan, brought forth by the Green Party members of the board, for four months. It’s going to have yet another meeting on the subject this week.
Continue reading "Keep Hope Alive. Please." »
San Francisco Supervisor Jake McGoldrick’s chief aide, Jerry Threet writes in with some outsourcing comments and he makes a smart observation to counter what appeared here yesterday.
I think you may be missing part of the outsourcing story, though. Many of those who have suffered the worst fall-out from outsourcing phenomena are those same Progressive Libertarians who benefited from the dot.com craze.
Continue reading "Local Outsourcing" »
In response to a piece I wrote earlier in the week about hating the California Legislature, Tracy Hall writes in and sums the whole mess up.
“Californians don't hate their legislators - they hate your legislators,” Hall writes.
Well put.
That’s right, it’s not my guy – I live in Mark Leno’s district – it’s someone else’s fault! This thinking seems to apply at all levels. People don't like Congress but they keep re-electing their Congressman. And it applies to the San Francisco Board of Superivisors. As much as they’re disliked and distrusted, surveys show city residents still prefer candidates to run from individual districts.
If it weren’t for the growing popularity of gay marriage – yesterday you could get married in New Palz, N.Y., today it’s Portland, tomorrow, who knows? – next Wednesday’s SF Bay Guardian would probably carry this headline:
We’re Baaaaaaack.
Until Gavin Newsom told city officials to start granting marriage licenses to same sex couples, his credibility as a mayoral candidate was wrapped up in the passage of a “workforce housing,” initiative.
Continue reading "Party On" »
The sheep have lawyered-up.
The man who would be San Francisco District Attorney -- three time loser for the job -- Bill Fazio is now defending black sheep.
Well, more precisely, he’s defending the owner of a flock of blackbelly Barbados sheep found living in a Bayview/Hunters Point junk yard. The little sweater factories, all 13 of them -- get this 13 black sheep -- are owned by Mike Garza. Garza’s a busy guy. In addition to sheparding and running a wrecking business, he is seeking to unseat Rep. Tom Lantos and is running the Republican primary for that Congressional seat.
Sheep and politics. You can’t make this stuff up.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been mulling over that old saw about people “getting the government they deserve,” in terms of the Bush presidency. When only about half of registered voters actually turn up at the polls, it seems somehow fitting that we get a government that has contempt – that isn’t too strong a word – for its citizens. If half of us don’t care about them, why should they care about us?
Arrogant? Hell yes. But in the past few months, it’s started to feel like more people are paying attention to what’s going on politically than they were a few years ago. Total Recall has energized California, bringing newcomers into politics. Howard Dean has done the same for younger people and tech Geeks. But are they hanging around?
A plaintive email yesterday and a civic association meeting last night – hors d’oeuvres and white wine so you know we were in San Francisco – got me thinking a little more about this and about how people enter politics. I don’t mean enter in the “run for office sense.” I mean get involved in the “go to meetings, get involved” sense.
The email came from a SoMA resident upset by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ decision to ban the demolition of buildings with more than rental 20 units. “This project is the absolute linchpin to the revitalization of Market Street from Van Ness to the waterfront,” the SoMA resident wrote. “This is not just about the rent controlled apartments, this is about the health of a major artery in SF that has been inextricable intertwined with the homeless, drug, and crime problems that have become intractable along one of our urban lifelines.”
He’s right. But the ban was a smart, grand-standing political move on the part of Supervisor Chris Daly. It neatly put board members in the position of having to vote in favor of evicting tenants and to support a landlord with a record of treating residents poorly. That’s why it passed. But it also passed because no one’s really paying attention to the politics that are involved here. And the reporting that’s been done on the demolition ban has been sloppy and superficial. The SOMA resident who’d like to see his neighborhood improved seemed to think the board’s vote was the final word on the development. You can’t blame him. That’s what The Chron implied in its brief write-up – that’s after the paper wrote a story predicting weaker support for Daly’s measure. The SoMA guy just figured he’d been sold down the river by his supervisor and was almost – not quite but almost – ready to bring down a pox on all their houses.
But, as the civic association folks were told Thursday night, it remains to be seen if Daly’s measure (this link is no longer active) will stand up to what’s certain to be a mayoral veto. It’s also unclear if the law will withstand court challenges. Oh, and the actual construction of the project, some 1,400 apartments at the now forlorn corner of 8th and Market, is years away. The thing hasn’t even finished its full planning review. Meaning there’s lots of time and plenty of maneuvering in the weeks and months ahead. Daly really was showboating and The Chron played along. He’ll have plenty of time to negotiate on tenants’ behalf -- as he and the board should do -- as the approval process ground on.
Ah, yes, but to counter Daly moderates on the board are going to have to start maneuvering. Deal making. Compromising, engaging in the dirty work of politics. Listen to supervisors who felt compelled to support Daly’s measure because of the tenants’ rights issues and you hear them say one thing: politics ain’t a pretty business. You want a better city, a country run the way you want it run, well you might actually have to spend a little time thinking about what’s going on. And you might have to organize. And roll with the punches. And come back for more. Again.
This is what’s so disappointing about the Geek chorus that’s following Joe Trippi as he preaches the power of the net. Geeks – political newcomers like that SOMA resident – are upset about nominee Howard Dean’s replacing campaign manager Joe Trippi with Washington insider Roy Neel. It’s corrupt. It’s politics as usual, they grouse, and politics – as opposed to policy – is a nasty business. There’s some truth to this; Roy Neel is indeed everything the Geeks hate about politics and politicians. But like all broad generalizations, it’s not entirely accurate. These political newcomers are using Neel as a way to cover their embarrassment -- or their frustration -- with the messy business of having to deal with other people, in this case voters who don’t like Dean.
It’s not a massive retreat, of course. But people once in love with Dean, folks upset to find that politics doesn’t mean you get your way – exactly what you want all the time, every time – are pulling back. This sort of disengagement is how grandstanders like Chris Daly get their more moderate colleagues on the defensive. There’s no one around to say “yes, but…” so the simple easy argument is the one that gets play.
It doesn’t help that the press, from Big Media on down to The Chron, are so involved in what they’re doing that they can’t see its effect. Or, more importantly, how things look to outsiders. They reach for the cliché – the Dean campaign was about lonely young people looking for love – or the simple explanation – the Daly maneuvers have killed the San Francisco project – when something a bit more nuanced would do. A smart Dean campaign reporter might have talked to those outside the campaign process about the causes for their disillusionment (actually, I think Steven Levy over at Newsweek is doing just this). A smart Chron reporter might use the recent vote to look at ahead at Prop J – the “workforce housing” initiative here in San Francisco to talk about how the city’s moderates are – or, as the case is right now are not – mobilizing on planning and other important issues.
If you’re a client of San Francisco attorney Jim Sutton and his rates have just gone up you can thank the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
The story’s off the newsstand today but you can read it on-line for Savannah Blackwell’s assessment of Sutton’s skill defending, defining, and defeating various parts of various elections laws up and down the state. Basically he gets credit for being a really influential guy. As hit pieces go, it’s not bad at all. (I know and like Jim Sutton and am pretty cynical about politics generally, so I was expecting something a bit nastier.) Still, there are lots of great quote from good government types who paint a pretty grim (no matter what your perspective) look at state election law. It doens't matter which side you're on, you need a lawyer.
"He is one of a small handful of very influential political law attorneys who typically represent moneyed, influential candidates," California Common Cause executive director Jim Knox told [Blackwell]. "And he seems to be on something of a crusade right now."
Yes. Well, the Sutton kids have colleges plans. Bill 'em, Jimmy.
Unfortunately, if you live in San Francisco, you have to read this week’s Guardian, too, to get the outlines of the “No on J” campaign against the “workforce housing” initiative slated for city ballots on March 2.
The lefty weekly runs down the list of opponents, a list the run the political gamut from moderately conservative Supervisor Tony Hall (this link is no longer active) to self-styled anti-capitalist Supervisor Chris Daly (this link is no longer active). They oppose the high rise development zone saying its bad for San Francisco since it will allow tall buildings, won’t serve the “truly” needy, won’t do anything to help the city forgotten middle class and is a run-around the city planning department and a long-entrenched neighborhood planning process.
Okay. Mr. Smith, you over there at the Weekly, your turn to – sigh – once again make the argument that adding housing – any housing – to San Francisco is a good idea; that the city’s middle class has pretty much relocated to the East Bay because someone forgot to provide places for them to live and that two-income households are not the economic rarity the Guardian makes them out to be in its piece. At least not in the 21st Century I inhabit. The only way a gross household income of $87,000 a year in San Francisco can be considered wealthy is, well, is if you’d been living on a Guardian reporter’s salary for the past eight years. Maybe its malnutrition that makes their thinking so soft.
There are plenty of people besides the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce who support Prop. J but they’ve been oddly silent these past few months. There are plenty of people on both sides of this debate who see a compromise between this vote and a fall bond issue – that will need approval from two-thirds of voters – to expand supportive housing for the homeless. Some opponents are suggesting that a compromise will be easier to work out once J has been soundly defeated. That way, Prop J opponents – like a unified coalition between Daly and Hall? I’m gonna pay cash money to see that -- can deal from a position of strength on the supportive housing bond. Well, maybe. Certainly this mess gives Angela Alioto's special commission on homelessness something to chew over.
Call me cynical, but the way things are going now, it makes me miss dealmeister Willie Brown. And he’s only been gone a month.
San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano is in many important respects, a wonderful guy. There is no one who is more in love with this city and its greatest attraction: it’s tolerance and diversity.
But he ain’t no banker.
Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a big story about the $98 million that developers stand to make if the Ricon Hill project that’s already made it past the Board of Supervisors and the Planning Commission wins final approval. Only Ammiano has voted against the measure.
Now, $98 million is a huge sum of cash, a pile o’dough. But for a real estate developer, it’s nothing to get too excited about particularly given how long his project has taken. Developers stand to make about $181,000 off the sale of each Rincon Hill unit they eventually sell, assuming that planning forecasts done in 2001 remain accurate, not exactly a safe bet. The $98 profit relies on two-year-old planning forecasts. Doesn’t that mean the project has been awaiting approval for two years? So, that means Rincon Hill’s developer are making $98 divided by 4 years (two for planning, so far, two for building), or about $25 million. I know people who are worth $25 million. More importantly, it’s hard to tell from the Chron story if the $98 million is calculated with or without the low-income housing concession that Supervisor Chris Daly (this link is no longer active) recently secured.
San Francisco’s property mavens, from the developers down to the apartment brokers are a conniving bunch as any one who got here at the beginning of the Interet stock bubble would be happy to testify. But having spent much of my career listing to business guys talk, I’m not going to curse the profit-makers. Particularly in a city that as hard up for housing – please sir, can we have some more? – as this one is and will remain for the foreseeable future. Developers make money by borrowing against the future. It’s risky. That’s why it pays well.
If the Rincon Hill developers have shown the patience necessary to go through San Francisco’s painful, slow and expensive development process in a market that’s slowing in an fiscal environment where interest rates are increasing (driving up their costs and driving down demand and price for the units) there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of sense in saying they can’t make money.
It can’t be that Supervisor Ammiano -- who is proposing the city add economic analysis to its planning review -- is hoping that the board will get into the business of deciding “how much” is “enough” profit. Can it? No, I suspect what Ammiano wants to do is have the city better examine the economic outlook for a particular project. That's a good idea; done in 1997 an analysis like this could have saved the Board a lot of anguish and heartache. But to key zoning on how much a property will improve in value, well, even if it's paved with good intentions it's a road to a certain kind of San Francisco Liberal Class Warfare Hell. And I for one, can't take much more of that.
Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein is pissed. Really pissed. He’s bringing up my colorful past, too!
Bronstein says talk of his having a romantic relationship with San Francisco D.A. Kamala Harris is false. Okay. But lots of people, including The Ex – which hasn’t heard from Harris or Bronstein since it ran the “romantic item around town,” (this link is no longer active) reference earlier this week, think differently. For two such high-profile folks, this sort of stuff -- and the appearance it has clearly generated -- matters. As Bronstein correctly notes below, it can affect how they do their jobs because their jobs are in the public eye.
Phil, like everyone and anyone, is entitled to his say. Here’s the first message he sent today after seeing the “Leading by Example” post below. “Your web log piece about Kamala Harris and me is completely false…You did not perform the most fundamental and basic journalistic practice of checking accuracy with anyone you name. You should remove this from your site.”
An offer to run and edited version of Bronstein’s letter – along with a reminder that this web log, like any other, is opinion and speculation – solicited this, much longer response.
“It does not read as a 'speculative piece’. It says ‘Let me get this straight.....Do I have this right?’ And then the next sentence starts ‘Oh boy do I’
“It also says ‘Bronstein has undoubtedly told his staff that his involvement with Harris won't affect their coverage. But that's if anyone had the nerve to talk to him about this pending mess.’
“You also state categorically that the ‘Harris-Bronstein affair is a mess, a real conflict of interest that should present far more concern......’ That's not speculative by anyone's definition.
“As to malice, your malice is established by your failure to speak to me or to Kamala Harris before the story and your refusal to modify the story after being told it is not true. The fact that several people at city hall believe something that is false does not make it true.
“Your response ignores the basic issue of not bothering to check with either Ms. Harris or me. And the reporting is indeed false… Being a public figure does not mean anything written about you is true, nor does it mean you cannot be defamed.
“The report is damaging to me because it - and you - essentially states that I'm engaging in a relationship that would in fact be a huge conflict of interest professionally. It also assumes and states that editorials were slanted to accommodate the non-existent relationship, another defamation of me professionally. Ms. Harris, I'm sure, would have her own view about the damage such a piece of unchecked gossip, reprinted, expanded and commented upon as though it were fact, does to her as a public official.
“Matier and Ross wrote about a lunch where Arnold Schwarzenegger issued the invitations separately to several people, including Willie Brown and Richard Riordan, as they also reported. Their piece - and the lunch itself - in no way supported completely false rumors about some kind of romantic relationship.
“I'll leave it to someone else to point out the irony in your raging about alleged conflicts of interest, given your own history. But I suspect if the Examiner or Chronicle or anyone else had written about your activities at the Merc in this way - assuming rumor, gossip and accusation to be true - you would have reacted strongly.”
Well, two observations are in order.
The earlier post says nothing about The Chron slanting its editorials or coverage in Harris’ favor. If anything, the Chron didn’t cover her race closely enough. And Bronstein still hasn’t said whether he's asked The Ex for a correction. Lastly, after my “activities at the Merc,” I had lunch with Bronstein in the fall of 1999. He asked me this question: “What would it take for you to come to work for San Francisco’s only newspaper?”
Let me get this straight: Recently elected San Francisco D.A. Kamala Harris and Chronicle editor-in-chief Phil Bronstein are a “romantic item around town,” (this link is no longer active) as TheEx recently put it.
Uh. Sharon Stone’s not-yet-ex-husband, the guy who runs the local newspaper, is dating the woman who is in charge of enforcing local laws? Stuff like, oh, I dunno, police brutality cases? Drug busts? Political corruption? The kind of stuff that makes headlines? Do I have that right?
Oh, boy do I. And it appears that the couple is making public appearances. Yesterday’s Matier and Ross column had Phil and Kamala hanging with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Mayor (as well as Kamala’s ex) Willie Brown at Le Central. Cozy.
This wouldn’t be so obnoxious – just more San Francisco goofiness – if The Chron hadn’t been so high and mighty when columnist Henry Norr decided to join an anti-war protest last year. The paper fired him citing a violation of its ethics policy. Management thinking – and this should include Bronstein, he is the boss –was that Norr’s appearance at the rally compromised the paper’s objectivity. The paper moved quickly to make sure its readers knew just how seriously it treated such conflicts. Of Interest.
It was one more example of newspapers taking themselves, their “mission” and their duty to serve the public far too seriously. Because the Chron hardly sets the pace when it comes to coverage of the war or the protests against it. It does, however, set the pace – not exactly a brisk one, thank you -- when it comes to local government. And Kamala Harris is a very important part of San Francisco government right now.
Harris’ come-from-behind win election to the D.A.’s job, has made her a rising political star in this city, if not the state. She won election to office by promising she will not repeat the relaxed prosecution style of her predecessor, Terrence Hallinan (this link is no longer active). Harris is promising – directly or not – a cleaner, better-policed city that’s more in keeping with a city of law-abiding property owners rather than a bunch of screw-the-man rabble-rousers. Harris’ office will play a key role in resolving San Francisco’s homeless problem since getting people off the streets and into shelters is one thing the D.A.’s office can and should do as it enforces the law. How Harris handles this – and the differences or similarities between her and Hallinan – is a story the Chron should be watching.
Ad the main local newspaper, The Chron will cover these and other issues and that will almost certainly put Harris and Bronstein on opposite sides of a range of issues, providing they’re both doing their jobs. Bronstein has undoubtedly told his staff that his involvement with Harris won’t affect their coverage. But that’s if anyone’s had the nerve to talk to him about this pending mess. The Chron was the very, very last news outlet to carry word of Bronstein's divorce from Stone -- and he filed the papers! Playing catch-up, Leah Garchik had to throw something up on the paper's website to match the NYPost's Page Six. I'll bet she was pleased.
The Harris-Bronstein affair is a mess, a real conflict of interest that should present far more concern to Chron and parent company Hearst management than a lone business reporter's appearance at a anti-war rally of thousands. It's a conflict that will affect its editorial news judgment on a host of issues that San Francisco residents care about. Henry Norr got fired. What do you think will happen to Bronstein?
Michela Alioto-Pier – she picked up a husband since I first heard her name in the Old Country while she was working for Al Gore – is the newest San Francisco supervisor.
Hmmmmmm. I heard that somewhere before. Oh, yeah. Here. And here.
This is what Silicon Valley types call “value add.” You could remember that when it comes time to give to the tip jar – or buy an ad! – in the soon-to-be-provided space on the right side of this page. Money. We need it. Send us some.
SF Mayor Gavin Newsom’s doing the right thing – sort of – by calling for a City Attorney investigation of the DPW9, the welfare-to-work guys who say they were told to work and vote for the mayor and DA Kamala Harris as they campaigned for office.
The DPW9 have a credible story which is why Newsom might want to think about taking this little probe to the next level: maybe ask California Attorney General Bill Lockyer or even, gasp, the U.S. Attorney’s office to have a look at the whole problem. It ain’t like we haven’t heard this before.
City Attorney Dennis Herrara’s office is filled with Newsom backers – some even worked on his campaign – as well as Harris supporters. So well, uh, well, uh, a split-the-baby decision like the one Herrara issued earlier this year isn’t going to do much for his credibility or erase the queasy feeling people have about those absentee ballots.
Besides, there’s not a lot to be lost here with a more outside investigation. The voter wrangling belongs pretty squarely to Newsom’s successor, Mayor Willie Brown. He was mayor when those ballots were cast. So if there’s harm to be done, like a lot of other Newsom reforms, it’ll splash backwards. And thorough investigation would – once again – thwart the voices on the Left who claims Newsom’s nothing more than Willie Lite and reassure the “reformers” out there that the new mayor means business. There’s a lot of be won here and only a little to be lost.
It’s something of a “holy shit” news day out there, isn’t it?
First off, Phil Matier and Andy Ross come back to The Chron newsroom from their holiday vacation and do some fine reporting. Okay, so maybe that’s an exaggeration but the boys got someone over at Newsom transition HQ to tell them about a very smart and long overdue plan to drag the city’s Building Department into the modern age. It’s a good story and amazingly, The Chron packaged it with a smart sidebar about the ridiculousness that passes for business as usual in City Hall.
The Chron left out the political implications of Newsom’s decision to appoint a special inspector to the department – one who would be encouraged to report abuses to the state attorney general – so scroll down and look at al the back and froth over the “workforce” housing measure. That ballot initiative can’t work unless there’s an honest inspection process. There can’t be an honest inspection process until “expeditors” are kicked out.
But there’s more! Check out Residential Builder Association President Joe O’Donoghue’s comments on The Sentinel site.
O’Donoghue issues what’s called a “non-denial, denial.” What’s that? Remember grammer school? Two negatives equal a positive? A non-denial denial is how smart pols tell some one they’re right, without actually doing so. But it can also be a way to redirect a question, to talk around an issue by expanding the argument. It’s a way to change the subject. That’s what O’Donoghue does.
Here’s what the great man said:
"There's never been one complaint, not one single item of evidence, that our members have been kicked to the top of the line,’’ O'Donoghue said. “The Department of Building Inspections processes 55,000 applications a year," noted O'Donoghue, "and our members submit about 300 a year."
It gets better: "You think that if we were being taken out of line that not one person out of 55,000 would have noticed?,” O’Donoghue asked the Sentinel. "Not one person out of 55,000 would have complained?”
They noticed, Joe. We’ve all noticed. And we’ve complained. But finally, it seems -- oh, it’s too much to hope, isn’t it? -- someone is listening.
Who who who will Mayor-elect Gavin Newsom pick to replace himself on the SF Board of Superviors?
The smartest idea I’ve heard yet is that he should pick someone who isn’t going to seek re-election. It's not like it's a hostile neighborhood. Anyone running in District 2 is probably going to be a Newsom supporter once they get on the Board. It’s that kind of place.
The names haven’t changed much since the election. They are Newsom friends and supporters, Meg Levitan or Janet Reilly, SF Port Commissioner Michela Alioto, along with Jim and Ann Lazarus.
Reilly is the one getting all the attention. Her husband, developer, big Democrat and former mayoral candidate, Clint, is pushing hard on her behalf, according to a number of folks who know what’s going on with Newsom’s campaign.
There are good reasons to appoint Janet Reilly. She’s qualified – and don’t give me that, she’s as qualifed as Supervisor Chris Daly and better mannered. And it would be a big favor to Clint who really did a lot for the campaign. Like the appointment Newsom made for former rival, Angela Alioto, it’s better to have Reilly inside the tent and in politics, sometimes that’s the only reason you need, particularly with a guy as famously ill-tempered -- in a city where grudge matches are as common as flies -- as Clint Reilly.
But there’s a big, big negative. Reilly’s appointment will give Newsom’s opponents the opportunity to point and say, see, pay-off. Business as usual. It’ll upset all the goodie-goo, good government who think the tent is some kind of special club just for them and their pet causes. That crowd is still reeling from the Alioto appointment. And given all the heat over Prop J and its looming reputation as a pay-off for the city’s real estate community, well, uh, you can see names other than Reilly are being floated.
It’s looking like Proposition J might be the San Francisco political fight of the decade. Well, okay, maybe just this year.
Either way, it’s shaping up as a good test of soon-to-be Mayor Gavin Newsom’s character. The neighborhoods are getting restless. Prop J is nothing more than a land grab, says Tony Kelly, president of the Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association. Kelly says he and his neighbors have been trying to plan the development of the land just north of their ‘hood for years and they don’t like the SF Chamber of Commerce swooping in and, well, messing with their hard work.
“The residents of the central waterfront took on the planning department five years ago, creating and publishing their own neighborhood zoning plan that added 3000 housing units in a livable, vibrant mix,”Kelly wrote in an email. “That vision has been mixed (in good ways and bad) with the city's own “better neighborhoods” rezoning program. That program has been stalled in the planning department recently, due to lack of funding for environmental impact reports.
“But somehow, there's plenty of money for the Chamber of Commerce to raise for their own ham-fisted approach to fixing the housing crisis and, incidentally, create great gobs of money where there wasn't money before. Money isn't bad, of course; but stomping on an existing neighborhood and five-plus years of hard work is.”
Kelly’s mixing apples and oranges when he talks about money for the initiative and the city’s funding. And the idea that any land in the city, particularly land near 280, the road to Silicon Valley wouldn’t attract greedy, rapacious land developers is a short-sighted one. But Kelly’s broader point is worth thinking about. San Francisco’s planning and building departments and their processes are in a world of hurt. The mess that’s been created there is really what the fight over Prop J will be about. It’s a stand-in for a planning process and department that’s alienated neighborhoods – all of them, it seems. It’s pissed off developers – most of them, it feels like. It’s politicized. It’s corrupt – show me another city where “expediters” are treated as credible business people. It’s ineffective and oh, yeah, it doesn’t seem to be working very well.
Or is it? Look, planners piss people off. To some extent, saying “no” is part of the gig. And city residents’ reluctance to consider higher, denser development is well-entrenched. Maybe the problem here is that the Chamber – like many business interests sees Newsom’s election as its personal triumph – ignoring the niceties of grassroots support? Managing those expectations, really, is the test of Newsom’s character and his election promises. Along with everyone else he wants a City Hall that runs cleanly and fairly but the ghosts of the past – in this case the shenangigans over live/work lofts – are, fairly or not, haunting Prop J and its laudable goals.
The Chron just can’t get soon-to-be-former SF Mayor Willie Brown. Over the weekend, they did the obligatory summation of Da Mayor’s term in office but that’s not what you should read. Instead check out The Bee’s profile, which does a much better job of putting Brown’s career in perspective.
You knew coverage of the mayor was off-kilter when he had to explain the phrase “we’re in high cotton now,” to a local reporter. Translated, it means that things are good. You don’t have to bend over to pick high cotton. It’s easier work.
Of course, Brown did some of his best work in Sacramento. The state capital, a bit more than San Francisco, is a city where people understand that political success is often the art of not doing and saying as much as claiming credit and taking bows. That’s, of course, why Brown is such an elusive subject and such an effective politician.
Both papers talk about Brown’s public works legacy and his problems with the city’s progressives. But they also fail to point out Brown’s biggest failure: San Francisco’s absolute paralysis during the Internet Bubble. It's the failure of someone accustom to the legislative not (for all his high-handedness) the executive role.
San Francisco city government did virtually nothing during the boom. It just let it happen. It didn't plan. It didn't save. It didn't think ahead. Its confusion – it wasn’t a refusal to do anything, it was just a complete befuddlement – triggered the urban class warfare between those who were well off before the bubble and those who are, having had the Internet experience, are much, much better off. That those newly wealthy people have settled in what were once the city’s established middle class – in the truest economic meaning of the words – neighborhoods like Noe, The Mission, Bernal Heights, just added to the confusion and the xenophobic resentment toward newcomers. It was everywhere and it escalated very quickly. I’ve still got the key scratches on my car to prove it.
City Hall wasn’t alone in not understanding what was happening to San Francisco. A few years ago, I had lunch with Phil Bronstein, the Chron editor formerly known as Mr. Stone. Apart from complaining about the Hollywood parties his wife made him attend, he, too was mystified by what was going on around him. Told that San Francisco’s center was about to pivot south – that the southern part of the city would be more dynamic because of its freeway access, the ball park, and the “better” weather, Bronstein scoffed. Real estate in Sea Cliff where he had just moved was still sky high, he said.
Ah. The personal made political. Maybe that’s why the Chron can’t get its hands on Willie Brown.
The workforce housing wars have started. And I’m not helping.
In the “Crystal Ball 2004” predictions, I called Prop J a bond measure. Blame it on the flu. Here’s how Alex Clemens corrected me: "It's not a bond - it's a market-driven option for housing builders. In two areas of town, if builders want to build more densely, Planning will allow them to do so - if they build 39% of their units as affordable to low- and average-income families. No public funds, no tax dollars, totally optional for builders."
Okay. So now go read today's Ex piece (this link is no longer active) which – hey, Adriel, your editors not working Sundays? – pretty much says the ballot initiative benefits only the wealthy and not the poor. Bias anyone?
I say again. I will say a thousand times: more housing is better than what we have now. The Chamber, which is hot for Prop J because they think it will “revitalize” downtown is probably over-stating their case (that’s their job) but more housing means cheaper housing. And, in housing, cheaper is better.
Alex Clemens has maps!
Wanna be an election geek and see how Newsom v. Gonzalez played out on a precinct-by-precinct basis? Here you go. Wallow away.
There are a couple of things worth noting.
One, the Richmond looks like it’s becoming Newsom territory. On pollster-in-the-making David Latterman’s map, it’s blue. The bluer the precinct, the more Newsom votes. So Bayview/Hunters, which had low turnout, is only light blue (but Newsom should send Kamala Harris a big fat present for those votes 'cause she carried him). So are the Outer Mission and the Excelsior. It's a nice baby hue. The color is deeper up in the Castro, Noe, Diamond Heights where turn out was particularly high. Orange, yellow and brown -- where Newsom had a poor showing -- dominate the center of the city.
The Chron wraps the same info (their map colors aren’t as nice, though) into a story about the death of the Brown-Burton machine.
Please. This machine had five people running as Democrats for the mayor’s office in the general election. Yeah. That’s a machine. A broken one.
More seriously, The Chron misses an interesting twist in this last election, one that’s going to be a whole lot more important in the future, particularly if you think we're going to start casting votes on-line, turning on its head all the usual election day dynamics.
The Chron talks about the number of votes cast on election day as proof of Gonzalez’s ability to motivate people and his potential threat to Newsom. It's impressive, certainly, that on election day, Gonzalez got a 10,000 vote lead over Newsom. But by election day, Newsom had already won by using mail-in ballots. The Chron refers to this as “absentees” which may be technically accurate but many of the people filing those ballots were here in town they just relied on the convenience of mail-in. So they didn’t need to go to the polls. In fact, if they had, it would have been illegal.
This is important because the Newsom campaign may well have changed the way San Francisco votes by relying so heavily on mail-ins particularly if they can convert these recent voters to permanent mail-ins. They’ve found a way to get a whole lot of people who don’t ordinarily make to the ballot box – ‘cause they’re stuck in Cupertino, maybe? – involved in the political process.
And that could be the beginnings of a new new thing.
So, did Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez energize San Francisco’s young voters or did young voters, energized by national politics, help Gonzalez?
The Chron says it’s all local.
Amazingly enough, I disagree. Here’s why: the interviews the local daily did with Gonzalez supporters sound a whole lot like the interviews The New York Times did a few weeks ago with Dean supporters.
I think the anti-WTO, anti-globlization movement - of which the Green Party is an important part and which has deep roots in this community - the anti-war efforts, and the new interest younger folks are taking in Howard Dean's campaign, all helped Gonzalez rack up the impressive vote total that he received. But, as Sen. John Burton points out to The Chron, it’s going to be very hard momentum to keep.
Going from a rousing anti-war rally to a “people’s campaign” for mayor is very different from running a nuts-and-bolts, little press, even less money, community college board election. It may sound perfectly plausible but, well, we’ll see how it plays in real life. Ya gotta have a taste for the game to stay in those small contests where ideology is often trumped by more down-to-earth considerations.
There’s been a lot written about how getting a flu shot doesn’t – at least this year – keep you from getting the flu.
These stories are accurate. (This link is no longer active.)
Two feverish observations on the mayor’s race, however.
Mayor-elect Gavin Newsom managed to have voters return more than 70,000 mail-in ballots. And chances are good that most of those ballots came from well-off, more conservative voters – the kind of people who often ignore local elections. They’re rich enough, or live in nice enough neighborhoods that they don’t have to worry about a lot of bread and butter issues like cops and zoning stuff.
This little organizational tactic is a good one for anyone in California politics to tuck away for later use. Mail-in voters, it seems to me, are more likely to be swayed by the person who’s getting them to mail-in. Mail-in is universal in this state. I’d look for it to be used again as a get-out-the-vote tactic particularly for issues that are welcome but perhaps not so popular.
Also worth nothing: the high turn-out in the city’s newly wealthy neighborhoods: Noe (59%), Castro, Diamond Heights (59%). Clearly, they didn’t all vote for Gonzalez.
Of all people, it was Presidential hopeful – at least for now – Sen. John Kerry who put the San Francisco mayor’s race in focus.
As I listened to Kerry talk about sustainable fuels and environmental policy Monday night at the Julia Morgan Ballroom, I realized Kerry was saying many of the same things I’d heard on Saturday night at a “Pacific Heights Penthouse Fundraiser Cocktail Party for Matt Gonzalez.”
In other words, the policies espoused by the middle-of-the-road Democrat – the one “everyone” thinks can beat Bush – are the same as those endorsed by San Franciscans who claim to be supporting Gonzalez, a Green Party member and something of a self-styled rebel. “It is Matt, ironically enough, who supports the traditional values and principles of the Democratic Party," the Pac Heights crowd was sure to say in their press release.
Well, as Joan Walsh observes again and again in today’s Salon, those principles don’t include the ability to tell one black person from another, good manners or intelligent, reasoned critique.
So how did a bunch of well-meaning people sincere in their convictions come to support Gonzalez? Well, there are a lot of answers to that question, as many as there were people in the two rooms. But one bubbled up pretty quickly as Chet Helms, spoke.
Helms is an elegant and graceful man who loves the Haight today as much as he did when he arrived here in 1962. But his sentiments summed up, at least for me, much of the energy that’s powering the Gonzalez campaign. It’s a nostalgia trip. It’s a longing – as Helms was visibly doing Saturday night – for a time in which Progressive politics really were on the cutting edge, leading to a better future. San Francisco led the nation, led Democratic politics and politicians for the better part of two decades and the Progressives were right, not just politically but morally and socially. They had the answers.
The stakes were high, too. Emotions – rightly – were pitched. The anger and frustration over the Vietnam War, the sadness and mourning over the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the emotional chaos and confusion created as the city’s gay community watched as Harvey Milk was slain and then young and younger men died painfully and slowly, was genuine and searing and, oh man, a hell of motivator. There was a sound track, too, a good one. And the conviction that change was absolutely essential helped turn this city into the nation’s Progressive corporate headquarters.
But these days, the cutting edge in San Francisco politics are decisions about whether the city can plan its future more carefully than it has done in the recent past. The debates are over patronage jobs – let me tell you something, it’s only patronage when the other guy is giving away jobs – and bond issues. That’s not to say the life or death issues have been resolved. The fight to build a more inclusive society is never over. The vigilance necessary to maintain a free society should never relax. But those issues aren’t a sexy as they once were. And they’re a lot more confusing, too.
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is a creepy guy whose regard for the constitution is, well, let’s just say he has an odd way of showing it as he jails illegal immigrants on questionable pretenses, hammers shut the nations borders so children are left to cross miles of desert alone, and defends policies that keep U.S. Citizens in jail, isolated and without lawyers for months at a time. But take the other side and, well, it’s hard to defend “terrorists” isn’t it?
And if you want to see where this fight is being fought – go online. Talk to the folks in the computer business. They’re the ones who are waging that war. Some of them are going to line up behind Matt Gonzalez, for sure. He talks the talk. That’s why you’re seeing Gonzalez posters in the back of late-model BMW’s (“Don’t look back, you can never look back”). But many of them are also going to be Gavin Newsom supporters. Newsom’s business-like sensibility – his government wonkishness – appeals to their sense that something isn't right in the way this city runs. The atmosphere that lets Progressive Corp. flourish is also one that subtly undermines Gonzalez, too. In San Francisco in particular, being progressive and making money aren’t warring opposites. But being inept and making money are.
Because of the intensity of the campaign, who ever wins this race is teed up for national political attention. That’s particularly true for Gonzalez. The Greens would score big time points if their come-from-behind guy triumphed over a self-styled moderate Democrat. And the California Democratic Party would, once again this year, look like dopes.
But a Newsom victory might also serve up a long overdue whallop the self-righteous Holy Lefties who seem to think -- despite lots of evidence to the contrary -- that they’re on the forefront of the next bout of sweeping change. They ain’t. Instead, they’re running the Kewl Kids’s Klub For Korrect and Virtuous Thinkers. Their past glory – and their reveling in it as they decide who gets in the Klub, who gets kicked out, who’s going to get double secret probation -- hasn’t translated into votes at the national level. Perhaps, for the first time in a while, it may fail to do so locally.
Rumor has it that the Chron is about to unleash another Survey USA poll showing Green Matt Gonzalez beating Democrat Gavin Newsom in the race to become San Francisco mayor, 52% to 45%.
This will, no doubt, unleash a flurry celebrating and congratulating over at Matt for Mayor HQ along with a bunch of notes, letters and postings from Gavin folks quoting poll wizards who will tell us what’s wrong. Their polls, by the way, have Newsom ahead 52% to 43%. Well, unlike last time around, I have stuff to do this weekend, so here's what's gonna get said.
Survey USA is going to say just 'cause they're cheap and just 'cause they're fast doesn't mean they're inaccurate. The pros are going to say Survey USA polling is bad because it's done by machine not by people. Among other things, it skews young and skips those who have already voted (important because absentee turn out in SF is probably to going to set a record in this race). It’s so bad, that some people refer to these polls as CRAP, which – I am not making this up – stands for Computerized Response Audience Polling.
In races where the polls are used, they've been off by as much as 20 points.
Now, I hate polls. They take the fun out of elections. And stories about polls are even tougher sells: Who cares how they get the numbers, just that they get them.
Well, of course, that’s the problem. How they get the numbers does matter. It matters very much. And in this case, as plenty of people who know more about polling – and care more – have said, these things stink.
Jim Ross, Newsom's campaign manager, writes in with this reaction to the Hearts and Minds and View From the Field, entries from yesterday.
"I think you hit on the point why Matt has not really climbed over 41% in any credible poll. He has run a predominately negative campaign. You can rally the troops and the base with a campaign against someone but in the words of Harvey Milk "You've gotta give them hope." And that means a positive message. Here we are with five days until the election and I do not think any voter can tell you what Gonzalez's message is beyond being anti-Newsom. While I do not think anyone will question our willingness to go after an opponent, I also understand that you have to give people a reason to vote for your candidate.
"The clock is running out for Gonzalez to articulate that message, mail must be dropped at the post office by tomorrow if it is going to get out to voters, and TV really takes a week at a minimum to burn through. The election is not over by a long shot but it is coming down to a contest of turn-out and while that is not very interesting to most members of the media, it is what wins this type of election.
"Jim Ross
Campaign Manager
Gavin Newsom For Mayor"
The SFWeekly’s John Mecklin (This link is no longer active.) loads up his shotgun and goes after The Chron and the Bay Guardian with an enthusiasm that’s positively heart-warming. Go, John, Go!
Mecklin ends up endorsing Green Party Mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez but along the way, trashing his newspaper competitors left and right, he does a fine job making the case for both candidates. Mecklin draws the same lines as the dot.com guy in the post below who is supporting Democrat Gavin Newsom.
This election is indeed a fight for the votes of the city’s newest residents. The Chron, bolstered this observation a bit when it attached an interesting chart to a dumb story about income levels being a motivator in voting (Duh!). But check this out: My ‘hood, up here on the hills of D2 has the same income levels as The Castro, Noe and part – just parts but part nevertheless – of The Mission.
I’m not sure I wholeheartedly agree with Mecklin about Gonzalez. The campaign is simply too sloppy for my taste, too quick to point the finger of indignant righteousness. But Mecklin's generous comments and his fair-minded assessment of what’s going on out there is well worth the read.
This is a big step for Gonzalez, particularly for folks like the dot.com guy quoted below. The SFWeekly may be free but it’s influential partly because it’s a good little newspaper. Need proof? Check out today’s Chron Business section rehash of a story the SFWeekly (This link is no longer active.) did in October.
Ralph Nadar (This link is no longer active.) may be back.
It’s interesting timing. Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez has gained a lot of ground in the past few weeks, a surprising amount, in fact. If he wins, it’ll be a very black eye for the Democratic Party – and not just here in the Golden State. So here’s a fearless prediction: If Green Party Candidate Matt Gonzalez wins his bid for mayor, Nadar will be all over this place. And I’m not entirely sure that’s a step up from Al Gore.
The closer it gets to election day – that’s next Tuesday, Dec. 9 – it looks as though Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez is giving Democrat Gavin Newsom a run for his money.
That’s before Al Gore came to town and Matt Gonzalez, stealing a page from Gray Davis’s oppo boys, “discovered” that Newsom had given money to the Republican party.
Dopey grand-standing aside, Gonzalez is giving Gavin a hard time for all the right reasons. And one particularly fertile bit of territory is the city’s new tech rich. They’re not – to a surprising degree giving how much money they’re sitting on – all nuts for Newsom.
There is perhaps no better illustration than the reaction that a young – oh, he’s in his mid-thirties now – dot.com guy had when he attended the Great American Music Hall fundraiser for Gonzalez dubbed “Musicians for Matt.” (Cake played so I was more than bummed not to go because I, of course, have a looooooooooong jacket).
This thirty-something entrepreneur says he’s a Newsom supporter but he lives in the Mission and all his friends are Gonzalez supporters so maybe he’ll go, learn something. “I am pro-Newsom but I have a group of friends who are trying to reform me,’’ he says before adding that he doesn’t want his name used. You’ll see why.
“I am intrigued by Gonzalez,’’ he said. “My heart is with a lot of what he says.” All went well, for a while, the dot.com guy says. Gonzalez is well-spoken and he’s scoring points talking about the viability of a three-party system and why it’s good to have voices other than those of the establishment. “Then he sort of snaps,’’ the entrepreneur says of Gonzalez who exhorts his followers: “Vote for me because Newsom and his people are a bunch of fucking liars.”
The dot.com guy – no prude – says he was taken aback. “You don’t say it yourself,’’ he said. “You get your underlings to do it." Spoken like a CEO, huh? But the business guy has another point: regardless of who wins, the loser is going to be the most powerful person on the SF Board of Supervisors. So what's with the trash talk? “This is sort of relationships 101,’’ the dot.com guy said. “I was expecting to be very impressed by the man,’’ he added. “I just thought the potty mouth was a little much.”
Speaking of lying, let’s talk for a second about the charges and counter-charges spinning around over the “Mary Green” email circulated, encouraging protestors at former vice president Al Gore’s appearance with Newsom.
There are a lot of ways to get access to a computer network, particularly a computer network run for and by volunteers. There’s wi-fi, that wireless miracle where you can boost a little bandwidth if you know the password. There’s the in-house network available to anyone with a laptop and an Ethernet card.
You wanna take a guess how many people on Van Ness Street have that password or, more importantly, how long it’s been since they were changed. That doesn’t mean the Gonzalez guys sent the mail. It could have been the Newsom people. But remember, what the great Kevin Mitnick would be happy to tell you, the best hacks don’t have anything to do with engineering skill. They’re usually successful because someone tells you how to do the job.
That doesn’t mean the Gonzalez folks are off the hook. It does mean their finger-pointing isn’t on the money. Let’s just say that every scenario that’s been played out by either side is, given a little time, a smart geek and some luck, perfectly plausible.
And remember, change your passwords every six months – minimum.
The back and forth on who’s got the more ethical campaign racheted up a notch over the long holiday weekend. This is getting to be just a little silly. And more boring than I can say. No one can “prove” they’re more ethical. It’s something you demonstrate. That’s why making that argument as a campaign platform is stupid. It’s setting landmines in a field with a map that’s drawn in the dark.
But, well that's what this election has come to. Here are the highlights: Frank Gallagher (This link is no longer active.) fires a shot at Gonzalez for allegedly high-jacking a City Hall event. And the two campaigns swap hacker creds trying to figure out who sent out an email inviting people to protest Al Gore’s San Francisco appearance on Newsom’s behalf. Let’s just leave it at this: computer systems are usually more vulnerable than they seem. Just ask the NYTimes. And IP addresses, well, they can sometimes be misleading if you know what you’re doing. Anyway, The Ex tells you all about it.
Tech lessons indeed.
Oh, and Al Gore? Al Gore?
The boys over at Matt for Mayor had a pretty funny subject line on the e-mail they sent around inviting folks to their Saturday press conference, the one triggered by The Chron story about the roles that truth, lies, fact, fiction play in campaign literature. (Abridged version of story: it depends on who’s doing the talking).
“WHAT: West Side leaders come out in support of Matt Gonzalez for Mayor and in commendation of Gavin Newsom's disinformation,” says the subject line of the e-mail sent around
Gentlemen, “commendation” is praise. You know, commending someone – that’s pointing out their good works. The word you’re looking for – someone over there’s heard of a dictionary, they got it right on the website – is condemnation.
Also, while we’re on the subject, “disinformation” isn’t really a noun…
Today's Bad Reporter captures the essence of the Angela Alioto's courtship by both Gavin Newsom and Matt Gonzalez. Read it and weep with laughter.
Just in time for the holiday, the San Francisco mayoral election has served up something to chew over. And no less a personage than Angela Alioto is front and center, tormented in her decision to endorse former opponent Gavin Newsom by a pantheon that includes John F. Kennedy, Harvey Milk, and George Moscone. In the White House, Hilary Clinton had to deal with the ghost of one great Democrat, Eleanor Roosevelt. Alioto gets three. No wonder Herb Caen thought heaven looked like San Francisco.
Alioto, who as recently as a month ago, accused Newsom, of being a wealthy self-involved puppet of downtown business interests, says she’ll be a kind of super-advisor to Newsom, maybe vice mayor. On the campaign trail, Alioto made the most sense when it came to homelessness and contracting issues. She clearly knows what she’s talking about and she’s got good some ideas on how to fix what’s wrong. But Alioto’s also got deep union support and that support has, throughout the city’s history, come with a hefty price tag.
Her father, Joe, put together one of the great urban Liberal coalitions of unions, New Deal Dems and other “progressives” that carried San Francisco safely through the 1960s and 1970s. But, in the end of his tenure as mayor, he, too, was seen as a tool of downtown business interests. That’s one very good reason why Matt Gonzalez doesn’t invoke his name in the pantheon of liberal footsteps he’s trying to follow.
The optics on this deal – which Newsom first let Alioto advertised as a job then soft-pedaled as a volunteer advisory role – are a bit distorted. Alioto exaggerates. Maybe someone said “vice mayor” but maybe it wasn’t Newsom. Gonzalez, a shrewd campaigner, has taken full advantage of the way this shotgun wedding looks and isn’t holding back. Now jilted, he says he turned Alioto’s demand for a “job” down flat. It’s unethical he says from his high horse. Well, Gonzalez is in many respects a revisionist historian not above amending interpretations to suit his aims. Between the two of them, we’ll never really know what was said.
The Sentinel has the best Lefty take saying, managing to invoke (in a hysterical combination of Photoshop and editorial over-reaching) former mayor Frank Jordan’s famous shower scene at the same time it denounces Newsom, Willie Brown, and Alioto. The paper says the Alioto deal marks the day Newsom lost the election. The Chron carries a milder version of that interpretation, banking – in true ‘horse race’ fashion – on a fall in poll numbers.
The Sentinel overstates the case but for many of the city’s newer residents -- the ones who don’t understand the fierce, emotional allegiance Alioto’s name conjures up particularly with neighborhood activists -- this deal looks odd. It seems to run counter to the reform-minded message Newsom has been preaching. Carefully executed, this endorsement could have looked like a marriage of old, neighborhood-centric San Francisco and the city’s newly civic-minded tech rich. But it’s not. Not yet, anyway.
Gonzalez hasn’t let the opportunity to talk about City Hall “politics as usual” pass. What Newsom could have been played as a revival of Joe Alioto’s coalition has, in Gonzalez’ hands, been turned into a cynical vote-grab. That may not last. Those tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing neighborhood activists are experienced pols, fiercely loyal to Alioto. They can body check a twenty-something Green Party vegan from the Haight and send him flying to the other side of town with a flick of a finger. But the Newsom campaign has taken a gamble with the Alioto endorsement. It may pay off – having Alioto inside the tent is a little bit easier on the nerves than having her outside – but the risk is there.
Tom Ammiano shows grace, class, and character, endorsing Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez for mayor at the rally marking the anniversary of the Milk and Moscone assassinations.
I normally don't go for politicians talking about redemption and forgiveness but, in Ammiano's case, I've heard it enough -- and in private conversation he's such a shrewd observer of those around him -- that I'm going to moan and groan too much. He means it. And sincerity is rare, no matter when or where you find it.
Over at the Chron, where they’re green-baiting like crazy, what with all that hand-wringing about Greens actually winning, Ken Garcia looks at the record and decides that he doesn’t like Matt Gonzalez.
Garcia’s got some good points. Gonzalez, he says, ignores ballot initiatives and other indications of what neighbors and city residents want when he casts his votes on the Board of Supervisors. Well, there’s something to be said for that. It would be nice, for once, to have a city -- hey, here’s an idea, a state -- that’s run not by grand, sweeping (and expensive) ballot initiatives but one that’s run by people who actually want to do the job they’re paid (and paid well) to do.
The problem isn’t that Gonzalez ignores voters. It’s that he and others, in the “Alice in Wonderland” distortion that goes on in city politics nurture the idea that opposition by its very existence creates a moral high ground.
When he casts votes, Garcia claims, Gonzalez is just as keen to reward supporters, pay off backers, and keep the “progressive” coalition together as any machine-backed ward heeler. That means he’s a politician just like, oh, pick one, Willie Brown. Having opposition doesn’t necessarily mean Gonzalez is leading anyone anywhere new. But in a city dominated by a progressive coalition, Gonzalez can wrap himself in the virtuous mantle of the Left and claim to not only be good but right.
This argument, which was perfected by the Clintons while they were in the White House and now trotted out regularly by any besieged Lefty, is hermetically sealed. It lets in no other thinking: maybe there’s another way? Maybe we’re wrong? It bastes in its own glory and much of that glory is past (which is why the only Liberals walking the national stage are in the 60’s and 70’s. They’ve clearly never heard of a ‘farm team?’). It looks backward to days of past triumphs over social ills and injustices and not forward to find new solutions to problems.
SF Weekly columnist Matt Smith has already said much of this. But it bears repeating. Again and again.
In deciding whom to endorse for mayor, former candidate, Democrat Angela Alioto says she’s undecided between fellow Democrat Gavin Newsom and Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez.
Could be she has trouble making up her mind. But, like a lot of the drama of the Alioto campaign, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that she’s really just enjoying the last few bits of the limelight. The Chron does the usual but The Ex (this link is no longer active) has some nice insights about Tom Ammiano and Matt Gonzalez.
That’s the more important conversation, judging from the story The Chron did about The Castro as San Francisco’s new swing district. The neighborhood is no longer the bastion of liberal thinking it once was. There are too many new-tech rich couples (gay and straight) living in the area for it to hew as closely to the "progressive" line as it once did. That’s how Bevan Dufty got elected, it’s why Plan C thrives.
The Castro went for Newsom in the general election. And The Chron doesn’t find anything that suggests history won’t repeat itself.
Leave it to Terrence Hallinan -- a man who, if nothing else, understand the look and feel of politics -- to talk some sense in to the Gonzalez campaign by getting spokesman and D.A. employee Ross Mirkarimi to take a leave of absence.
There’s plenty of evidence on this very web site to show that Mirkarimi, who may be a fine investigator for the D.A.’s office, doesn’t really understand the importance of optics in politics.
Here's the rule: if it looks bad, it is bad. Even if it is “green baiting,” or unwarranted personal attacks or whatever you want to call it. That's setting aside the obvious: if the public face of the campaign is under a cloud, the rest of the effort will suffer.
The best take on what's going on here comes from Frank Gallagher, who knows a lot more about city payrolls than I. Go look at what he has to say (this link is no longer active).
A few weeks ago, SF Weekly columnist Matt Smith reminded me that I’ve become an old fart since I didn’t really appreciate – I still don’t – San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly’s political theatrics.
But I really like hacker theatrics: those little punks going around raiding computer systems, hiding box cutters in planes and calling the cops, the guy who got the phone numbers and social security numbers of the NYTimes OpEd contributors, John Gilmore’s “suspected terrorist” silent protest. It makes me laugh. It makes me think.
The LATimes Joe Mennes (this link is no longer active) did a little write-up about hacker politics earlier this week so I started thinking a little more about being an old fart. And well, as much as it pains me, I decided that Smith is right. When it comes to minor stuff, I like peace and quiet.
And, compared to my civil rights, airplane security, and the entertaining idea that the New York Times sent Arial Sharon a 1099 tax form for his 750-word essay, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission really is pretty minor (yes, I know I’ll think differently when I can’t flush the toilet after an earthquake but, hey, call me high-minded). All politics may be local. But not all local politics -- even here in San Francisco -- is life or death. Not any more. Thank God.
So maybe that’s what a lot people who like to think of themselves as hip have been struggling with during this city election: the stuff the city has to pay attention to over the next few years is boring, adminstrative slogging. Boring but important stuff. It’s not life or death. It’s not stuff that lends itself to political theatrics. It’s stuff that calls for smart thinking and tough decisions and, well, firing people and saying ‘no’ to your friends and maybe making enemies. But, well, that's what reform is all about and every candidate for mayor agreed with one voice that reform -- change -- is long overdue.
No amount of grandstanding can get around that. So both sides in the campaign that scheduled to end on Dec. 9 have done their level best to “fire up the base,’’ as the political pros like to say. It’s working. There’s a lot of anger out there. That’s why (see next entry) John King’s talking about California as the “great exception” comes at such a timely moment. But the anger being generated in San Francisco over this race -- unlike the stuff the hackers are pulling -- doesn’t feel like the kind of anger that gets translated into action that makes you think or, sad to say, makes you laugh.
In what Matt Gonzalez spokesman Ross Mirkarimi will probably call a great example of “green baiting,” The Ex warns that Green Party volunteers from up and down the West Coast are headed to San Francisco to organize. The paper has a little fun with Ryan Chamberlain, a volunteer for Democrat Gavin Newsom’s campaign. Let’s just say that “tactful” is not a word that’s going to be used often in the same sentence with his name (although his weekly Newsom campaign round ups are always a good, snappy read).
The Greenies may be young and annoying. These are the earnest young people who used to stop polo-shirted thirty-something CEOs on the street and ask if they’d sign a petition to stop the dot.com invasion. But, if nothing else, they’re more colorful than the crowd that runs the Newsom campaign. One political observer I know calls the Newsom “The Mormons” because they’re so white and boring.
Here's a note from the Gonzalez campaign in regard to yesterday's posting. It speaks for itself, but, a "correction" isn't really necessary.
"Regarding your story on Matt Gonzalez's parents. A correction needs to be made referring to Matt's parents as running a maquila. I learned that they do not run it, nor are they investors, nor do they own it or even parts of it, nor are they employees. They are a semi-retired couple with experience in shipping and customs, and they lend that shipping experience to the company on an as needed basis. Matt's father has been in the medical and dental sales field for over twenty years and has an import-export business called McAllen Imports, located in McAllen, Texas. Both of Matt's parents do shipping and customs work for the maquila on an as needed basis. The most they make collectively from this work is approximately $18k per year.
"This story apparently originated with the McAllen Monitor newspaper which incorrectly reported that Matt's parents "run a fishing lure maquila". The McAllen Monitor got this fact wrong and Matt's parents would be more than happy to request a correction.
"Please correct the story you published. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
"Regards,
"Ross Mirkarimi
Gonzalez for Mayor"
Not all press is good press. At least that’s what one McAllen, Texas, resident seems to have thought when she saw a story in her local newspaper, The Monitor, about San Francisco Green Party mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez. His parents, who are justifiably proud of their son’s achievements, “run a fishing lure maquila in Reynosa,” across the Rio Grande from McAllen, according to the Monitor.
“Given what I know about the Green party's stance on such matters, Mr. Gonzalez's dad would be regarded as one who exploits the working man. Is this what San Francisco wants in a mayor?” the McAllen woman, Ludivinia Garcia, wrote. In response to a message asking about her interest in the San Francisco election, she had this to say: "I did not even know Mr. Gonzalez was a candidate for mayor let alone Mr. Newsom. I only obtained Mr. Newsom's name from the article itself and did a little searching on the web. As to my motivations, they are simple. I was simply thunderstruck by the apparent hypocrisy of Mr. Gonzalez's remarks in light of his parent's business. I say let the voters of San Francisco be well informed and decide who will be their mayor."
As Garcia's tone indicates, Maquilas, also known as maquiladoras are controversial. The factories hire Mexican workers, mostly women, and pay them wages well below those permitted in the States and far, far below the $8.50 an hour minimum that Gonzalez has helped make the law here in San Francisco. Unions don’t like them because they pay low wages and don’t offer benefits. Lefties look at abusive maquiladoras -- conditions can and do vary -- as evidence of rapacious, often racist, capitalism at its worst. That's why a bunch of progressive organizations are gathering in Miami this week in protest against the extension of the sort of tax breaks and tariff relief that could make maquila-like factories proliferate throughout Latin and South America.
Gonzalez spokesman Ross Mirkarimi said he and the candidate were "thrown off" by questions about the factory. "They don't run anything,'' he said of the Gonzalez family which he said has an investment in the maquila which generates less than $18,000 a year in income. "They don't run it at all," he said. "They have some investment interest. Whether it's an owership or not, I don't know." The family's interest in the factory predates NAFTA and other trade agreements that have subsequently made maquiladoras popular among U.S. corporations, according to Mirkarimi.
There’s irony aplenty here. Some – the city’s business interests -- will argue that it’s increases in the minimum wage like the one Gonzalez helped enact that spur the need for maquiladoras. U.S. workers simply aren’t competitive. The Left, including the Green Party, claims the factories are another way in which corporations shirk their responsibilities by locating factories in countries – not just Mexico but all over the world – where they can pay lower than living wages and oppress workers.
Now, none of this would really matter if Matt Gonzalez hadn’t decided to frame the campaign – as he did over the weekend – as an ideological battle pitting his values against Democratic opponent Gavin Newsom. City residents will suffer under Newsom, Gonzalez said because his values are askew.
"If Supervisor Newsom is elected, many people will suffer,'' Gonzalez said in the Chronicle story. "He doesn't have our values.''
Polls, schmols.
The Chron did a pretty good imitation of the LATimes Saturday, releasing a poll that well, probably isn’t going to stand up come Election Day. You remember how the LAT told us that Arnold wasn’t gonna win. And that the recall might be close.
The local rag says Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez leads Gavin Newsom in the race for mayor by two percent. That sounds like a lot when you consider that, Gonzalez only got 20 percent of the vote in the general election. But it’s not until you get well down in the story before that The Chron’s results were more of a survey, not an actual look at how people might vote. This is the sort of stuff that has professional pollsters heating up email boxes of people who type for a living (see David Latterman's smart comments below for more on this).
Today, Saturday, some Newsom supporters have brand new numbers that paint a different picture than the paper’s The Democrat’s lead is growing. Newsom is ahead of Gonzalez by 15 points, getting 50 percent of those polled to Gonzalez’ 36 percent. And with Independent voters -- that’s the second largest block in the city since Total Recall -- he’s got a healthy 10 percent margin over Gonzalez. As expected, Gonzalez’ is attracting about half of former candidate and city Treasurer Susan Leal’s supporters and almost all of those who voted for Supervisor Tom Ammiano in his bid for mayor.
Kamala Harris, candidate for District Attorney is doing just as well, leading incumbent Terrence Hallinan by a healthy 8 percentage points.
These number put the race to get former candidate’s even more important – that’s the horse race angle the press will keep following. Democrat Leal’s already thrown here weight behind Newsom. Ammiano’s probably going to stay silent (you can’t really blame him, can you?) But former candidate Angela Alioto, also a Democrat, is said to be close to an announcement -- and she'll keep it in the family.
UPDATE WORTH READING: David Latterman, who’s got a “roll your own” poll-making election prediction up at The Usual Suspects, had some smart things to say about The Chron poll and the way all the questioning works. In short, says Latterman, people don’t always do what they say they’ll do.
Continue reading "Pollsters' Smackdown" »
Don’t be making the mistake of thinking that San Francisco’s election is only about San Francisco.
The New Democratic Network which draws a lot of money and support from Silicon Valley’s business-oriented Democrats – people like the ones whose names appear at the bottom of the GavinTech invite – rolls into town on Friday. Guess who their keynote speaker is? Okay, so it's not hard. Gavin himself is scheduled to wake them all up at 9:15 a.m.
The NDN is playing the city election as a way to sell their version of big-D Democratic politics as a way to rescue the party from the likes of Lefty Liberals like Gonzalez.
And if this photo on their website is any indication, The Greens think the stakes are just as high.
You really didn’t need to attend last night's mayoral debate to get the show.
[Aside: unless of course you needed to know that the marvelous, early ‘70’s California corporate lobby of the Commonwealth Club with its goofy plastic hanging lamps and its funky spiral staircase is being ripped out. To be replaced, no doubt, by some sort late ‘80’s “tasteful” wood paneling and color-coordinated mauvey Four Seasons-tasteful upholstery. It’s an outrage! San Francisco is being robbed of a tacky monument to faux corporate chic!.
UPDATE: Kenton Hoover, who has a better sense of SF history than I do, writes in and says I'm admiring the lobby of what was once known as Marathon Oil. Which explains all that plastic.]
No, if you really wanted to understand the campaign you could have just stayed home and gotten up this morning to read Matt Smith whose analysis of the race is dead on worth reading. Go now and read about reconstituted hipster Joe O’Donohue (this link is no longer active) and the cynicism of the Left.
San Francisco is at a crossroads the likes of which the city has never seen before. And no one, not the Left, not the business community (as there is no right here), NO ONE, has any overwhelming good ideas about what to do next. It’s going to be up to the guy who gets elected. He's going to have to make his own way, as Smith points out. And that’s how people should decide to vote.
Equally well informed, is Frank Gallagher (this link is no longer active) who raises a red flag about the city’s Democrats and their seemingly visceral dislike of Gavin Newsom. The central committee might not endorse the guy who got the most votes. And he’s from their party, a party, by the way, he's done a pretty good job of defending.
They have two different styles and two, not-so-different, ways of looking at the world but mayoral candidates Matt Gonzalez and Gavin Newsom proved last night that they’re pretty well matched when it comes to debating. It was a tie.
Moderated by KQED’s unflappable Michael Krasny – who might just be the best interviewer in California – Green Party candidate Gonzalez and Democrat Newsom went at each other for just about an hour. Each landed a few punches.
Gonzalez got Newsom on campaign finance – they both missed the point but Gonzalez got the “spending cap” cap credit if you believe Rachel Gordon’s story in today’s Chron. Newsom got points on substance – he clearly knows how the city works and has strong feelings about what needs to be done. He did fine defending Care Not Cash and the aggressive panhandling ban but those are issues on which voters have made up their minds. There were no extra credit points to be made. Gonzalez did good job of looking less flakey and more interested in City Hall reform than he has in the past but Newsom landed a solid punch with his questions about Gonzalez relationships with Democrats and on women’s issues.
One subtlety: Newsom' invocaton of Supervisor Tom Ammiano on a range of policies and ideas. And Gonzalez' seeming refusal to utter that same name.
Krasny call the whole thing "a debate, a ceremony, a ritual." Consider yourselves blest.
GavinTech, whoever the hell they are, aren’t the only sinners around. The Gonzalez campaign should be facing scrutiny in a variety of ways – from its own constituency – that it’s not.
Much has been made of Gonzalez’s babe-quotient. I didn’t believe it until I saw it but chicks (the kind who date guys like the one who sent the GavinTech invite, by the way) dig Gonzalez..
The campaign guys -- and it's mostly guys as JoeFire has pointed out -- dig them, too, it seems. “Food, music, and beautiful models will be included,’’ reads a flyer for an October fundraiser at the Elbo Room. It’s probably a joke. But still. That’s business as usual in politics, of course but it’s time the parties of change in the city – because that’s what Gonzalez is claiming to be – paid attention to the details.
Oh, and one last thing. That same Elbow Room invite? It has an RSVP number. It’s a City Hall exchange for someone who works at the San Francisco PUC.
That’s the Public Utilities Commission, a powerful but, uh, until recently, somewhat neglected government agency.
He’s telling supporters not to believe what they read but the chart published in Sunday’s Chron doesn’t make things look too good for Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez.
In most parts of the city, he got pretty thoroughly beaten. Gonzalez supporters say that’s not important. That he can put together a coalition that can beat Democratic candidate Gavin Newsom. Certainly the Green Party – looking at capturing its first major U.S. city if Gonzalez wins – sees it that way. They’re bringing in the heavy artillery turning the rag-tag bunch of Gonzalez supporters into a real live honest-to-God media savvy machine in the suede draped figure of Ross Mirkarimi, a Nadar 2000 vet.
But, as Friday’s union endorsements of Newsom demonstrate, Democratic politics runs deep in San Francisco – union deep. The Greens don’t like to say this too loudly but much of their support doesn’t come from working folks, folks who get their hands dirty, it comes from intellectuals, folks who think for a living. And, this time around, in this city election, a lot of those people seem to be headed to Newsom.
Gonzalez, of course is trying to mitigate that. Hence the courtship of Joe O’Donohue (this link is no longer active) and the Residential Builders Association, a partnership that would smack of pandering and political opportunism if Gonzalez weren’t a Green Party candidate.
I was once treated to a diatribe by a building contractor about the live-work units that O’Donohue was instrumental in constructing throughout SOMA. The contractor, who had been hired to do a fairly minor kitchen renovation spent a great deal of time talking about the various code violations he found and how difficult and more expensive those violations made the job he was hired to do. A Sunset resident, he’s not a Newsom voter. He's not a union guy, either. But he’s no Green Party supporter. He thinks what O’Donough has done is the southern part of the city is very dangerous; we'll find out how the next time the earth shakes. The RBA is talking about building affordable housing. Okay. But shouldn’t it be safe, too?
Getting this contractor’s vote is Matt Gonzalez’s biggest challenge. One he's going to have to repeat over and over during the next month.
It'll be a day or two until us mere mortals get a look at the district-by-district election tallies but let's just say that third-place finisher Angela Alioto provided one clue about what's going to happen when she was interviewed in late September.
Polls Alioto was touting at the time showed her, in some neighborhoods like the Marina and parts of Pacific Heights, doing as well as Democratic nominee Gavin Newsom.
That means many of Alioto's 28,000 or so votes are headed to Newsom's column, not to Matt Gonzalez. Leal's votes are headed to Newsom, too. But it's best not to count the chickens too early. Housing activist Randy Shaw does a very nice job in the Sentinel of explaining just how Gonzalez could pull it off.
TheEx(this link is no longer active) does a fine job setting the scene, pitting the state's Dems, who haven't exactly been doing well, against the Greens who are pretty excited -- still -- about all the exposure they got from Peter Camejo's brush with fame in the guise of Arianne Huffington's book tour.
The Trib (this link is no longer active) points out -- the first to do so, methinks -- that Gonzalez' candidacy means a lot to the Green Party something that's gotten overlooked in the mess of squabbling going on during the Lefty Primary.
This is their chance at a big win. Frank Gallagher adds a little more insight.
"Camejo told fjgallagher.com last night that the Green Party plans to throw everything available resource at the San Francisco mayoral runoff - including busing in hundreds of volunteers from out of town to pump up Gonzalez's field organization.
There are 50,000 Greens in the Bay Area, Camejo said, adding that the party planned to enlist as many as a thousand of them on Gonzalez's behalf.
“San Francisco is a symbol,” Camejo told fjgallagher.com. “We cannot let it go corporate. This is a crusade.”
Just in time to get us in the right mood for the election -- that thing last night was the Lefty Primary -- Matt Smith makes the intelligent case in favor of Chris Daly's guerrilla Public Utilities Commission appointments.
It's not the argument the Guardian makes. Instead, Smith takes us "finger waggers" to task for failing to appreciate Supervisor Daly's frustration with Mayor Willie Brown's self-serving politics. Smith is right. Brown has used City Hall as a private playground, piggy bank, and social service program for the past eight years. And he hasn't been subtle about it.
But if the rumors about Daly doing Aaron Peskin's bidding are true -- and an awful lot of people in and around City Hall seem to think they are -- then Daly hasn't done anything very different from what Brown is accused of doing. Peskin's business is water and the PUC is all about water. Having someone like Adam Werbach on the commission might be good for Peskin.
Smith makes another good point: Chris Daly, Matt Gonzalez, and Aaron Peskin have all done a lot to stop the kind of machine corruption that's made the Brown Administration the envy of payola lords everywhere. They haven't made much progress in part because of Brown's political skill. That, of course, makes their frustration -- their little bits of guerrilla theater -- that much more bombastic.
But style is part of politics. And more and more, the screaming and yelling the flat out rudeness that passes for public discourse from San Francisco to Washington -- at all levels, in almost every discussion -- has become self-defeating. Daly and Gonzalez in particularly like to take sledgehammers to problems that just aren't that big. Holding a sit in over a parking garage then yelling at police officers -- that was a Daly trick. Making fun of Tom Ammiano -- that was Matt Gonzalez. Taking a stab at stripping down the Equal Benefits Ordinance's power over non-profits (non-profits like, say housing advocates maybe or environmental groups?). That was Daly and Gonzalez. Their style isn't the Brioni smoothness favored by Da Mayor and well, that's one reason they resort to theatrics. It's a vicious cycle. It needs to be broken.
San Francisco isn't that big. And the fights that the city's Democrats and other assorted liberals have are often, as the case with the PUC appointments, procedural. Sometimes, they're over city management issues. Sometimes they're issues of style. But they're rarely the Liberal v. Conservative, Progressive v. Reactive bloodbaths that call for the kind of speechifying and stand-up dramatics that made politics so much fun when, oh, lives were at stake. At heart, San Francisco a the tolerant Liberal-leaning village, a sophisticated small town. And if it's going to stay this way, the rhetoric has just got to come down a notch.
Tom Ammiano has a nice "thank you" up on his site.
And TheEx (this link is no longer active) story about his concession is worth reading. Yes, Supervisor Ammiano, you are fucking loved.
And deep in Matier and Ross, Carole Migden makes the observation that a gap of more than 15 percent between Newsom and the second place finisher -- it was Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez -- could mean a cakewalk for Newsom. The ratio of Newsom votes to Gonzalez was 2-1.
He's not counting on it. Newsom's site this morning asked for volunteers. Citing Newsom's fundraising, Gonzalez is asking for money. The outlines of the campaign are pretty clearly formed, huh?
Still haven't made up your mind?
Take a look at these interviews with the mayoral candidates.
Angela Alioto
Tom Ammiano
Michael Denny
Susan Leal
Gavin Newsom
Jim Reid
Tony Ribera
All the interview contain links to the candidate's website so you can have an up-close look at what else they're saying.
Oh, and Matt Gonzalez didn't have time to talk. That's why he's not included. It's not an oversight.
Rarely do you get to read an editorial as insulting as the one that appears in this week's Bay Guardian. Go get a copy -- good thing it's free -- so you can see just how dumb the dolts at the Guardian think you are.
In "Daly's Coup," the writers praise San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly's guerrilla PUC appointments -- the ones he made in the few hours where he was acting mayor -- saying they're reminiscent of Mayor Willie Brown's backroom shenanigans.
"Sure there are what the left-liberals like to call 'process issues' here. Sure, in an ideal world, Daly wouldn't usurp the mayor's prerogative and fill two vacant posts while holding what is normally a ceremonial position," Guardian editors write. "But let's be serious here. What exactly did Daly do wrong?"
Daly, says the Guardian, was just doing what Willie's done throughout his career. The ends justify the means because this time around, a good cause -- the people's cause -- is being served, not the cause of established entrenched elites.
Yup. The people. That band of ignorant sloths too stupid to see that the logic employed here is no more sophisticated than that of a three-year-old wanting a new toy. Because. Because I want to, that's why.
Well, one of the nice things about the left is that some of them still have the sense -- and the sensibility -- God gave them.
As Marc Solomon said in a letter to the San Francisco Sentinel: "Brown pulls this kind of crap. We don't. That's what makes us different. That's what makes us better."
Elites, as anyone who has been left out of one can tell you, are often self-anointing. They don't have to be rich. They don't have to be powerful. They just have to believe their own press.
And in San Francisco there appears to be plenty of holy oil to go around. The Guardian editorial is just one example.
There are plenty of others. The rumors, for example, that Daly's guerrilla appointments were encouraged by Supervisor Aaron Peskin. Peskin's professional interest is water rights management. And now with former Sierra Club president Adam Werbach on the city Public Utilities Commission, he has an ally on the board that controls city -- and the region's -- water supply. Nicely done, Supervisor Peskin. So progressive, so open, so -- what's that word they like to use in business? -- transparent.
That's not all you can see behind the thin curtain. In their Lefty revival meetings, Daly and his buddy, Green Party mayoral candidate and Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez preach the progressive bible. They will, they say, run the city differently. But strip away the usual code words, the flashy political protest theatrics, and their actions speak to a return to past -- as the Guardian itself acknowledges with its Brown comparison -- not a move ahead.
There's Matt Gonzalez' rental of a Walter Wong building -- that's something outgoing Mayor Willie Brown used to do during his campaign. Why? Because "expediter" Wong has political juice in the Asian communities and he uses it on behalf of those who help him. "It's not a coincidence," says a political op who is working against Gonzalez.
There's the brohaha over the city's Equal Benefits Ordinance, a landmark piece of legislation that San Franscisco's gay community regards as the cornerstone of its political and social achievements.
Daly recently suggested, as the Bay Area Reporter detailed in this week's issue, that oversight of the law become part of the city's public health department, a move that would strip it of its power. " 'We have been betrayed," [long-time gay rights activitist Jeff] Sheehy told the committee at a special hearing on Monday," BAR reported. "'This language effectively destroys the enforcement mechanism which has been key to the ordinance's success.'"
There's a disconnect here. Words and actions don't meet up.
(The links to the Examiner no longer connect to archived articles.)
A few days ago, Assemblyman Leland Yee was quoted as saying that he counts himself lucky to be in Sacramento because San Francisco politics has gotten so nasty. Man. He wasn't kidding.
Today's Ex is just loaded with dish, so click on over. Take a spoon. It's juicy.
The stand-out -- and this is saying something -- is Angela Alioto grabbing headlines -- in print and on the web -- with yet another temper tantrum. Alioto's been taking shots at front-runner Gavin Newsom all summer in what looks like an attempt to trigger some kind of class resentment of Newsom's business community and wealthy neighborhood support. She even took a shot at his recently deceased mother. Now, Alioto's mad at The Chron's John Diaz for endorsing Newsom.
It's weird to see a candidate, particularly one with the kind of experience Alioto has, fall apart like this, so publicly. A smart, tough cookie, a woman who should be admired in a number of ways, Alioto is from one of the city's better regarded political families. And she should be as proud as she is of that family's accomplishments and contributions to San Francisco.
But that's not enough to guarantee her the mayor's job. The "people know me" stuff Alioto's trotting out just doesn't work; people don't know her. They don't know her family. They don't remember former Mayor Joe Alioto. Instead, they see a wealthy trial attorney engaged in some kind of bizarre grudge match with a man young enough to be her son. It doesn't help when Alioto gets going on the stump. She sounds just like Marge Simpson. More telling: Alioto doesn't know The Simpsons.
Her charges that Newsom is nothing more than the rich son of privilege are just as out of touch. In her latest flyer, Alioto says she won a $11.2 million judgment against Mary Kaye, the cosmetic firm. Well, trial lawyers aren't known for their altruism. They usually take home 30 percent of the settlements they get, meaning Alioto probably pocketed $3 million from the Mary Kaye case. She earned it. There's no doubt about that. But those seven-figure fees are more than enough to cover the expense of running for Mayor.
That's a glass house, Angela. Move out.
UPDATE:Mayoral candidate Angela Alioto told TheEx that she hasn't lost it. She's just tired. I believe it.
Continue reading "Compare and Contrast, Part Two" »
So maybe it's not Progressive's progress.
Adriel Hampton over at The Ex, slides this poll into his column today. It's from the Alioto mayoral campaign.
These numbers give Newsom 35%, Alioto, 17%, Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez, 13, with Supervisor Tom Ammiano tied with Treasurer Susan Leal at 7% each, and 14% undecided.
A Newsom supporter wrote in to chastise me for 1)having inaccurate numbers and 2)taking the word of another, less well informed, supporter.
He's right. I wasn't clear when I wrote yesterday that the numbers I posted were given to me by the supporter, who had been hit up for money. And he probably wasn't paying that close attention when he heard them.
Gonzalez has 18%, according to the Newsom folks. And that has held; it's not increasing. More importantly -- and this is what makes Alioto's recent poll interesting -- the total between the three Lefties is still 43%, unchanged since September. Meaning Newsom isn't loosing any ground. "All that has happened is the rearranging of the deck," the Newsom supporter writes. "No new votes have broken to the three of them."
And, he warns, Gonzalez should be careful what he wishes for. Again.
"Matt is the easiest one to beat," the Newsom guys says, adding that polls have shown that Gonzalez has high negatives among voters. "He is the most intelligent, best debater, and is presently the least defined negatively. But he is the easiest to beat."
That jives with what Hampton is saying, again citing an Alioto pol, showing Gonzalez and Ammiano losing badly in a runoff against Newsom. Alioto gets 40 percent to his 48 percent, with 12 percent undecided.
Can't wait 'til Wednesday. You?
Well, it looks as though Matt Gonzalez was right.
He is, indeed, the mayoral candidate of the Left. A poll done over the past week or so shows Gonzalez winning the Lefty Primary coming in second to Newsom with 19% of those polled, beating Tom Ammiano (about 14%) by a hefty 5 point margin. Angela Alioto is third with around 11% of those polled followed by Susan Leal (6%) and Tony Ribera (2%). The Chron has different numbers but the same result: Gonzalez has picked up votes in the past few days.
SFGate's left-of-center on-line readership seems to agree. What's interesting -- or, if you're a Newsom supporter, worrisome -- is that Gonzalez has leapt ahead of his entrenched competitors in a very short time. Remember, he entered the race at the last minute.
"That's about the worst news for the Newsom campaign,'' said one long-time Newsom supporter who was told of the poll results when he got a call asking for a donation.
What's the attraction? After all, isn't Supervisor Chris Daly's guerrilla PUC appointment a good example of how machine-like the anti-machine Left has gotten? And isn't Gonzalez the leader of that little cabal? He is and it is. But voters aren't seeing it that way, says the Newsom supporter. In part, because no one on the board -- save Supervisor Tony Hall -- is kicking up a fuss about Daly's tactics.
So the lefties are getting a free pass from their more conservative colleagues. On top of that, Gonzalez, the Green Party candidate and president of the Board of Supes, does well in the debates. And he's not tarred with the socialite/insider/downtown business community connection that haunts Newsom. "People are sick of cronyism in City Hall," the Newsom supporter said. That translates into support for Gonzalez who has set himself, at least rhetorically, apart from the city's mainstream politics.
"The press is saying he's uncorruptible,'' the Newsom supporter said of Gonzalez. "They're not saying he's the son of a some millionaire…"
It's never safe to judge someone by what you can find out about them on the 'net but Adam Werbach, Chris Daly's recent guerrilla appointment to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, seems to have a lot more political sense than his mentor.
Werbach managed to maneuver through some tricky politics as president of the Sierra Club, getting the group through a touchy vote on immigration policy without burning his fingers. It was nice work for a 20-something. And it wasn't easy.
That's why he should decline to accept the post to which Daly's appointed him. Werbach clearly knows the importance that timing plays in politics.
San Francisco Supervisor Tony Hall accurately sums up his -- and others, not so conservative -- reaction to Daly's guerrilla tactics.
"From this point, I will not look at their qualifications. I'm looking at their integrity for accepting under these conditions," Hall said [in an interview with TheEx]. "I'm going to fight it on the grounds of one little supervisor getting his way over everybody else. That's what he's doing. He talks about the downtrodden, poor and homeless, and he steps on everybody else. That's a joke."
Too bad no one's laughing.
There was a time, a time not long ago when young men were convinced that their way of doing things and seeing the world was the only one that mattered, that counted, that meant anything here in San Francisco.
Those people – those dot.com people – were blamed for everything that was wrong with a changing San Francisco. They were blamed for mall-like chain stores. They were blamed for sky-rocketing rents. They were blamed for changing this beautiful once-tolerent city into a money-mad hell hole.
They were blamed for change.
Today, a group of young men – they are still mostly young men – convinced their way of doing things and seeing the world is the only one that matters, that counts, that means anything are back. And they are once again in love with their own power.
But this time, they’re not dot.com people. They’re political people. But boy it’s hard to tell the difference, isn’t it?
These so-called Progressives are trying to roll San Francisco back to being a city that – if the truth be told – never really existed. These political people, born and educated in the East, too young to remember the city's Summer of Love, far too young to remember its proud Liberal union-based past, want to create change but they want to call it somethinge else.
They are as fervent in their belief in their own righteousness as the people they once denounced and cursed. To hold their ground these Progressives have taken advantage of a ceremonial act of good will to make political appointments that favor their cause. And, it seems, they’re going to get away with it.
But the bad will that’s been created – the bad will that comes on top of Green candidate Matt Gonzalez’s cheap and petty jibes at Supervisor Tom Ammiaino, the bad will that comes on top of the Green Party’s constant complaining about School Supervisor Arlene Ackerman – is getting more bitter by the minute. You can cheer their intentions but their tactics –no different from the stock price inflations, the insider dealing, the self-congratulation that made the tech bubble so unbearable -- are not in keeping with a city that wants to run with some semblance of order and integrity.
The dot.com crowd was undone by its own hubris. If anyone should understand this lesson, it’s the Left. But they don’t. Which makes you think they’re not really Liberals, they’re not really Progressive. They’re just out for themselves. And that means they’re not out for anyone else. Not now. Not in the future. Not in the past.
Republican candidate and former San Francisco Police Chief TONY RIBERA has made a name for himself on the campaign trail by speaking his mind, with humor and, in most cases, kindness. As a Republican, running in a predominantly Democratic town, he’s not expected to attract that many votes. A popular figures as chief, however, Ribera will get some recognition and in an eight-way race. That gives him more clout that you might expect by just reading the numbers.
A fan of mass transit, a cop who jokes about his days on the beat in the Haight during the “Summer of Love,” Ribera isn’t the most conservative candidate running. But he’s among the toughest, in words and deeds, as he demonstrates in the following interview. He knows the city and he knows City Hall. Ribera was interviewed in his office at the University of San Francisco, where he teaches criminal justice, on September 23, 2003.
What's this mayor's race about?
I think this mayor's race is about eight years of terrible mismanagement in San Francisco. It's mismanagement that has created a budget deficit of $350 million. We've now created a new budget built on smoke and mirror where we've terribly exaggerated salary savings. We've made ridiculous cuts in overtime that will never happen and we've cut virtually no programs or no positions. This budget is an absolute joke and it's a culmination of eight years of ineffectiveness. Do we want to get a grasp on managing our city where we can set goals, expect results, hold people accountable and hopefully curb the size of our city government?
Continue reading "They Might be Mayors:Tony Ribera" »
Why has a nice man like San Francisco mayoral candidate Tom Ammiano turned in to Green Party mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez’s favorite punching bag?
First, Gonzalez, who is also president of the city board of supervisors, entered the race, splitting the left by giving people a fourth candidate (that’s counting city Treasurer Susan Leal). Then, Gonzalez either tried (or spread rumors he was trying) to get Ammiano to take the schools superintendent’s job. That tactic, had it succeeded, would have taken Ammiano out of the race and, by the way, would have knocked the city’s highest ranking black female out of a job. Now that’s a nice way to rack up the “progressive” credentials, huh?
But this last hit is a low blow. And it looks like it’s backfiring.
The cause? A four-page mailer asking “Who should be our next mayor? The millionaire candidate? Politicians Who Have Had Their Chance?” The first question is a reference to the race’s front-runner Gavin Newsom. The second to Ammiano.
And in case you don’t get it, there’s a comparison chart – Gonzalez, Ammiano and Newsom – inside.
This political subtlety – anyone got a sledgehammer? – has outraged some of the city’s leading Lefties, among them, Robert Haaland, president of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club. “ I am struck by the smallness of his mailer and the smallness of his actions,” Haaland wrote in a widely circulated email late last week. “If this is what being a progressive means in the near future, let me be the first to tear up my progressive membership card.” (Haaland’s essay defining what it means to be a progressive – in our out San Francisco – is so worth reading that it’s printed below).
Naturally, Ammiano supporters are furious at Gonazalez, according to a political op working in a citywide campaign. “They really feel betrayed, worse than Angela getting the Guardian, worse than when Matt got in the race,” he said. “We haven't seen the last chapter of all this...there may soon be an ‘Anybody but Newsom or Gonzales’ philosophy.”
That's good for Ammiano. It's good for Alioto and it's good for Leal. But it's bad, very bad, for Gonzalez now, and in the future as he tries to run the Board of Supervisors.
And you thought Total Recall was a rock’em’sock’em roller coaster ride.
Continue reading "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Gonzalez" »
Now that Total Recall is available on video, the San Francisco’s mayor’s race can begin.
So, naturally, this being a nation, not to mention a city of TV sets, there was a televised candidates’ debate on KPIX to get things started.
There wasn’t a clear winner which is about what you’d expected in a field with this many candidates grouped so closely to the left. But it also sounds that the moderator got all eight candidates to actually talk about what they’re doing and what they want to do.
Angela Alioto, however, has won big, very big, with the Bay Guardian’s endorsement. The Guardian isn’t the beacon of progressive, activist journalism it once was, sadly. But it’s still very influential and picking Alioto for her ability to beat front-runner Gavin Newsom is savvy Lefty politics (for once).
The Guardian’s endorsement also focuses the race. More than ever before this is a contest of class and culture, a collision that started as soon as the first New Yorker arrived in San Francisco, went to work at a dot.com and decided to stick around despite the stock market crash.
Alioto v. Newsom will be an election that pits a city of older, more blue collar, less urbane San Franciscans against new arrivals who are wealthier, less familiar with the city’s hard-core union past and more accepting of change. The lines will get clearer as we get closer to polling day but if you’d like a refresher, take a look at the interviews Alioto and Newsom gave late last month. They represent two different cities that just happen to be in the same place.
A bit of self promotion: “They Might be Mayors,” the series of one-on-one interviews with candidates, continues to day with Jim Reid (see below). You can catch up on the series – which ends Tuesday with Tony Ribera -- by searching the candidates’ names or, a little more conveniently, the term “SF Mayor’s Race” in the box on the right.
Housing and Homeless advocate JIM REID is probably the only truly single issue candiate in this year's mayoral contest. With nothing more than a sense of protest politics and an unsual dedication, he's pushed himself into debates and mayoral forums demanding time for himself and, by extension, his issue, at ever opportunity.
Reid's candidacy, like Libertarian Michael Denny's, has no real chance of succeeding. But in a seven-man race -- the city's Lefty Primary -- his dedication is enough to pull votes from others candidates. That strengthens Newsom's chances, of course. But also pretty much guarantees a run-off in December.
Reid, a former contractor and home builder, has built a small structure -- about 100 square feet including laundry facilities and a full bath -- that he says proves how easy it is to house San Francisco's homeless. He was interviewed on the steps of the house, which he calls Shelter One, in Bernal Heights at Montcalm and Franconia streets on Sept. 19, 2003.
What is this election about, what is the election about for you as a mayoral candidate?
It's about solving the housing problem.
Is that all it's about?
Well, homelessness is about housing and I’m the only candidate who understands housing and how easy it is to build it. The mayor of San Francisco could solve the homeless problem. The mayor of San Francisco could develop a model sort of like the AIDS model of the 1980's that the nation would replicate. We need to do that. This is why I'm running for mayor. I can't afford housing in this city. I can't afford $1.2 million. I can afford to live in this [Shelter One] but it’s not legal to build them. This is why I'm running.
Continue reading "They Might Be Mayors: Jim Reid" »
The front-runner in almost every poll taken for the mayor's race, San Francisco Supervisor GAVIN NEWSOM, has been helped by his friendships with two powerful and influential men. In politics, he has enjoyed the protection of Mayor Willie Brown. In business -- Newsom owns restaurants and nightclubs -- he has been helped by his family friendship with billionaire Gordon Getty.
Appointed to the boad in 1996 and re-elected three times since, Newsom's campaign is aimed at city residents just like him: Young, business-minded city dweller who want to see changes made in the city's politics as usual.
Newsom first captured their attention last year with the controversial "Care Not Cash" proposal to reduce cash payments to the city's homeless and this year's race has built on that ballot-box success. Newsom's mayoral campaign enjoys support not just from the city's political establishment -- he's been endorsed by Brown -- but also from the business community. Newsom was interviewed on at his campaign headquarters on Van Ness Street, Sept. 18.2003
What's this race about? For you, for what is this race for mayor about?
It's about the future of San Francisco. It's about uniting San Franciscans around real solutions to our real problems. It's about getting this city moving again. It's about creating jobs, creating opportunities for people. It's about cleaning the streets, giving people the hope and expectation this city can turn around its homeless policies, its failed aggressive panhandling policies. It's about creating housing opportunities for the middle class, the forgotten middle class who have been left out of the equation. It's about working families. It's about restoring a sense of pride, spirit and confidence in the of San Francisco.
Continue reading "They Might Be Mayors: Gavin Newsom" »
A lawyer, a Latina and a lesbian, SUSAN LEAL was born and raised in San Francisco, the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She served on the board of supervisors for four years beginning in 1993 where she headed the board's finance committee and helped draft and enact the city's domestic partnership laws.
Leal is running a moderate-lefty campaign working to appeal to the city's business community by stressing her financial acumen and business experience in concert with her years in political office. Leal's had some success in that arena; her backers include financier Warren Hellman.
She is finishing her second and last term as treasurer and was interviewed one morning on her way to the office after a breakfast campaign appearance.
What is this race about in your mind as a mayoral candidate?
It is a lot about the direction of the city and whether the city is really ready -- and I think the city is ready -- to get serious. And they'd like someone who really wants to operate as an executive. I think they want an ideology that they can at least relate to and feel that they respect, but also they're looking for someone with financial skills, they're looking for someone who can say how do we get these 20,000-plus employee going in the same direction.
Continue reading "They Might Be Mayors: Susan Leal" »
They have a saying in Washington, D.C.: Everything has been said but not everyone has said it. That’s kind of how I feel about Total Recall. Particularly since I was wrong — probably wishful thinking — about the recall tally itself. For once in this thing, there were no suprises.
The Bee’s undoubtedly exhausted but very perceptive Dan Weintraub wrote a nice bit after Davis conceded. That can be the last piece of state election news you read for a while. But that doesn't mean politics is over. It's just coming to your neighborhood.
TheEx, always local, uses Total Recall to launch into its coverage of the San Francisco mayoar’s race. Susan Leal’s spokesman gets in some shots at Plan C — calling them Republicans! — but at the same time giving them more credibility.
Matt Smith goes and spends — cough cough — quality time with mayoral hopeful Matt Gonzalez bumming around The Mission and almost getting ticketed for jaywalking, a promenade on the wild side if I ever heard of one.
Smith also taped the interview. Hmmmm. I spot a trend. It’s probably time for me and Smith to have lunch again. I’ll be sure to tape that, too.
Oh and you have to read Smith -- actually you can read almost any part of the SFWeekly save Dan Savage -- to get the full-on MG experience live and in person. He didn’t have time to talk to me before deadline so there will be no Gonzalez interview in the series that's posted here on Tuesday and Thursdays (tomorrow, Susan Leal).
Bummer, huh, dude?
Libertarian Candidate MICHAEL DENNY runs American Wine Distributors, a company he started in 1987. And he may be the only candidate who is happy -- no proud -- to be boo'd at the forums and debates where he's managed to get a seat on stage.
In a city of people who believe government has a right to engage in most aspects of its citizens' lives, Denny is clearly a fish out of water. As Libertarian he believes in as little government involvement as possible and counts the city's schools, its zoning and planning efforts and the county-run hospital system as examples of things that government shouldn't do.
That means he's probably not going to win this election. But the 'free markets, free minds' philosophy that Denny embraces is one that's increasingly popular among the area's tech rich. And that makes him someone worth hearing. He was interviewed in his office on Pier 23.
What's this race about for you as a mayoral candidate?
This race, for me, is about restoring the influence of the citizens and tax payers in City Hall. I don't believe that currently we have a representative City Hall. We have a City Hall that is beholden heavily to special interests who control the political direction. All the other major candidates are beholden to some aspect of the power infrastructure.
Continue reading "They Might Be Mayors: Michael Denny" »
Don't go thinking Total Recall is the source of all good political humor.
No, smarty pants Alex Clemens over at The Usual Suspects, has made a more local contribution. No doubt mourning the death of SFPolifix.com -- the email chat room that thought I was a man -- Clemens has a build-your-own political parody up at his site.
Pile on. Don't hold back. If the increasingly nasty nature of my email is any indication, we're going to need all the humor we can squeeze out of this election.
For those of you more seriously inclined, there's a new chat site, The Wall. The Malik Looper Tribute Thread, along with the email exhange between Jake McGoldrick and Plan C's Mike Sullivan are up for the uh, edification of all.
Leave it to the SFWeekly's Matt Smith to come up with the best, and the most exhaustive, analysis of the San Francisco Mayoral race. He's too hard on everyone involved but he's right on the important stuff.
It is, in essence, he voices the complaint you hear in most part of town: Why doesn't this city have better politicians? What's the matter with San Francisco that the people who seems to care the most -- or give the most time -- to its civic life are a bunch of goof-balls? Or, if they're not goofballs, they come off looking silly or insincere because they forget the nicities: showing up on time, being considerate or even polite.
There's no easy answer. Term limits play a role, certainly. So do the cynical machinations of the Brown-Burton machine. It's dying but nothing's sprung up to take its place. That's part of the reason for all the confusion we see. District elections, which keep the Board of Supervisors tied to specific neighborhood agendas (in a city of 700,000 and shrinking, that's insane) are also a factor.
So we've got a race that, so far, features little more than petty back-biting and silly prank-oriented gamesmanship. Some mayoral debates are more like dis-fests than actual debates which makes anyone who listens to the rhetoric of the city's inclusive, progressive politics -- a rhetoric everyone seems to embrace -- ring more and more hollow.
In his last campaign for mayor as a write-in candidate, San Francisco Supervisor TOM AMMIANO forced a run-off against Mayor Willie Brown.
It was an upset that surprised a number of long-time San Francisco pols and rattled the city's business community. Ammiano's current race -- in which he has support from labor, the city's gay community and many of those in the liberal coalition that almost captured the mayor's office in 1999 -- is an attempt to turn that near victory in to a solid win. Ammiano was interviewed at his campaign headquarters on Mission Street.
What's this race about for you as a mayoral candidate?
I think it's about a recognition of populist issues. I think there's been a tradition in the mayor's race in San Francisco that the mayor is someone, man or woman, who has more of a -- for lack or better word -- a downtown orientation not so much a neighborhood orientation. So I suppose you could say there's are some class issues involved.
I think there is an issue about gay/straight here. I don't think it's necessarily a pervasive or negative thing. After so many years of being in San Francisco, the gay community actually has one or two candidates for the mayor's office that are credentialed and certainly experienced enough. Some people are going to be challenged by that.
So class issues, orientation issues. But also, the momentum toward more accountability with the district elections. Is that going to be sustained? Is that going to be recognized? Should the mayor have total power of appointments, things like that, or should it be shared?
Continue reading "They Might be Mayors: Tom Ammiano" »
Former San Francisco Supervisor ANGELA ALIOTO's very name is enough to call up memories of a city led and run by one of its best-known mayors, Joe Alioto.
His only daughter, Angela Alioto, is clearly trying in her run for the office once held by her father to capture the coalition he once described as "a kind of New Deal coalition of labor and minorities, plus flag-waving Italians." She has backing from many of the city's politically powerful labor unions. Angela Alioto served on the San Francisco board of supervisors from 1988 to 1997 and was interviewed in her campaign headquarters on Howard Street.
What's this mayor's race about for you as a candidate?
The future of the city as far as the present crisis that it's in, from homelessness to affordable housing to education, which is a departmental nightmare and so is homelessness and health and housing. It is in my opinion going to get so much worse if someone doesn't really care.
Continue reading "They Might be Mayors:Angela Alioto" »
The eight people in the San Francisco mayor's race may well be engaged in one of the nastiest political races the city has ever seen. And it won't be over for a while.
Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez, Supervisor Tom Ammiano, former Supervisor Angela Alioto and city Treasurer Susan Leal are running in a sort Lefty primary, each hoping to get enough votes to face front-runner Supervisor Gavin Newsom in a December run-off. Former Chief Tony Ribera, the Republican candidate for the office, and Libertarian businessman Michael Denny, are running to Newsom's right, also hoping to face him in a run-off.
Meeting almost nightly in political forums, the eight men and women who would like to lead the city have answered detailed questions on neighborhood renovations projects, youth programs, schools and education as well as homelessness, housing and the city's economic recover plan. But they haven't answered many questions about their vision for the city. That's an admittedly hard thing to define, ever for the most articulate. But in a world where anything can -- and often does -- happen, it's often better to know what candidates are thinking as they make their priorities and set their goals.
Today starts a series of interviews conducted with seven of the eight candidates. Despite repeated efforts to talk with him, Green Party candidate Gonzalez was not available because, according to his staff, of time constraints. Candidates were asked the same questions in the same order; their responses were taped and transcribed (with some editing for clarity and length) and are appearing, starting with Angelo Alioto, in alphabetical order.
Total Recall might be the subject of a NYTimes magazine cover story and the main focus of most of the state’s daily newspaper editorials but in San Francisco, the big drama – one that promises a few more twists and turns – is between School Superintendent Arelene Ackerman and her board.
Ackerman hinted last week, according to The Chron that she might be moving on. And there was some rejoicing among mayoral candidates when word circulated that Ackerman was holding a press conference. The conclusion – the wrong one – was that she was publicly resigning that the neighborhood schools proponents had “won.” But Ackerman called a press conference and with Mayor Willie Brown by her side, said no way, she wasn’t going anywhere. Good for her.
The three board members who are holding the door wide for Ackerman, all but pushing her out, are assumed to be in cahoots with Green Party mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez, president of the board of Supervisors. Even if they’re not – and some are claiming they were quoted by The Chron out of context -- they’re giving the whole gang a bad name.
Only San Francisco’s sometime parochial politicians would automatically assume someone would publicly resign -- giving them gloating rights. But that assumption speaks volumes. The kind of enemies Ackerman has show she may well be on the right path to cleaning up city schools. Certainly her calling the law in to investigate the mismanagement and possible fraud she’s found is an step in the right direction. That, of course, doesn’t mean Ackerman's always right. The fight over neighborhood schools -- keeping kids in near home for schooling despite the racial balance at those schools -- is a delicate one. It needs a savvy political nose and sense of the class and racial conflicts in play within and with San Francisco’s Chinese community. Ackerman may not have that sensibility. Not yet anyway.
Her fight with the board members is a multi-faceted fight, one that’s undoubtedly complicated by race. But there’s another factor here: Ackerman is also from a far away place, where they do things very differently. That’s right. She’s from the East Coast where being “autocratic” is considered part of being a boss. In San Francisco, being autocratic is often the same as knowing what you want and being straightforward in how you go about getting it. And you know what? San Francisco could use a little more of that, particularly when it comes to city politics.
The rumors about Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez' attempt to with school board chief Arlene Ackerman make today's Chron. A the same time Gonzalez is talking about changing voting rules so non-citizens can vote in school board elections.
Gonzalez, who grew up in McAllen, Tex., knows what he's talking about with the schools issue although it's unclear, in a city of renters in a state ruled by Prop 13, if the taxation/representation argument his building will fly. His attempt to change sentiments toward first-generation immigrants and their children is admirable.
But he could be heading for a classic 'be careful what you wish for' moment. New arrivals to this country are a bit more conservative about their children's education than Lefties like to think. They want them to go to school, learn stuff and go to college and so they can do better. That is, after all, what immigrating is all about. So, a school board that spends its time debating the merits of the war on Iraq or the propriety of guns on campuses, might find itself in for a rather rude surprise come election time.
The pettiness associated with San Francisco's mayoral forum invitations is getting some long-overdue attention.
It seems the good folks at the University of San Francisco don't want to invite one of their own -- faculty member Tony Ribera -- to their debate this evening. Organizers say it's because former SF Police Cheif Ribera -- a Republican in a city of die hard Democrats --isn't doing well enough in the polls to consider him a viable candidate.
TheEx's editors blow that reasoning out of the water, as they should. Are there any polls not commissioned by a candidate or campaigns? And don't they always show the person writing the check does better than the other guy thinks?
The brohaha over Ribera is particularly silly since he's one of the few candidates who has something different to say. It's often hard to tell, what with all the hissing and booing from the audience but debate are about the exchange of ideas, not insults. (Note to Angela Alioto in particular: your supporters hiss their disfavor, then hoot in what sounds like appreciation for Gavin Newsom. It's confusing. And irritating. Make them stop).
Ribera may have no hope of winning -- that's undoubtedly why he doesn't get booed and hissed as Newsom does -- but he's got a following and he's got legitimate backing from a national political party. What more do you want?
For a few months, there's been some quiet talk that Mayoral candidate and Supervisor Gavin Newsom has been "unofficially" endorsing Bill Fazio's campaign for San Francisco District Attorney.
Fazio is running on a pretty standard "law and order" platform, promising to prosecute more offenders that current D.A. Terry Hallinan.
Last night, at the Mission Merchant's candidate forum, Newsom offered a hint that adds substance to the Fazio rumors. "It's not just our lax prosecution…" Newsom said in response to a question about drug dealing in the Mission's parks and playgrounds.
Lax prosecution? Hmmmmmm. Who could he be talking about?
Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons, books that show an obsession with the Vatican, Catholic Church and symbolism, might want to take a look at the San Francisco election.
Here's betting that every one of the six leading contenders -- Alioto, Ammiano, Leal, Newsom, Ribera and Gonzalez -- could say a "Hail Mary" in 10 seconds flat, without breathing.
It's a cabal of Catholics! Right here. In the city of St. Francis!
Tom Ammiano is profiled in today's Chron in a piece that talks about his move to the center as campaign tactic.
Meanwhile, The Ex engages in a little flat-out Gavin Newsom bashing as Adriel Hampton channels the Three Dot King, Herb Caen.
Hampton's caught a common occurrence. When Newsom doesn't show -- or leaves early -- at a community mayoral forum his competitors lay the insults and little jabs on one after the other. When he's there, they couldn't be nicer to him.
"You've noticed that, too?" asks Libertarian candidate Michael Denny, the only guy who is -- proudly -- running to Newsom's right.
It's odd and, frankly, it makes the non-Newsom Left, seem less high-minded than they'd like to think. Of course, community mayoral forums are catch-as-catch-can affairs. There's no getting around that. Both the campaigns and community organizations rely almost entirely on volunteers. But it would be nice if candidates could stop arguing about who's showing up, who was invited, who was left out and whether it was deliberate, and focus on what most of the people in their audience want to hear about, their plans, their hopes and their goals for the city. It might even boost attendance at these things.
Part of the problem is that there are simply too many forums for all the candidates to make all the time. This hurts every one and it creates a side show -- did he show? was she invited? wat was the scheduling conflict? -- that detracts from what should be the business at hand.
"It would be much better to have two or three really solid mayoral discussions," says Denny.
That live wire, Joe Fire, might have been on to something last week when he talked about the invitation process that sometimes characterizes San Francisco's Mayoral Forums.
Fire accused the Buena Vista Neighborhood Association of inviting only candidates it wanted to hear, not those who might disagree with its politics. There was the usual vehement denials exchanged but last night's meeting of the Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods seems like a good example of the trend continuing.
The forum, opened with candidates Angela Alioto, Tony Ribera and Jim Reid -- in other words no one in elected office in San Francisco and no one positioned by any poll to win. Treasurer Susan Leal sat in for a bit but left early for other engagements but Supervisors Tom Ammiano, Matt Gonzalez and Gavin Newsom -- having spent the day duking it out over 'Care Not Cash' -- didn't show.
The three of them were said to be across the street at a Board of Supervisors meeting that having considered a city-wide controversy, the homeless, had moved onto to a neighborhood hot potato, the tunnels in Golden Gate Park.
One candidate's spokesman suggested that the supe's meeting agenda had been set so Gonzalez could avoid the Neighborhood coalition's forum. Maybe. But unlikely. Another race insider says maybe there's a very simple explanation: The Neighborhood Coalition didn't send invites to everyone. "As far as we can tell, we weren't formally invited,'' he said.
Sunday's Chron took a look at the city's fledgling Behavioral Health Court, a program set up to counsel mentally ill people who are arrested, not by sending them to jail but by referring them to a series of assistance programs.
The court, described by the judge as social work, pure and simple, is a start getting some of the city's saddest and toughest cases off the streets. This is a fine example of intelligent and humane liberalism that San Francisco's homeless advocate and politicians should embrace.
Ken Garcia does a fine job updating the mayor's race here in San Francisco, poking as much fun at the candidates as he can in the space allowed.
Between the bike race photos in every section of the paper, The Chron also profiles city Treasurer and Mayoral hopeful Susan Leal who seems to spend a lot of time looking for her lipstick (Bobbi Brown, no shade listed). The photo is a very nice one for her mom's scrapbook.
The Chron ignores an interesting question, however. With support from movers and shakers like finanicer Warren Hellman and schmoozer Cissie Swig, why isn't Leal doing a little better on the street? Party it's the Treasurer's job which is not exactly an out there gig people find fascinating. But, others suggest it's because Leal's partner, Susan Mayer Hirsch, a dynamic, well-connected and smart fundraiser, helps Leal behind the scenes. Hirsch can do a lot, they say, but she can't do it all.
This item in the Sentinel brings to mind Vice President Garner's comments about the vice presidency, the nation's number two job, "not being worth a bucket of warm spit."
The Green Party endorses Mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez and disses his competitor. "We are ecstatic although not surprised, and grateful to Tom Ammiano for the substantive dialogue he brought to the debate," Gonzalez campaign advisor Ross Mirkarimi told the Sentinel.
The Chron has devoted two days and many column inches to a set of stories on the city's homeless problem. The paper sums up the politics and history of homelessness in San Francisco, providing some useful history and a look at the differences in the proposals put forward by the eight folks running for mayor this year.
But, as is often the case, the stories are a little fuzzy on the details, the kind of details that make it easier for readers to decide what proposals might offer the best solution. There's a lot of heat around this issue. There's still not a lot of light.
So for the editor once known as Mr. Stone, here's a handy-dandy story budget. One for every day of the week.
1)When someone turns to the city for assistance, what happens? Do they get a bed in a shelter? A room in a residence hotel? A check? Where do they go? How do they get there? How much do these programs cost?
Continue reading "Why The Chron Drives People Crazy, Part II" »
Matt Smith's goofy column on Green Party Mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez's potential as a political stud was a pretty funny demonstration of how a married guy sees San Francisco's singles' scene.
Particularly since, well, since Gonzalez live and in person is uh, well, he's not exactly rude. Let's just say he's personally uninspiring for those of us who are actually in the single, straight and female category cited by Smith as an important voting block.
But the sanctimonious letters that Gonzalez's supporters have written to the SFWeekly are truly hysterical. Gonzalez' outraged supporters are furious to find that Smith considers them attractive. They assume he thinks they're stupid. Smith, no dummy, made no such claim.
Remember that old saw about opening your mouth and confirming your moron potential? Someone should tell the babes over at Gonzalez HQ to clam up. We have all the evidence we need right now that, while they may be hotties, they ain't rocket scientists.
Sen. John Burton is challenging Prop M, the 'aggressive panhandling' measure that Mayoral front-runner Gavin Newsom is championing as part of his bid for office.
The smarty pants response here is to say it's a family quarrel and that Burton, who is reaching the end of his legislative political career, is just trying to keep his name in the papers.
But that's not entirely fair. Burton is a classic Liberal. And he's proud of it. There aren't enough of his sort around any more; politically savvy, not always politically correct Democrats who really do want to fight for the little guy.
It's something that many of those who like to pat themselves on the back for their "progressive" politics have forgotten. Anyone who thinks about why Prop M is necessary -- it's not, Burton's right about that -- does so with a heavy heart. But this small city has a big problem. Too many people are living and dying on its streets.
But the measure, like its forerunner, Care Not Cash, has support because the San Francisco City Hall isn't doing its job. And many people, particularly the city's young and wealthy, feel comfortable allying themselves with business interests as a way to fix what's wrong.
In that respect, Burton is fighting an uphill battle. The city's political ground is shifting. But at least Burton's fighting. Unlike the seven people running for Mayor against Newsom, he does it in a smart and provocative manner. The signs Burton posted around town this Spring and Summer -- "St. Francis was a beggar on the streets of Assisi" was my favorite -- were a nice way to remind the city's more fortunate of their good luck. Ideally, that's what a 'progressive' government does.
District 5's civic organizations -- 5together -- had their mayoral forum Wednesday night and it wasn't much of a debate.
Pretty much everyone who made the trek to Cole Auditorium at UCSF -- Newsom skipped out -- agreed on the need for more affordable housing, the need for more mass transit, the need for stronger, better schools, the preservation of small businesses, and reform of city hall's bloated bureaucracy and budget…blah blah blah.
It was hard to avoid the conclusion that success is what's killing San Francisco's Left. This was a group of well-off white folks talking and listening with other well-off white folks all under the expert guidance of KPFA's Michael Krasney.
We're not perfect Dept.: Krasney's at KQED.
Even Republican Tony Ribera -- who happily endorsed "Transit First" -- was with the program. (A Republican? Mass transit? Quick! Call Karl Rove!). Ribera even had nice things to say about a bureaucrat, MUNI Chief Michael Burns.
It's not that the candidates aren't interesting or interested. It's just that the biggest criticism they have of Newsom -- who's said many of the same things they all said -- is that he's rich. And well, uh, uh, uh, so?
Writing in The Ex, Samson Wong, serves up a little bit of electioneering history for those of you just getting interested in San Francisco politics.
Green Party Mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez likes being a spoiler -- the guy who comes in at the last minute and makes a strong showing -- because it's worked for him in the past, Wong says. The ploy gets Gonzalez media attention (that's G-O-N…) which boosts his name recognition which helps him with his next race. It's kinda like what Supervisor and Mayoral Candidate Tom Ammiano was hoping his last bid for the mayor's seat would do for his current campaign.
Wong ends with this prediction, one that's becoming very easy to make: "There is the increased likelihood that Alioto, Ammiano and Gonzalez will turn against one another to finish in second place," to face Newsom in the December run-off.
It turned into a story about the number of homeless deaths in San Francisco, but the speech mayoral hopeful Gavin Newsom has started delivering is a lot more impassioned than you'd expect. It's not the usual moaning and groaning about empty needles and used condoms (and there's plenty of that) and how he'll make it all go away.
Instead, he talks about compassion and caring and how the city has failed. It's an interesting tactic, one that works particularly well with skeptics who think that Newsom, who has so much corporate support that it's almost embarrassing, is balancing his political ambitions on the backs of the city's less fortunate. He talks past his audience to his critics.
At the City Club and again that evening before a group of doctors and other medical types on Russian Hill, Newsom talked about how little the city has done for its homeless, the effects that heroin addiction have on the San Francisco's street people and the need for reform. It's a smart tactic one that, in addition to showing how Newsom really feels on the issue, goes a lot way to getting him out from under his most serious criticism: that he is too young, too green and not professional enough to run the city.
The Chron says voters are confused. That could be true. But listening to all the talk about all the polls and you get the feeling that the people who are really confused are the ones who would like to be able to make definitive statements about what's going to happen.
They can't. Voters revenge. Sweet, isn't it?
Meanwhile, there's lots of confusion to go around at the local level. Not to mention bitchy squabbling.
The Sentinel has more on the story that won't die, despite everyone wanting it to, instant run-off voting and the Green Party. Oh, yeah, and Supervisor Aaron Peskin endorsed fellow Supervisor Tom Ammiano for mayor.
San Francisco's initiative banning aggressive panhandling kicks Thursday morning with a breakfast at the City Club. This is the second phase of Mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom's "Care Not Cash" proposal from last year. Over the weekend, The Chron's Rachel Gordon rounded up the implications and reasons for the initiative and had some smart things to say about why ballot measures like this one are becoming so important.
Gordon talks about the money, how initiatives let supporters spend freely under different guises. But initiatives are a very good way to attract voters who might normally stay home to the polls. The city unions have the minimum wage measure, the business community has panhandling.
As Gordon points out, many of those helping fund the Committee to Stop Aggressive Panhandling are also Newsom backers. It's no secret that Newsom is the business community's candidate. And it's nothing to be ashamed of. San Francisco's younger and most recently arrived residents are, for the most part, a business-oriented bunch. But why oh why does the anti-panhandling breakfast have to come the morning after Newsom's "Meet Me At the Fairmont" fund raiser with its $250 minimum? This is the sort of stuff that Newsom opponents gobble up.
The Ex says that Republicans have opened an little campaign office in The Mission. The Ex seems surprised. It shouldn't be. How do you think Bevan Dufty got elected in the first place? Not exactly a flaming liberal, Mr. Dufty rounded up support from, among others, the city's more fiscally conservative residents, the same crowd that's cheering Newsom onto victory.
The more conservative tone that San Francisco politics are taking makes the fall-out among the city's left even more important, particularly for those who might run against them.
The Green Party, gathering to endorse a candidate, couldn't. In part, of course, because of the party's rules. Candidates need 75 percent of votes being cast to win endorsement and Matt Gonzalez's, the party's candidate on the Board of Supervisors, fell three votes short of getting the mayoral endorsement. Some other compromise attempts to back two candidates, Tom Ammiano being the other, also fell flat.
The Green Party dispute seems particularly bitter with members still nursing their wounds over the instant run-off voting controversy, saying that Gonzalez didn't support the idea with the fervor that he should have. Well, Gonzalez has been throwing his weight around plenty this past few weeks so maybe it's a good idea that he stayed out of the recent spat at the city's elections commission. But the public fighting that's going on between the city's more liberal contingents is moving past amusing.
And it's not just the city's Democrats who are taking a wait-and-see attitude toward the November election. More and more this is looking like a nasty race, on many sides.
It's August. And the SFWeekly's normally sane Matt Smith has lost his mind. Unlike columnists in other parts of the nation, he can't blame it on the heat, the humidity or the black-outs.
"The Chick Factor" says the headline on Smith's column about mayoral candidate and board of supervisors president Matt Gonzalez. The subhead: "Socialist stud boy Matt Gonzalez may have tapped into an overlooked segment of S.F. voters: single, straight women."
Smith went to the Gonzalez organizing rally, toting his baby daughter (his baby daughter?) and observed a number of good-looking single women in the room who "lit up, talked enthusiastically, and gestured emphatically as if on a first date," when approached by the candidate.
Umm, Matt, the shrinks have word for this. It's called "projecting… " that's when you well, you see things that you would like to happen to you, happen to someone else. Someone who doesn't have a kid, Matt.
Instant Run-off Voting is the little San Francisco story that won't go away. That's because it's part of a the larger drama -- we promised you yesterday -- called The Left Eats Itself.
Why is IRV, as the insiders like to call it, so important? it represents a good way, maybe the only way, for anyone running against front-runner Gavin Newsom to claim the mayor's seat. Under the run-off system, candidates who do not secure majorities see their votes shifted to the next highest vote-getter until one candidate hits 50 percent and is declared a winner.
Here's a demonstration, using the numbers from the San Francisco Democratic Central Committee's vote last week. Newsom got 10 votes from the party faithful. Ammiano, 9, Alioto, 4 and Leal, 2. The instant run-off system would add Leal's 2 votes to Alioto's 4, giving Alioto six votes. That's not a majority so the addition would continue, adding Alioto's 4 votes to Ammiano's 9. Nine and 6 is 15 votes for Ammiano, more than Newsom's 10. Ammiano wins and become mayor.
Tonight, in what promises to be one very nasty meeting -- they called the cops last time around -- the city elections commission is set to debate the future of its chairman, Alix Rosenthal. Rosenthal doesn't think the city should institute the voter-approved instant run-off plan in this fall election. It isn't ready and a number of state and city officials have reasoned that the stakes -- political and otherwise -- of a bungled election are too high to mess with a new, untried system.
Voters approved the scheme in a ballot initiative last year, and various members of the city's Board of Supervisors along with pretty much every mayoral candidates not named Newsom, have been calling for the run-off scheme to be put in place in November. There are lawsuits, of course. But to keep the pressure on, various candidates for mayor-- three of whom have delegates on the commission-- have been urging that Rosenthal be voted out. That would undo the 3-3 deadlock that's keeping the run-off scheme from becoming reality.
San Francisco's latest political drama, "The Left Eats Itself" is off to a fine start. There are plots and subplots aplenty. We'll get to them all, never fear. There's lots of time between now and November.
But to get in the proper frame of mind, consider these "campaign posters" being offered on Craigslist. Supporting Green Party candidate, one of four people running to the left of poll leader Gavin Newsom is compared to…
Shooting yourself in the head...
Shooting yourself in the head and putting a razor blade in your eye...
Or being just plain dumb.
"Artists and activists are coming together to support Matt Gonzalez for Mayor of San Francisco," says the smarty-pants who is offering the "campaign posters." "You can do your part by downloading these artistic posters and putting them in your window."
With all the fuss being made over Total Recall, city politicians up and down the state are despairing. No one cares a wit about them.
In San Francisco, run by Democrats, that's even more true. So the city's pols are focusing their attention on the city's December run-off. With November turn-out expected to be low because of the recall (What! Vote again?) San Francisco pols figure votes will be split between the six people currently expected to be on the ballot.
That explains why the SF Democratic Central Committee has decided not to issue endorsements in either the mayor or the city attorney's race. They're going to wait and see.
Gavin Newsom, the front-runner in the polls, got 10 votes from the committee when it met earlier this week. But seven committee members voted not to endorse anyone. Tom Ammiano got 9 votes, Susan Leal, 2, and Angela Alioto, 4.
Do the math: take the seven "blanks" and add them to any announced candidate. Funny thing, you get a number close to (Leal with 9) or greater than (Ammiano at 16, Alioto 13) that Newsom's total. This will change, of course, and the numbers, like all early numbers are very fluid.
But the no-decision decision is a good indication of just how tense things are getting in city politics. If anyone drops out, Newsom could be in for a real fight and not just with Matt Gonzalez.
The Looking Glass that is often San Francisco politics gets curiouser and curiouser. Progressives, once a program of earnest government reform seem to be moving in the other direction.
The Chron says that Green Party Mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez is backing Police Chief Alex Fagan in his attempt to stay on the job. It's a temporary thing, says Gonzalez, until the city gets a new mayor and voters approve a ballot initiative that would put the Board of Supervisors in control of the police department.
Meanwhile, fellow Supervisor and Mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom, who represents city's moneyed and business interests, is saying Fagan's gotta go. He's joined in that by the Lefty coalition, Treasurer Susan Leal, and Supervisor Tom Ammiano and Angela Aliota. They say Fagan say that he shouldn't be in the job since he's tainted by his son's involvement in 'fajitagate.' Actually, he's tainted by the fact that it took 'fajitagate' to get young Alex Fagan Jr. kicked off the force despite his record of questionable behavior. The San Francisco Police Department does not, even on a good day, inspire confidence.
The Chron speculates that Gonzalez is endorsing Fagan is moving toward the center to pick up votes. Sounds right.
Which means a bunch of things. One, the mayor's race is changing fast. Gonzalez is squaring off against Newsom front and center. That adds currency to rumors that he's looking for a way to get Aliota or Ammiano off the ballot. Even clearer over the past few days: Gonzalez is going to be happy to win ugly. He's moving around to get votes -- any good pol does that -- but he's so obvious about it.
A snarky little rumor about San Francisco Supervisors Matt Gonzalez and Tom Ammiano is making its way around the city's political circles. It's not a particularly nice story.
Worried that Supervisor Gavin Newsom is a shoo-in for the mayor's race -- he leads in most polls -- Gonzalez has entered with the hopes of forcing Ammiano out. Young, articulate and a wheeler-dealer, Gonzalez, a Green Party candidate in the mayor's race, currently president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, seems to think he can take Newsom in the run-off. Lucky San Franciscans get to vote three times between now and the end of the year. Think of it as the thrill of Democracy.
Gonzalez might be right about his potential to draw votes one-on-one against Newsom. But the way he's said to be setting up for the contest is not the clean green politics that's usually associated with the Left. It's old-style machine politics.
Continue reading "A Mean Green Fighting Machine" »
This month's award for really crummy political timing goes to SF Supervisor Matt Gonzalez. The Green Party Supe filed as a mayorial candidate -- oh, yeah, that other electon -- on Friday evening, just before the filing deadline for the race which goes off, as regularly scheduled, in November. If there are enough voters.
It's going to be hard enough for anyone in SF to talk above the noise being made at the state level so it's hard to tell if Gonzalez is serious. He said Friday that his campaign organization was still gearing up.
The Chron gamely provided a handy run-down of the candidates Saturday morning.
With three candidates on the ballot, the city's left is promising a "united front" Oh yeah? That sounds like something out of the Cruz Bustamante play book.
The Recall has become a national news drama, er, story, so local politics will get short, short shrift until Oct. 7.
That makes it tougher than tough for local pols. For all the ink that's been spilt, no one's talked about the effect Total Recall is going to have on municipal elections. This fall, San Francisco has a mayor's race. Forgot all about it, eh?
Despite one of the easiest absentee voting systems in the world (they send you a form to fill out), California voters are famous for not voting. So there's a real danger that the regularly scheduled elections up and down the state will suffer because of the recall; it's barely a month before the regularly scheduled event. In San Francisco, that's going to mean that the usual handful of voters elect the mayor.
That could change, of course, if there's some intersection between the local races and the recall. San Francisco remains a Democrat's town but there are precious few Democrats who would be willing to stand next to Grey Davis right now. And even though the city is becoming increasingly conservative -- that's to say moderate -- no one's going to have the nerve to welcome Arnold until he wins.
San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly has calmed down lately. No political theatrics. No temper tantrums.
But, don't worry, his fellow Supervisors are stepping into fill the 'can you believe it?' void.
Continue reading "Your Tax Dollars at Work" »
San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown says DiFi won't run but well, it's never a good idea to believe everything the mayor predicts. But he, as always, does a great job of spelling out the Dem's strategy for the recall on city Democrats' new website, SFPolitics.com
That's not the only reason this interview is worth reading: Make sure you read to the end and savor the shots Brown takes at friends and foes, particularly the Chron editor, formerly known as Mr. Stone.
Think about this: San Francisco has passed a budget. The state hasn't. And just in case you thought government and business had nothing to do with one another -- and there are plenty of you out there -- take a look at these three stores. One, on the state's falling bond rating. These days, it's junk. Two, California's trade offices are going to be closed. Given the amount of business California does with Asia alone, this can't be good news. It all adds up to this: Budget woes aren't just bad for people who hold elected office. They're bad for everybody.
San Francisco Supervisor Chis Daly had a big poltical win last week with passage of "Real Housing, Real Care," and the signing of measuring honoring the former flag of the nation of South Vietnam.
Daly was, it seems, the only Supe who knew what he was voting on when it came to the flag. But take a look at the quiet peacefulness of his win -- including a few subdued words of praise from the mayor -- on the homeless issue. Is Daly, long master of in-your-face protest politics, beginning to play insider's ball?
The Sunday Chron has a Q&A with Well Fargo CEO Dick Kovacevich, part of a surprisingly good series of interviews they've been conducting over the past few months. But unlike Doug Shorenstein, who sat down with the paper's busieness staff a few weeks, ago Kovacevich falls into a common trap -- they kind reporters set just to see what happens.
First of all, he clearly doesn't know what the Chron has said about him and his company. And he talks about politics -- specifically Assemblywoman Jackie Spier's privacy bill -- with the contempt that many in business like to use for situations they find intolerable or ineffecient. Mistakes both.
But Kovacevich does something that's truly puzzling, particularly since he's a banker. He talks about the creation of manufacturing jobs in the city's suburbs as evidence that California or San Francisco is becoming more business-friendly. This sounds a bit dated. Not that you want to bring back the outrages of the dot.com era but many of the services and products that are created in Silicon Valley -- San Francisco's biggest suburb -- make the city what it is today by employing -- and paying well -- lots of people who live in the city but work in the valley.
That's one of the reasons San Francisco is still seeing lots of nightclub/restaurant activity south of Market, in the Mission, Castro and Noe Valley neighborhoods. There's plenty of money left over from the Bubble; check out all those home renovation dumpsters on 23rd Street.
But over the past few months, things have started picking up down south. The Mercury News says some $2.5 billion flowed into Silicon Valley companies so far this year.
The Merc specifically cites Plaxo, an address book software company, that's plenty popular with the Geeks. Other up-and-comers: Music downloads (hey, Napster's back), spam filtering and on-line retail (eBay uber alles). Those aren't traditional manufacturing jobs, Mr. K. But they're jobs.
Kovacevich highlights of San Francisco's biggest political problems: The outright hostility that "old" San Francisco -- the city that still thinks of San Jose as a small sleepy farm town -- has toward the new influx of young, wealthy residents that is, slowly but almost inevitably, changing the city.
Editor's Note:This post originally appeared in The New Republic.
San Francisco's cool summer fog is giving way to the warm autumn days that residents quietly think of as their extended summer, and November's elections are already holding out the promise of the lefty silliness that has come to characterize the city's politics. In a half-serious taunt to the Bush administration, residents will be asked to vote on a ballot measure about whether the city should grow marijuana for residents who have their doctors' permission to take the drug.
San Francisco being what it is, the measure will pass. But elsewhere on the ballot are two other initiatives that, if successful, promise to turn the dope-growing initiative into the last gasp of a fine, if increasingly comic, tradition of liberal tolerance. One, dubbed "Care Not Cash," asks whether the city should slash cash payments to homeless residents. The second, hope, for "Home Ownership Program for Everyone," will loosen city regulations to make it easier to convert rental apartments into condos that occupants can buy. The two measures resonate with San Franciscans who don't understand why the city's homeless aren't better cared for; why the available housing is so expensive and run-down; and why trees aren't planted, streets aren't swept, and graffiti isn't removed.
San Francisco politics, in short, is moving to the right. It's partly the result of all those dot-this and e-that arrivistes who moved here searching for Internet gold. Some left empty-handed. But many, particularly those who did well, have stayed. And their bottom-line approach to life has given San Francisco's beleaguered business community a chance to regain some political muscle. The dot-commers have been joined--led, even--by San Francisco's largest block of motivated voters: the politically savvy gay community. More prosperous, safe, and wealthy than most residents, the community is now focused less on civil rights--all but guaranteed, legally and socially, in a host of ways--and more on civic rights and responsibilities. "We are such a rich city,'' says David Blumberg, a gay San Francisco-based venture capitalist and a member of Plan C, one of the city's fastest-growing civic organizations. "We can be efficient and very livable."
Passage of both initiatives would go a long way toward disabling, even crippling, two of San Francisco's largest and most powerful advocacy groups: homeless activists and tenants'-rights organizations. The two have worked happily in concert for years, forming a coalition that made for some of the strongest tenant laws and some of the kindest homeless policies in the nation. Evictions are hard to effect, rent increases are modest to minimal, and for years living on city streets has been considered a sacred right. It is exactly this ideology that the Internet newcomers--who hail from cities where the homeless are helped in spite of themselves and where renters live in recognition of landlords' authority--now deride as too idealistic and impractical. And they have defenders of the leftist status quo worried. "We are looking at that larger political picture," says Ted Gullicksen, a longtime activist with the San Francisco Tenants Union. "This is all about changing the face of San Francisco. It's an assault on progressive politics."
are Not Cash, the brainchild of aspiring mayoral candidate Supervisor Gavin Newsom, would kick just under 3,000 of the city's homeless residents off a payment system designed to supplement the shortcomings in federal welfare payments. Currently, those residents get about $350 per month in municipal cash payments, money that many claim is spent on drugs and alcohol, thus keeping people on the streets. If Care Not Cash is approved, these flat payments will be replaced by vouchers for city services.
The measure has been denounced by homeless advocates as needlessly cruel, and there are plenty of questions about how the city plans to administer the voucher program. But polls done by the city's business community show that it is steadily gaining ground. Surveys taken this summer gave Care Not Cash 56 percent of the vote; one late-July poll put that number at 74 percent. Plan C members like Blumberg are among the measure's strongest supporters, one reason that Care Not Cash is considered likely to pass. If it does, the almost classically handsome Newsom--a 34-year-old restaurant and nightclub owner and a longtime friend and protégé of the Getty family--will get a big boost for his 2003 mayoral bid. "This election is critical,'' Newsom said recently. "It's going to tell us where we're going."
till more important for San Francisco's political future--as well as for Newsom's mayoral campaign--will be the fate of HOPE. It's that measure, more than any other on the ballot, that threatens to effect real changes in what was once known as Baghdad by the Bay. It too is doing well in early polling among the city's business community, with a margin in favor of about two to one. HOPE aims to turn San Francisco's 770,000-odd residents, 70 percent of whom rent their homes, into home owners. Lefty activists like Gullicksen respond that, despite the "for everyone" in its acronym, HOPE won't enable poorer city residents to buy their apartments--and in a city where a 900-square-foot apartment sells for $450,000, they're probably right. Meanwhile, the measure's sponsor, Supervisor Tony Hall, promises that the initiative won't have any effect on the city's strong rent-control laws. He's probably right, too.
But HOPE isn't aimed at those struggling to make rent. It's for folks like Brian Mikes, a recently married 26-year-old who moved to San Francisco in 1998 to work for an online investment bank. "If I'm going to live here long-term, I want to own a house, my apartment," he says. As it stands, if Mikes decided to brave the city's housing market, he'd almost certainly be disappointed by the quality and cost of what he could find. And that's where HOPE comes in. Supporters don't like to talk about the direct effect that HOPE will have on the real estate market; but, being business people, they know the score. If enacted, HOPE would slowly put more housing on the market, and that should, in combination with the city's recent building boom, moderate or even lower purchase prices.
Yet HOPE's ultimate purpose goes far beyond real estate. By turning renters into home owners, supporters of the measure want also to turn them into "voters who are going to question where their tax dollars are going," says Nathan Namen, director of the San Francisco Committee on Jobs. "This will radically change San Francisco,'' agrees Hall. "It's a program that, in reality, will bring more responsible behavior to San Francisco.''
Plan C co-founder Mike Sullivan, a San Francisco attorney, embodies that new ethic of responsibility. Earnest and boyish, Sullivan doesn't seem like a zealot out to thwart the progressive cause. Despite his Silicon Valley experience, he all but squirms when Plan C is associated with anything dot-com. Sullivan and the other mostly gay business and property owners who populate Plan C are put off by the image of the rapacious, out-for-himself Internet entrepreneur that haunted the city's politics for much of the Internet boom. And the earnest, good-neighbor vibe that Plan C's organizers give off is very different. But, like the Internet entrepreneurs, Plan C's members are absolutely convinced that if more San Franciscans were like them--home owners--the city would be a better place to live. "It's important to San Francisco to provide home-ownership opportunities not just for the rich,'' says Sullivan. "If what you care about is a city where you can have vibrant institutions, a city that looks good, that functions well, I think you have to have a vibrant middle class to make that happen."
Adds Eric Mann, another Plan C board member, "I want to be able to walk my dog without tripping over homeless people." He's a liberal, he insists, but like many others living and working in San Francisco, he's fed up with City Hall's incompetence. "We used to say the problem is money,'' he says. But San Francisco is a wealthy city that has squandered its riches. "You can still have lofty goals, and you can still have social programs--let's just get rid of the waste."
t is certainly hard to argue that the city is using its tax dollars effectively today. Some estimate that San Francisco spends as much as $174 million per year on all aspects of its homeless problem (in a city with a roughly $5 billion annual budget); others say that, in truth, the city doesn't know how much it spends or how many people it helps. One Hayes Valley business owner, frustrated by the city's inability or refusal to help a homeless man living--and defecating--in a bus shelter near her home, stopped calling the police and city services for help and started demanding that the city remove the bus shelter. And it's not just Hayes Valley--a swath of downtown near City Hall that's delicately known as a neighborhood in transition. Homeless men wander the aisles of organic grocery stores and sleep in doorways in tony Russian Hill and swank Pacific Heights as well. City Hall's main plaza and most of the city's central boulevard, Market Street, are crowded night and day with homeless people begging, ranting, or simply suffering.
Namen thinks the city's newer residents and recent home buyers are more sensitive to such quality-of-life questions because they have a very good idea how much money has flowed through city government in the past few years: It came out of their wallets. Compared with other cities and towns they lived in before coming to San Francisco, the results are paltry. "Whether you're a home owner or not, you feel this just walking down the street,'' says Namen. "I think there are people who are smart enough to say there is enough money to take care of these problems. Other cities faced with the same problems have been able to deal with it. We have not. ... People are smart enough to start saying, `When is it enough?'" "Enough" may come this November 5.
Editor's Note:This story originally appeared in The Washington Post.
The ornate Julia Morgan Ballroom atop San Francisco's Merchant's Exchange Building has seen some lavish parties. The room, with its commanding views up and down the city's financial district, is typical of the heavy California Gothic style favored by the state's first generation of big spenders. It has floor-to-ceiling arched windows; a honeycomb ceiling of mahogany octagonals; carved paneling, and a creamy stone fireplace, tall and deep enough for a petite woman to stand in.
The Morgan ballroom was the site of Silicon Valley's cherished coming-of-age ritual, the company launch party, held by entrepreneurs to celebrate their new wealth. One bash held in the Morgan room in June 1997 marked the inauguration of Crossworlds Software, a firm more famous for advertisements featuring its attractive CEO, Katrina Garnett, in a low-cut dress than for any breathtaking technological innovation. All style, no software, critics said.
On May 28, the Morgan ballroom was the stage for another debut: the launch of the Bay Area Democrats (otherwise known as BAD -- and, yes, the acronym is intentional), a group started by young Internet millionaires (yes, some are still with us) to get the folks who changed the world with technology working on their next repair project, politics.
BAD is styling itself as something powerful and better than what's gone on before. "We all know that National Democrats need to admit to some structural problems," the Web site says in a pitch to people who believe that money and politics should not go hand in hand. "We have been burning the donor candle at both ends for the last 10 years. . . . " How does BAD propose to fix that? With a network, of course, of "ordinary citizens." Falling back on familiar lingo, the group's Web site talks about "long-term growth" in membership, and "the productivity of the money" it plans to raise, which "will be leveraged because of a wiser asset allocation." And it plans to do this in "new and cleaner waters" that will flow after the implementation of campaign finance reform.
It's a sales pitch that's worked before. Remember all the dot-this and e-that stock that sold like hotcakes because the Internet was going to make everything better, cheaper, faster, cooler, newer, somehow morally and intellectually superior? These people believed all that. It made many of them rich. It made them believe that they not only could change the world but that they are duty-bound to do so.
So they've come up with a slogan. "Politics without Cynicism, Issues Without Self-Interest," says the banner over an area set up for a band. "There are people in America who are afraid of change, afraid of learning, afraid of ideas," longtime Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee says as he introduces Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. "That's scary."
Talking about change is one thing. Bringing it about is another. Daschle and leading Senate Democrats came out in force to this event because, well, BAD members have some serious money.
That helps explain how these two radically different American subcultures -- California techies and button-down Washington pols -- have crossed paths. House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is air-kissing a line of mostly white, mostly male BAD donors. And while BAD's mission statement talks about "engaging in policy in a sincere way" and "insisting that national politicians spend time here discussing issues with our members," the Democratic senators -- Byron Dorgan (N.D.), Pat Leahy (Vt.), Harry Reid (Nev.) and Joe Lieberman (Conn.) -- deliver their usual stump speeches after arriving late.
Few people here realize the featured guests were busy dining in Palo Alto with deep-pocketed donors as part of a multi-state fundraising tour designed to scoop as much "soft money" as possible into party coffers before campaign finance reform kicks in. This stop was tacked on as an investment in the future, because it's just possible that BAD, with its belief in the power of computer, personal, social and business connections, might be on to something that could help turn a senator into a president.
Changing politics isn't the only challenge for BAD's organizers. Many people attending this $75-a-person bash are just longing for those halcyon nights when the Nasdaq was cruising toward 5,000, the sushi was free and the martinis unlimited.
"I never voted in my life," says Marc Lawrence. "My vote doesn't count." Tall and well-dressed, Lawrence is a former regional vice president for business development at ePocrates Inc., which developed Palm Pilot prescription software for doctors. Now he's running a $2 million family-financed "hedge" fund.
So why is he here? For the oldest reason in the world: to meet women. "These are just substitutes for dot-com parties except now you have to pay," he says. "It sucks."
You can't blame him for comparing this to other launch parties. The mahogany bar is open. There's good food, too. One menu offers an "heirloom root" platter and chocolate truffles. There's live music provided by the Flying Other Brothers, a Grateful Dead garage cover band started by McNamee. The Flying Other Brothers is a garage band the way a Ferrari is a car. McNamee has brought along his frequent playing partner, the Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart. He, too, has signed on to help BAD.
"My day job is investing in technology companies," says McNamee. "It's really hard to do that right now. But it is easy to play rock-and-roll for a crowd like you."
For political professionals, this deluxe style of politics is an eye-opener. "The fundraisers I go to don't have open bars," says Mike Farrah, an aide to a San Francisco supervisor. "Really?" says John Witchel, a BAD organizer and Gore supporter, who is holding a nearly drained martini glass. "The fundraisers I go to are all open bar. I don't think I'd go to one that wasn't."
BAD's job is to make politics seem cool so that this crowd will come back, and maybe even give real money to candidates and causes. "Like a lot of you, I was invited to my first political event a few months ago," Crissy Yancey, 29, tells the crowd. "I went to this event back in February. I had a great time. I met great people. I had interesting conversations."
E-mail can turn anyone with a send button into an effective direct-mail machine. But the Internet millionaires' passion for networking must survive the rigors and yes, the cynicism, of politics as usual.
The 600 or so young people, with their straight teeth, nice haircuts and casual fashions, think of themselves as well-meaning and open-minded. They regard political liberalism as virtuous. But just as no one asked about who ultimately footed the bill at the lavish dot-com parties, no one at the BAD event is asking many self-examining questions.
In fact, the people here do have interests -- special interests -- in Washington. They want laws to increase privacy online so people will be willing to conduct more financial transactions on the Internet. That fight pits Silicon Valley against direct marketers, financial services business, anyone who gets customers (or voters!) through junk mail. Taking on Hollywood, Silicon Valley techheads want to change intellectual property laws so that music, movies and video games can be passed around more easily. They also want to keep the right to issue stock options without listing them as business expenses. Many of the people in this room are spending cash that they made selling those options.
A cynic might even call this an agenda. But there aren't many cynics here.
"I'm a Jeffersonian Democrat," says Craig Newmark, founder of the online bulletin board craigslist.org and a portly bespectacled fixture on the San Francisco tech social scene. A Jeffersonian Democrat? "I'm a great fan of the work of Thomas Jefferson, apart from his hypocrisy," says Newmark. Hypocrisy? "He was a slaveholder."
Newmark may be a political newcomer, but many BAD organizers have been around politics for a while. The martini-drinking Witchel (who made millions at a design and consulting firm he helped start), E-Loan CEO and millionaire Chris Larsen, and former NetNoir CEO E. David Ellington were part of a group known as the Gore-Techs. The Gore-Techs went to Washington, shook lots of hands, wrote checks and got credit for being able to talk about something besides bits and bytes. They have experienced staff, too. Kelly Crawford-Friendly, who worked with her husband, Andrew, at the Clinton White House, is talking to a group of young women. Across the room, former Gore staffer Tim Newell, a private-meeting kind of guy, is squirming. "Some of the people in this room know you have elections," Newell says dryly as he surveys the crowd. A former Clinton economic aide, Tom Kalil , offers tips on talking to the press to former Federal Communications Commission staffer, Jamie Daves, Yancey's boyfriend.
Where is this mish-mash of earnestness, apathy, experience and money leading? That's the big mystery. So the pols play it safe and tell the BAD crowd what it wants to hear. "The Bay Area Democrats are the new breed of Democrats," Daschle tells the group. "It's no longer money. It's grass-roots organizing."
Easy to say when you've reportedly just raised $1 million over dinner. Besides, these people are well-educated, wealthy and, when they want to be, well-organized. That technology's-gonna-change-the-world sales pitch sounded naïve, too. But it had pretty spectacular results, didn't it?
"There's lot of money in that room," says former San Francisco supervisor Leslie Katz. She isn't dismissing BAD's organizers. Having done a stint at Petstore.com, Katz knows better. "You have a lot of talented and energetic people involved," she notes. "They're doers." And you get the feeling they're just getting started.
