Few people besides Burton can pull off perpetual grumpiness as a form of charm, and he was in fine form that evening, whipping toward us with a devil's glare then grunting two lines about what he believes to be the inhumane nature of mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom's homelessness crackdown. "You know those veterans who sell flowers on Market Street? Under Newsom's panhandling law, they could be arrested," Burton said, and strode off.
Burton's comment, referring to an anti-panhandling measure sponsored by Newsom, pointed up a gaping, if silent, divide in San Francisco's Burton-Brown political machine. Gavin Newsom is the machine candidate, but machine boss Burton despises him, and word on the street is that the state Senate leader is quietly lending muscle to Newsom opponent Angela Alioto. And whispers downtown say that the city's myriad private, secret polls -- conducted by the Committee on Jobs, the Chamber of Commerce, other mayoral candidates, and assorted consultants -- posit a runoff between Newsom and Alioto.
"With them," Peskin said, referring to Burton and his fellow travelers, "it's in their blood: You just don't scapegoat the poor. Newsom's crossed the line. Burton's furious about 'Care Not Cash.'"
"Care Not Cash" is the Newsom-backed ballot initiative that was approved by voters last fall, and nullified by a Superior Court judge soon after; it would have shifted the small portion of the city's social services budget from cash payments for poor people to "in kind" aid to those people, in the form of housing and other amenities. The measure did not specify how this policy change would be enacted. Critics said that as written, the measure would have cost millions of extra dollars to implement. More to the point, while Newsom continues to emphasize the measure's purported goal of combating illegal drug use, supporters tout the measure as a way to help rid the city of poor and homeless people.
I feel Burton's disgust at Newsom's anti-poor-and-homeless bandwagon. If bashing the poor for professional gain were a type of bad dining manners, I'd liken it to shitting on the table. It's as craven a route to success as exists. And the front-running candidate in the race for mayor of San Francisco reveals no shame in taking it: Newsom preceded "Care Not Cash" with an effort to punish the homeless people who push shopping carts. And he followed it with an anti-panhandling measure.
But there's an aspect to the mayor's race more depressing still: Other candidates with a whisper's chance of winning seem to be in a frenzied contest to prove themselves completely unqualified for the job.
I've devoted columns to opposing the governor's recall. But there are quiet, secret moments when I bless it, because it's allowed me to avert my glance from the disheartening spectacle that is San Francisco mayoral politics.
A few weeks after my encounter with Burton I found myself, in defiance of all desire, squeezed into a chair at the Victoria Theatre, watching a mayoral debate. I asked my companions, a political organizer and a couple of local musicians, "What's at stake here?" My question provoked blank stares until one of the musicians wisely noted, "The mayor gets to pick all the official San Francisco days: Vidal Sassoon Day, San Francisco Giants Day, Robin Williams Day."
It's actually not true that nothing's at stake in San Francisco politics, though public discussion might lead one to believe so.
When attending San Francisco political events I sometimes imagine myself at a fashionable cocktail party in Argentina, where patter turns from polo ponies to Spanish architecture without once touching on the fact the country's falling apart. San Francisco is a rich, complex city, at the heart of a region hit extremely hard by the Bush recession. We desperately need a mayor and a Board of Supervisors seriously engaged in creating jobs, mastering fiscal issues, and providing housing, transportation, and education. Instead we have a political tribe consumed with games of trivia and either ignorant of, or uninterested in, what's really happening to the city.
The dot-com crash, the post-9/11 tourism drought, and a housing shortage two decades in the making have impoverished San Franciscans to the point where only one-fifth of the population can afford a median-priced home. Officials from other U.S. cities routinely troll the Bay Area, hoping to lure companies eastward with the bait of more plentiful, and thus cheaper, worker housing. And they're succeeding. Rent for a two-bedroom apartment is still in the $2,000 range here, and house prices hover around $700,000.
Unsurprisingly, homelessness remains acute; downtown sidewalks are carpeted with sleeping bags. Our tourism and restaurant industry is limping along after having laid off thousands of workers. After a 100-year run during which city fathers have repeatedly reinvented the San Francisco economy -- shifting the business critical mass from mining to shipping to warehouse/industrial to tourism to financial services to dot-com -- it's unclear whether San Francisco will pull another economic rabbit out of the hat.
This city, and region, is echoing with complaints:
"I just lost my job, and my health insurance is about to run out."
"My kids are having a hard time at their poorly run school."
"We can't find an affordable place to live."
Yet all the mayoral candidates seem barely aware that this dire situation exists -- all save Gavin Newsom.
Even among the eccentric fringe candidates San Francisco has been famous for, I've never seen anyone play the role of batty, pandering lunatic in a way quite so over the top as Angela Alioto does. The pandering is extreme, even for S.F. She's gained an unusual number of public-employee union endorsements thanks to a singular strategy: She's the only one who'll promise to fulfill the most outrageous union demands.
At the Victoria Theatre, Alioto attempted to distinguish herself from other, soft-on-drugs candidates by saying she'd round up dope dealers and send them to jail. Then she paused, and seemingly apropos of nothing, began shouting toward the balcony: "I meant drug dealers, not drug users; I meant drug dealers, not drug users."
"All the negative publicity Arianna Huffington has gotten for being smart and on-point," my musician companion commented, "Angela Alioto deserves for being crazy and off-point."
Susan Leal, bless her heart, has somehow managed to position herself as the "good manager" candidate in this year's mayoral race. The hilariousness of this notion is difficult to express outside a comedy nightclub. One example: While treasurer of the City and County of San Francisco, Leal served as a member of the board of directors of the quasi-private corporation known as SFO Enterprises Inc., a for-profit firm that airport managers ran after persuading the Board of Supervisors to approve.
While Leal was sitting in her dual fiscal-oversight roles, SFO Enterprises employees, who were also employees of the City and County of San Francisco, improperly diverted hundreds of thousands of city tax dollars to trips to Oman, Jamaica, Italy, France, and Honduras, in an effort to become titans in the business of privatizing Third World airports. The single success of the group involved designing complex and secretive maneuvers to siphon city tax dollars into a plan to privatize the airports of Honduras. The Honduran government is now uniformly outraged at the activities of the employees. Public officials there say they were victims of willful, San Francisco-sponsored fraud. And it happened under Leal's keen oversight.
When I asked Leal for documents in her possession about this scandal, she refused to provide them. When I asked her at a public meeting about her role in the debacle, she mischaracterized it as a form of friendly S.F.-sponsored foreign aid and downplayed her oversight role.
And now she's the "good manager" candidate, God help us all.
A couple of weeks ago, in an attempt to be funny, I wrote a column suggesting that Matt Gonzalez is an attractive candidate to single women voters. I still believe that he has qualities I outlined there: He listens well. He's an erudite conversationalist. He's a proponent of several good causes. But he'd also make a lousy mayor.
During the Victoria debate, in an answer to a question about city land use, he trotted out a "study" written up several years ago by a group calling itself the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. It said new office space was displacing garages and other businesses. "Industrial zones were being poached for office space," Gonzalez said, in what turned out to be one of his most passionate moments. As mayor he would not allow this to recur, we were led to believe.
San Francisco now hosts some 17 million square feet of vacant office space. If you add Silicon Valley, the figure becomes 100 million square feet. Analysts say this office glut will take at least a decade to refill. The city and its environs suffer a similar industrial-space surplus, and in San Francisco the oversupply is growing. If, during the next eight years, a San Francisco mayor were to devote time to the nonissue of preventing office space from poaching industrial space, he or she would be certifiable as insane.
Much has been made of Gonzalez having behaved as an adult during his short tenure at the Board of Supervisors. And he indeed showed greater willingness than other left politicians to confront city-employee unions during budget negotiations. But, perhaps because he sees board meetings as a version of wine 'n' Foucault all-nighters (a recent meeting went until 6 a.m. the next day), he's let the institution under his charge spin out of control. And he's allowed himself to become an agent of San Francisco's most noxious political elements. During an era when apartments are still so scarce that landlords feel at liberty to illegally discriminate against families with children, people like slow-growth attorney Sue Hestor and groups such as the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition continue to fight against new apartment buildings. And they receive help from "progressive coalition" politicians such as Gonzalez.
As others pandered to the Victoria Theatre crowd, Gavin Newsom actually discussed the city's real problems.
He described policies that would smooth approval for 25,000 new housing units. He spoke of the Planning Department's frustration over its lack of funds to complete implementation of its Better Neighborhoods Program, which would create dense, classicSan Francisco transit villages in different parts of the city. He talked about jobs -- he's the only candidate who routinely does this in a realistic way -- and he discussed transit. Andrew Sullivan, director of the transit-advocacy group Rescue Muni, told me last week that Newsom was a shoo-in for that group's mayoral endorsement.
"He's the only candidate who's been with us strongly on all the tough issues," Sullivan said.
Sullivan handed me a copy of his group's endorsement press release, which quoted Rescue Muni Vice Chairman Daniel Murphy saying Newsom "backed the dramatic changes we needed first, back when supporting real reform was a lonely endeavor."
But when I watch and hear Newsom, whose political, business, and personal fortunes are girded by the Getty oil wealth, I get the creeps. When I hear Newsom and his supporters scapegoat the poor, I get the same kind of oppressed feeling I got watching Arnold Schwarzenegger condescend to Arianna Huffington during the recall debate. Schwarzenegger seemed like the kind of guy who's used to picking on people he perceives as weaker than himself. So seems Newsom.
For me, the previous observations raise the question, "Whither Tom Ammiano?" It's hard to overstate the political energy his write-in campaign generated four years ago. I remember standing in packed halls amid shouts of "Run Tom Run" and feeling shivers in my chest. Since his 1999 loss, Ammiano has set to the task of becoming mayoral. When given the chance a year and a half ago to appoint Not-in-My-Back-Yard radicals to the Planning Commission, Ammiano instead appointed moderates with expertise in planning issues.
He's a supporter of a transfer tax on properties worth more than $1 million, good policy in my view. And he's advocated revising the city's dependence on the payroll tax, which discourages jobs. Perhaps as important, he's spent four years practicing talking to people he disagrees with. He returns phone calls faster than any S.F. politician.
But with Matt Gonzalez siphoning off the progressive-outrage vote, Ammiano's shaping up this year as an also-ran.
This strange, four-year political vanishing act has an interesting genesis: Despite his Rocky Balboalike performance in the 1999 race, Ammiano doesn't seem to terribly like the day-to-day realities of politics. He's a terrible fund-raiser; it pains him to spend time begging for favors, his allies say. This quality -- a good one from a moral point of view -- frustrates his admirers.
During Tom Ammiano's write-in campaign for mayor nearly four years ago, GraceAnn Walden became famous among Ammiano canvassers as the woman who brought delicious, gourmet food to headquarters. She's lost touch with Ammiano and his circle since then.
As we sat in North Beach, resuming discussion after Burton had taken his seat with Kimiko and a group of family friends, Walden said she'd work for Ammiano again in a heartbeat if called upon. But she hasn't heard from him.
I'm willing to bet there are other San Franciscans in a quandary similar to mine. Perhaps they've felt (or seen people they care about feel) the pain of San Francisco's dual housing and job shortages. And they've come to realize that progressive nonsense and bromides about the supposed war between "the neighborhoods" and "downtown" do nothing to address these problems. These voters have not lost their yen for social justice, and they're appalled at the idea of scapegoating the poor and homeless. They'd like to turn their lonely eyes to someone who's actually concerned about San Francisco's real problems, and at the same time to someone who's not running a mean, cynical mayoral campaign.
They'd be happy to hear from someone like Tom Ammiano. But sadly, they haven't, and neither have I.
