Whither the Live-Tweet: the soap bubble of history. And, this week, San Francisco figures to be especially soapy and bubbly. The Board of Supervisors will elect a board president on Jan. 8, a surreal, biyearly ritual (now documented in #real-time) of back-room politics on display in full view.
That's more dramatic than much of what constitutes a government meeting; observers piling into Board Chambers for November's election of the interim president were made to endure four hours and 41 minutes of sheer joy, including an interminable California Environmental Quality Act appeal of Telegraph Hill mega-condos. But, eventually, the knives came out.
They always do: Two years ago, a supervisor wept while delivering a bizarre non sequitur of a concession speech about the political bravery of Abraham Lincoln (!) after it became apparent she'd been tricked into making a kamikaze run for the presidential brass ring by a shrewder colleague.
But really, much of the coverage of board president elections is conducted with the mindset of fans attending hockey games just to see a brawl. Which is fine, until the subject is broached of what's at stake as the result of all this drama. Just what does it matter who the board president is?
Right now, not so much.
Mayor Ed Lee's most jingoistic partisans have long pushed the notion that, upon being installed as mayor of this city, the avuncular career bureaucrat was reconfigured into a wise and transcendent leader. If you want to evoke Shakespeare, think of it as a "Prince Hal moment"; if you want to evoke the Transformers, Lee was equipped with the Autobot Matrix.
Of course none of that's remotely true. But nobody even bothers mythologizing the transformative power of becoming board president. Being board president doesn't make you into a new person. Being board president makes you into a more powerful version of who you already are.
And if you're politically ambitious and/or have a clear-cut view of how things ought to be in this town, you can do a lot. And if you're a bit nasty, you can also do a lot to keep politicians who disagree with you from doing much at all.
That's because a board president's most crucial responsibility is to decide which supervisors sit on which committees — and, if desired, remove them at a moment's notice. And so, an aggressive board president can push his or her agenda with a high degree of impunity. He or she can introduce a measure on Tuesday, tell a committee chair — who, again, serves at the president's pleasure — that measure needs to be approved by the next week's full board meeting, and vote it into law one week after that.
Ideally, no one has to tell anyone anything. Everything would be intuitively understood.
As it would be if the board president shunted a piece of legislation penned by a political adversary to a committee chaired by a presidential ally. Where, conveniently, it's never scheduled for a hearing date. And, if the piqued supervisor threatens to yank the legislation back to the full board, the intransigent committee chair can, magically, acquiesce, and schedule a hearing — only to vote to table the matter. Indefinitely. And now putting that legislation back in front of the full board will require more votes.
Mission accomplished.
Mercurial board presidents of yore once stocked committees with supervisors who despised one another, just for the sheer joy of it. Dysfunctional government — anti-government, even — has its upside: Partisan games and brinksmanship are a lot more compelling than watching the system work as intended. Not everyone likes hockey, after all. But you'd be surprised how quickly a brawl pulls people out of their seats, and induces them to, instinctively, clench their fists. Now, though, the aggression isn't what it used to be. The game continues. But there's less blood on the ice.
Those wallowing in a bit of nostalgia for City Hall's "Payback Is a Bitch" era bemoan the reduction of the board presidency to a "ceremonial" position. But that's not quite true, either. Whether or not a board president is an assertive legislator, holding the position certainly looks good on the résumé . And it always has.
Back in the Pleistocene, when the job fell to the supervisor who received the most votes in a citywide election, it was a marker of popularity, viability, and a means to convince reticent allies to join your slate. In the era of district elections, the presidency is an opportunity for a supervisor to carve out a citywide profile. That helps for those harboring aspirations for higher office. That helps for those who'd like to push the city's agenda one way or the other (and fundraise, fundraise, fundraise from any and all interested parties).
Finding a way to be that all-important sixth vote on a crucial issue (and fundraising from any and all interested parties) fits in with the city of today. The vindictive tricks of an era in which the board was stocked with oversize personalities and engaged in overt warfare with the mayor do not.
That's not the way the game is played today. For the most part nobody's playing "games" today at all. And, regardless of the dramatic acrimony of November's vote or whatever may transpire this week, the word out of the mayor's office is that it "doesn't make a lick of difference" who our next board president is.
You may not like the direction this city is going. But we're getting there ever so much more efficiently than in the past.
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