Friday, Jul 4, 2008
In San Francisco, America's most liberal city, a gay progressive, a Green, a Clinton liberal and a labor favorite are battling to succeed legendary Mayor Willie Brown.
Oct 31, 2003 | Moments before San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown delivered his final State of the City address Tuesday morning in the glorious City Hall rotunda, its gilt-trimmed arches glinting in the autumn sunlight, tall, dark and beleaguered Supervisor Gavin Newsom swept in from a side entrance and eased his lanky, well-clothed frame into a front-row center seat. Lately it's looking like Newsom, who's been endorsed by Brown, will have a harder time sweeping into the mayor's office when his patron vacates it in January.
Despite Brown's backing and a $2.4 million war chest; despite sponsoring a homeless-aid reform ballot measure last year that won almost 60 percent of the vote and -- briefly -- made him look invincible; despite a sprawling, well-oiled field operation that spent more on payroll taxes last quarter than two leading candidates managed to raise in the same period; despite youth -- he's 36 -- money, good looks, some good ideas and the support of a wide swath of the city's rich and famous (and some regular folk too), Newsom is stuck in the polls at around 35 percent, leading the pack of mayoral wannabes by a sizable margin but nowhere near the 50 percent plus one he'd need to avoid a runoff. So next Tuesday's election is just a prequel to set up the real race, between Newsom and whoever finishes second. But now the December runoff, which used to seem like a formality on the way to Newsom's inaugural, is shaping up to be a fierce battle between the moderate Newsom -- who'd be a liberal in most cities but who's savaged as a right-winger here -- and whichever left-leaning candidate is still standing after Tuesday's election -- if the lefties haven't torn each another apart by then, that is.
"I've done three different polls and they had three different candidates coming in second," says veteran pollster David Binder, who's working for business groups and ballot initiative sponsors, not a mayoral campaign. "The race for second is clearly tightening." It's clear that nobody -- including Newsom -- has yet assured a majority of voters he or she can revitalize the city after the tech bust, solve its grim homeless crisis, shore up its flagging tourist trade or force its warring ethnic groups to get along. This is by far the nation's most liberal city, says Rich DeLeon, San Francisco State University urban politics expert, "but even on the left there's a strong strand of civic pride. People want this to be a city of greatness, and they want a mayor who can rev the city up again." So far, no candidate quite seems up to the challenge.
The struggle for second place, and for the right to wear the mantle of the left into battle with Newsom, is bad news for Supervisor Tom Ammiano, who ran an amazing last-minute write-in campaign against Brown in 1999, riding a wave of anger at dot-com gentrification -- remember young white tech lords evicting whole families from Mission District flats? -- getting roughly 49,000 votes and forcing the lordly incumbent into an unexpected runoff, which Brown won. Ammiano's been the left's presumptive standard-bearer ever since.
But then former Supervisor Angela Alioto jumped in and split labor, while Treasurer Susan Leal, a liberal Latina lesbian, challenged Ammiano's appeal as the gay candidate. And in August, on the eve of the mayoral campaign filing deadline, Ammiano backer, Board of Supervisors president and Green Party leader Matt Gonzalez stunned the city, and many of his friends, by diving into the race, insisting that while he'd endorsed Ammiano early, he'd come to the conclusion that the former teacher, stand-up comedian, gay rights leader and school board member simply couldn't beat Newsom. The first time I talked to Gonzalez about his decision, just after he declared, he told me it wasn't about Ammiano's politics. "I'm not running because Tom isn't progressive enough," said the 38-year-old Gonzalez, a good-looking, bass-playing, former public defender of Latino descent who's got a neo-Beat appeal. "I'm telling people, if you like Tom and you think he can win, vote for him."
That was then. A couple of weeks ago the Green leader sent out The Mailer That Shook the Mayor's Race, comparing himself, Ammiano and Newsom, and concluding that Ammiano, the dean of the local left, was closer to Newsom, its favorite whipping boy, than to Gonzalez. Ammiano allies went ballistic. "The left is split and angry," longtime gay activist Robert Haaland wrote in a bitter, widely circulated e-mail. "The mailer ... is just more evidence of that bloodbath that has occurred ... At the end of the day, the ends of Matt's campaign do not justify the means."
Now it's a nasty free-for-all. "I feel bad for Tom," says Angela Alioto. "I mean, when is Gonzalez going to start attacking Gavin Newsom? All he's done is bash Tom." If you believe Alioto feels bad for Ammiano, she's got a pretty red bridge to Marin she'd like to sell you. In recent weeks Alioto's sashayed past the brawling lefty men to win key endorsements that Ammiano took for granted, including from unions and the city's oldest alternative newspaper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian. (The Guardian endorsement was mainly the handiwork of publisher Bruce Brugmann, who overruled angry Ammiano and Gonzalez lovers on his staff, proving that freedom of even the alternative press belongs to those who own one.) According to many polls, Alioto and Gonzalez are now vying for the No. 2 spot, while the flagging Ammiano campaign, running out of money, fights to stay relevant, and Susan Leal, who still has a sizable war chest, fights to stay alive. (Republican former police chief Tony Ribera has no chance -- some think he's just setting up to run for supervisor on the west side of the city against board conservative Tony Hall -- nor do a handful of lesser-known candidates.)
As if that wasn't enough turmoil on the left, Gonzalez backer Supervisor Chris Daly threw a hand grenade into the race last week when, while serving as acting mayor during a Brown trip to Asia, he used his mostly ceremonial power to appoint two supporters to vacant posts on the city's powerful Public Utilities Commission, bypassing two Brown appointees who were awaiting swearing-in. If Gonzalez is the local left's cool theoretician, detached and intellectual, Daly is its mad bomber, a 31-year-old whose first act as supervisor was to get into a shouting match with the mayor (who's 38 years his senior) that almost turned physical. Daly's brazen PUC move was either a sign that the left is feeling its oats, or that chaos begets chaos, or maybe both, but one thing is clear: The reign of Mayor Brown is about to be over, and no one has a clue what comes next.
That's particularly true on the left, where the Gonzalez campaign raises the question of whether the Green Party is the left's future or its undoing. Critics say Gonzalez is playing trademark Green politics, savaging a progressive ally and, inadvertently, making way for someone more conservative. But his supporters insist he came along in the nick of time, to energize a coalition of the disaffected, breathe new life into the race and "stop the coronation of Gavin Newsom," in Gonzalez's words, in the coming election.
The scholar of the local left, Rich DeLeon, isn't so sure. "I have this creepy déjà vu feeling that it's 1991 all over again," DeLeon says. That's the last time the San Francisco left self-destructed, turning on its former champion, then-mayor Art Agnos, for the crime of compromising with the business community on development during an economic downturn and not stroking enough tender lefty ego in his contentious four years as mayor. Alioto ran against Agnos ("I have no regrets about that," she told me this week. "He closed a health clinic I cared about") but that time around the Bay Guardian (whose clip-and-take-to-the-polls voting guide delivers lots of lefty votes) endorsed former Sheriff Richard Hongisto. An out-of-his-league pro-business police chief, Frank Jordan, squeaked into the mayor's office while the lefties squabbled. (He squeaked out four years later, defeated by Willie Brown.) "I'm a Green Party member myself, and I admire Matt Gonzalez," says DeLeon. "But the question is did he move too soon, and risk dividing, not uniting, progressives?"
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