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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.
