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Editors Notes

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Follow the money: downtown and the landlords are trying to take over the Board of Supervisors.

It’s not surprising. For the past eight years, the progressives have had enough of a solid majority on the board to prevent Mayor Gavin Newsom from putting some of his worst plans in place and to propose — and often implement — a much better agenda.

This board brought us the living wage ordinance and the universal health care program. This board is moving to solve the budget crisis with taxes on wealthy property owners and big law firms. This board isn’t about to approve an Eastern Neighborhoods Plan that turns the city entirely over to the developers. This board supports public power and renewable energy, and is willing to go up against Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

In fact, these past few years have marked the first time in a generation or more that downtown hasn’t controlled both the Mayor’s Office and the board. And the big boys don’t like it a bit.

They know they can’t defeat Sup. Ross Mirkarimi in District 5, and that they can’t stop a progressive candidate from winning in District 9. But they are going full bore, with huge bags of money, to try to get their toadies elected in Districts 1, 3, and 11. This is a real threat, folks. We could lose the board in November. We could lose rent control; that’s what the landlords want.

Sarah Phelan and Ben Hopfer have put together a beautiful chart in this issue that shows how all this is happening. Essentially, a few big players and their political action committees have amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars and are using that money to try to smear supervisorial candidates John Avalos, Eric Mar, and David Chiu. There are independent committees doing hit pieces. There is money pouring directly into the campaigns of downtown candidates. There’s PG&E money. It’s a sewer of nasty campaign cash, all aimed at making sure that three solid progressives don’t win.

The San Francisco Tenants Union has a study showing that big landlords, developers, and real estate lobbyists have poured more than $100,000 into a real estate slate made up of Sue Lee in D1, Joe Alioto in D2, and Ahsha Safai in D11. Almost $60,000 went to Alioto alone; that’s a third of his total money.

You can see where that money’s going if you live in the Excelsior, North Beach, or Richmond districts. It’s going for misleading, nasty hit pieces. One piece attacks Mar for supposedly preventing neighborhood kids from attending neighborhood schools (on the School Board, Mar, like every other sensible board member, has refused to allow the schools to be resegregated, which is what the "neighborhood schools" movement is talking about). Another attacks Avalos for being too close to Sup. Chris Daly (sure, he worked for Daly and they share some political views. But if you meet Avalos, you realize he and Daly have radically different temperaments).

All this is part of a larger downtown strategy. If this crew can’t win those three races in November, I guarantee they’ll try to amend or repeal district elections in the next two years. They’re well-funded, they’re serious, the stakes are high — and they have no problem fighting dirty.

If you live in Districts 1, 3, or 11, vote for Mar, Chiu, or Avalos. If you don’t, you can still help. Go to Avalos08.com, Ericmar.com, or votedavidchiu.org. Show up at 350 Rhode Island St. (enter on Kansas) any Mon.–Thurs. between 5:30 and 8:30 p.m. to phone bank or 10 a.m. Sat. and 11 a.m. Sun. to walk precincts. Give money or volunteer. As the old Depression-era slogan said. This is your city. Don’t let the big men take it away from you. *

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Way back in the 1980s, when Willie Brown was the untouchable speaker of the State Assembly and by all accounts the second most powerful politician in California, he came to an event at the San Francisco Press Club and gave a few dozen reporters a lesson in how to defeat a ballot measure. I’ll never forget it.

A group of reformers — some Republicans, many unhappy with Brown’s leadership — placed a measure before the voters that would have taken the power of drawing legislative districts away from the State Legislature and given it to a panel of retired judges. The Democratic leadership, which had used its redistricting power with shameless brilliance to create safe seats for Democrats, wanted to kill the proposition, but polls showed it passing by a good margin.

So Brown went to the notorious Los Angeles political consulting firm of Berman and D’Agostino (a.k.a. BAD Campaigns). "And they told me," Brown announced to the audience, "that any piece of legislation has something in it that can be used to upset and confuse the voters. You just have to find the fatal flaw."

So the BAD boys decided to run against the judges. Brown turned on a TV his aides had set up and showed the reporters a series of TV ads. None mentioned redistricting. They didn’t mention the legislature. They didn’t give you any idea what the ballot measure was about. Instead they featured a bunch of shadowy figures in black robes, raising their right hands and swearing to uphold party loyalty. "Judges belong in the courtroom, not the back room," an ominous-sounding voice-over said.

Thanks to the grossly misleading ads — and Brown’s ability to raise millions to blanket the airwaves with them — the redistricting plan was defeated. Brown was positively gleeful about it.

I keep thinking about that when I watch the cable-TV ads against Proposition H. The ads feature a series of people — Hunter Stern, who works for PG&E’s house union; John Hanley of the SF Firefighters Union; and Sup. Carmen Chu, who has become a wholly owned subsidiary of PG&E — talking about losing the right to vote on revenue bonds.

Nobody ever votes on revenue bonds. In California, we vote on general obligation bonds, which are backed by taxpayers. Revenue bonds are backed by a defined revenue stream; airports, ports, and other agencies issue them all the time.

And none of this has much to do with the substance of Prop. H, the Clean Energy Act, which sets renewable energy goals and calls for a study of the city’s energy options. Yes, Prop. H would allow the city to sell revenue bonds for new energy facilities — but the city issues revenue bonds (without a vote of the people) for all sorts of enterprise projects.

So what happened here is that Eric Jaye, PG&E’s political consultant, realized that the Clean Energy Act was polling well and looked for something he could use as a fatal flaw. Like the judge in the back room. He settled on the revenue bonds, manufactured a right that doesn’t exist, and pretended that Prop. H would take it away.

I’m sure Willie Brown — who collected $200,000 in legal fees from PG&E last year — is proud. *

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was walking down Ocean Avenue the other day, and I stopped for a second to chat with two volunteers who were handing out literature for John Avalos, the leading progressive candidate for supervisor in District 11. Since everyone wants to know about the Guardian endorsements, which don’t come out until next week, we got to talking about District 9, where three good candidates are contending to succeed Sup. Tom Ammiano, who is heading to Sacramento and the state Legislature.

One of the Avalos workers was supporting Eric Quezada. The other was supporting Mark Sanchez. "But we’re still friends," the Sanchez backer said.

The supervisorial races would be very different without ranked-choice voting.

There are people who like the relatively new system, which allows voters to choose three candidates in ranked order. There are people who think it’s too confusing, or leads to the wrong outcome. But I think I can say, as someone who lives in District 9 and is in the epicenter of that very heated campaign, that a race that offers voters a choice between Sanchez, Quezada, and David Campos — any of whom would make an excellent supervisor, and all of whom have different strengths to offer — wouldn’t be possible under a traditional electoral system.

Three progressive candidates in an old-fashioned election might very well split the left vote, and leave the door open for someone like Eva Royale — a much less appealing candidate who’s backed by the mayor. There would have been a huge power struggle early on, and some of the candidates would have been under immense pressure not to run, and their backers would be running around trying to cut the other folks off at the knees.

In this case, though, one of the three good guys is going to win — and it will probably be the one who gets the most second-place votes. So it’s in everyone’s interest not to go negative. If Sanchez, say, started to attack Quezada, the Quezada backers would get mad and leave Sanchez off their ballots — and that would hurt Sanchez when the second-place votes are counted.

So everyone has been pretty well behaved in D9; I’ve heard a few whispers here and there, and a few people have tossed off a few nasty comments, but overall the candidates and their supporters recognize that it’s better to stay positive.

So let me shift for a second to District 3.

There’s a real threat in Chinatown–North Beach, and his name is Joe Alioto. As the brother of Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, the nephew of former Sup. Angela Alioto, and the grandson of the late mayor Joe, Alioto has a legendary political name. He also has big downtown backing. And his politics are, if anything, to the right of his sister, who is one of the worst members of the current board.

Based on polls I’ve heard about, there are two candidates who have a chance to beat him — David Chiu and Denise McCarthy. Chiu, a member of the Small Business Commission, will almost certainly get hammered by downtown. McCarthy, who has run the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center for many years, may get hit, too. And this one, like D9, will come down to the second-place votes.

The last thing McCarthy and Chiu can afford is to attack each other. There’s been some of that going on, and it has to stop. If the progressives want to win District 3, Chiu and McCarthy have to realize that, like it or not, they are a team.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The Democrats, who control both houses of the state Legislature, lost badly on the state budget. They caved in, they sold out — and the worst part is, they had very little choice.

The state can’t keep running forever without a budget. I think we could have gone a little longer, and the Democrats could have turned up the public pressure a bit more, but in the end, it probably wouldn’t have mattered a bit. A small number of anti-tax Republicans from very conservative districts now control the entire state budget process.

And the worst part of that is, I’m not sure we can change that. So I’m thinking we should try something else.

Just about everybody knows by now that California is one of only three states that requires a two-thirds Legislative majority to approve a budget. The state Constitution also requires a two-thirds vote to raise taxes. So unless the Democrats can take control of both houses by a 67 percent majority, the GOP can exert a veto over any attempt to close a budget deficit with anything but deep, draconian cuts.

And the Republicans who hold sway aren’t the moderate types who might want to negotiate. One reason the Democrats control both the Assembly and the Senate is that they’ve been experts at drawing legislative lines, shoving large majorities of Republicans into a small number of districts. That means more Democrats in Sacramento — but it also means that many of the Republicans represent areas where there’s little chance a Democrat can challenge them — and where the voters will rebel against any representative who raises taxes.

"The Republicans have no incentive ever to raise taxes," Assemblymember Mark Leno explained to me recently. "They all fear that if they vote for a tax increase, they will lose their seats. And history shows that they are right."

That’s why the polls show an overwhelming percentage of Californians want better schools — but the state budget will take billions away from education, putting the next generation of Californians at risk.

So the buzz in more progressive circles in Sacramento is starting to focus on a constitutional reform that would eliminate the supermajority for budget approval. But that would only be meaningful if we also scrapped the two-thirds rule for new taxes — and that’s going to be a tough sell. I can see the money flowing by the tens of millions into a campaign to keep legislators from raising taxes. And given the fact that the public in general doesn’t trust the Legislature, it’s possible that battle will be lost.

Over and over, starting with Proposition 13 in 1978, California voters have approved anti-tax measures. I hope we can turn that tide around, but I think we also need a backup plan.

See, it doesn’t take a supermajority to give cities and counties the right to raise taxes on their own.

Leno, for example, has a bill that would allow cities to impose their own car taxes. In San Francisco, we’re talking big money, $50 million or so — enough, perhaps, to blunt the impact of the state’s cuts to public schools and public health. It might be easier to push for the passage of that sort of measure than for statewide Constitutional reform.

Let cities pass their own income taxes. Let counties impose oil-severance taxes. Amend Prop. 13 to allow higher taxes on commercial property.

Then maybe San Francisco and Berkeley and Los Angeles will wind up with better schools and parks and streets and hospitals, and Orange Country and the other anti-tax havens will see their public services collapse as the state keeps cutting. Maybe after a while they’ll get the point.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Let’s look at what happens when a mayor who lacks political courage decides to run for higher office.

On Wednesday, Sept. 3, shortly after returning from the Democratic National Convention, where he sought to impress the bigwigs, Gavin Newsom announced that a plan to issue municipal ID cards to undocumented immigrants would be put on hold.

Newsom had always supported the plan. His staff realized it made tremendous sense: when thousands of city residents aren’t eligible for drivers licenses or passports, and can’t prove their identity, then they become a permanent underclass. They can’t open bank accounts (and are preyed on by unscrupulous check-cashers). They fear even talking to the police, since they can’t provide ID on demand (and thus are reluctant to come forward as crime victims or witnesses). They can’t take books out of the public library or easily access the public health system.

A city ID card costs the taxpayers almost nothing and helps prevent crime. It’s part of a very sensible Sanctuary City program, based on a time-tested premise: if official San Francisco doesn’t intimidate or threaten to deport the city’s undocumented residents, those residents won’t live in fear of official San Francisco. That’s better for everyone, immigrants and citizens alike.

But over the past month or so, the San Francisco Chronicle has been running a crusade against the sanctuary laws, digging up a few immigrants who committed felonies and managed to avoid deportation and using those stories as fodder for a sensational assault on the policy.

There was a time, I think, when Newsom might have stood up to it. But now he wants to be governor, and the notion that the press (and his competition in both parties) might portray him as soft on crime and too friendly to immigrants has scared him silly.

So Newsom decided to tell the press that the ID program — a very small part of the overall sanctuary ordinance — would be suspended "until a thorough review has been completed to ensure that every aspect of the program complies with all applicable state and federal laws."

Never mind that the ID program, sponsored by Sup. Tom Ammiano, passed the Board of Supervisors 10-1. It’s city law; Newsom has no authority to suspend it. And the City Attorney’s Office has already done a thorough review to ensure that it’s legal — that happened when Ammiano first introduced the bill.

Never mind that Ammiano — who was infuriated by the mayor’s statement — has been meeting with Newsom’s staff and is convinced the plan will go into place this fall, pretty much as planned.

Never mind that the entire episode will just scare off potential applicants for the cards and undermine a program that the mayor’s advisors know makes good civic sense.

See, this isn’t about San Francisco anymore. It’s all about Sacramento. It’s about the Governor’s Office — which means it’s also about Orange County, and the Inland Empire, and all those more conservative places where voters don’t like immigrants and think San Francisco is too liberal. If Newsom wants to replace Arnold Schwarzenegger, he needs votes in those parts of the state — and instead of standing on principle and saying that he’s a politician you can trust even when you disagree with him, he’s pandering to the lowest common denominator.

The governor’s race is still two years away. This shit has only started.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I made my nine-year-old son sit down and watch Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. I told him this was history happening, that he would never forget this moment, that when I was his age the idea of a black man standing up and accepting the nomination of the Democratic Party to be president of the United States was even beyond the stuff of dreams.

His response: "Why was that?"

Yes, we are making progress. Michael’s public school class learns about Martin Luther King Jr., but the kids are struggling to comprehend how this country could once have forced black and white people to drink out of different water fountains. We are not a post-racist society by any means, but even in my most depressed and cynical moments, I know we are making progress.

And so we sat through a good speech, possibly a great speech, although I can’t go along with the bloggers and commentators who announced just a few minutes after it ended that it was the best convention speech anyone ever made. I kind of think Obama was better in 2004.

But it’s tough to do all the things his handlers said he needed to do. They think he hasn’t been aggressive enough in responding to John McCain’s attacks, so he spent far too much of his prime time talking about why the other guy is a chump. They worry about how popular McCain’s oil drilling proposal is, so he had to make a really dumb comment about safe nuclear energy, which is an oxymoron if ever there were one.

He had to lay out a specific plan so he wouldn’t sound vague.

It got better toward the end, when he started sounding like the inspirational leader he has the potential to be. And what struck me — and what will be a huge part of this campaign, under the surface — was this comment:

"Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us."

And this on negative campaigning:

"And you know what — it’s worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn’t work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it’s best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know."

I think one of the central questions of American policy today is going to be rectifying the profound difference between John F. Kennedy and the Avengers. Kennedy, of course, urged his generation to "ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country." The Avengers, Penelope Houston’s 1980 San Francisco punk band, put it another way: "Ask not what you do for your country / What’s your country been doin’ to you?"

I grew up with the second one. The government sent you to Vietnam and spied on you and locked you up for smoking pot, and we joked about the greatest lie in the world being, "I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you."

Denver last week was full of people too young for either slogan, and their energy is what fuels the Obama movement. Government working for us, not against us, lacks Kennedy’s rhetorical flourish, but the idea is right — and if Obama can make that a theme for the next eight years, he’ll be doing something truly revolutionary.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Suppose you don’t care about the war in Iraq. Suppose you have a secure job, and you aren’t in trouble with your mortgage, and don’t spend much time worrying about climate change. You’re thinking about No. 1, and that’s how you plan to vote.

Let me ask you a question:

Who’s more likely to cut your taxes — Barack Obama or John McCain?

If you figure that the heir to the Bush mantra — cut taxes, cut regulation, cut government programs (except for wars) — is the guy who will reduce your tax burden, try again.

I refer you to a very intelligent article by David Leonhardt in the Aug. 24 New York Times Magazine. Leonhardt is not a radical leftist, and he’s not an Obama campaign operative. He’s an economics columnist who has spent a lot of time trying to understand what both of the candidates are really proposing, and here’s his conclusion:

"Obama would not only cut taxes for most people more than McCain would. He would cut them more than Bill Clinton did and more than Hillary Clinton proposed doing."

Obama is offering big middle-class tax cuts, reductions that would actually put a lot more money in the pockets of the people who are most likely to need, and spend, that money. And he’d do it by raising taxes on the very tiny percentage of people who make very high incomes.

McCain loves to talk about tax cuts, but what he has in mind is cutting taxes on the 0.1 percent of earners who have average annual incomes of $9.1 million. Those people would pocket an additional $190,000 a year, which, frankly, would make absolutely no visible difference to their lives or lifestyles.

Obama would raise that group’s taxes by about $800,000 annually — which would also make absolutely no visible difference to their lives or lifestyles. As the Times notes, "The bulk of Obama’s tax increases on the wealthy — about $500,000 of that $800,000 — would simply take away Bush’s tax cuts. The remaining $300,000 wouldn’t nearly reverse their pretax income gains in recent years."

So when it comes to putting more money in your pockets — as the free-marketeers like to say, giving the middle class more cash to spend as it wants, thus stimuutf8g the economy — the Democrat is far, far ahead. And all he’s going to do is put the very rich back where they were a few years ago, which was, well, very rich.

This message isn’t getting out.

Part of the problem is that tax policy is complicated (Jesus, just look at all those numbers in the past few paragraphs); analyzing the competing tax plans can make my head hurt, and I love this stuff. Part of the problem is that the Obama campaign is leery of sounding too populist a note; class warfare makes people like me happy, but it doesn’t tend to win national elections. (Part of the problem is that a large percentage of middle-class Americans seriously believe they’ll be stinking rich someday, which is why lotteries make money.)

But the economy is gong to be the issue that decides this election, and the Democrats have to sell two messages. One, we’re better than the Republicans at managing economic policy (not hard, when you look at how the last GOP chief has handled things). And two, we know you’re hurting (Bill Clinton became president by feeling people’s pain) — and we’re going to make it better.

Do the math: under Obama, around 90 percent of the country would get an immediate raise. That might be worth mentioning in his acceptance speech.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Chronicle has come up with a new name for the broad spectrum of political leaders and activists who make up the San Francisco left. We’re now "ultra-liberals."

The term first appeared in Heather Knight’s Aug. 15 article on the changes in the local Democratic County Central Committee. Her lead sentence was almost breathtaking in its drama: The party, she wrote, "has veered dramatically to the left, telling voters that on Nov. 4 they should elect a raft of ultra-liberal supervisorial candidates, decriminalize prostitution, boot JROTC from public schools, embrace public power, and reject Mayor Gavin Newsom’s special court in the Tenderloin."

There’s no question that the progressives made significant advances in winning control of the DCCC in June. And I think it’s entirely fair — and a good thing — that the party has veered to the left. It’s "dramatic," though, only because for so many years the Democratic Party in one of the world’s most liberal cities wasn’t particularly liberal at all: it was controlled by political machines and friendly to real estate developers and big business.

It shouldn’t really surprise anyone that San Francisco Democrats support public power and decriminalizing sex work and oppose military recruiting in the public schools. Those are pretty basic San Francisco values. What’s surprising is that it took a wholesale organizing effort and a huge battle to get the party to where it is today.

But I still cringe at the term "ultra-liberal."

David Campos, a Police Commission member (and generally a fairly even-minded guy) who is running for supervisor in District 9, called me this weekend to tell me he was laughing about the new tag: "It’s a badge of pride," he said. And of course, on one level, I agree with him.

But there’s something more to the story here. The way the Chron uses it, "ultra-liberal" is supposed to be a derogatory term, just a bit short of "radical" (or in another era, "commie." It suggests candidates who are out of touch with the mainstream, who don’t represent the majority, who can’t entirely be trusted.

I asked Knight what she meant by that term, and she had no comment. But here’s what I think is happening: Newsom’s political operatives are mad that the progressives have seized control of the term "progressive" — which is, in fact, an accurate and historically valuable term. They’d like to call Newsom a progressive mayor — which is inaccurate and historically invalid. But since they can’t get away with that, they’ve pushed the Chron to use another term for people like Chris Daly and Aaron Peskin, and the best the editors could come up with is "ultra-liberal."

Weak.

Speaking of progressive issues: the move to reinstate JROTC in the public schools is really a wedge campaign that will be funded by downtown interests and used against progressives like Eric Mar, who is running in a more moderate district. The issue itself is a no-brainer. Do we want military recruitment programs in the public schools? The progressive candidates for school board need to stand up on this one and make it clear that they aren’t going to back down — JROTC has to go.

Editor’s Notes

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I didn’t expect much from NBC’s prime-time Olympics coverage, but Jesus, it’s bad.

Forget the all-America, all the time, which is only to be expected. Forget the fact that only the sports that have prominent American contenders get much attention. It’s the reporting and commentary that’s making me sick.

I don’t watch the Olympics on TV to hear for the 12th time about Michael Phelps growing up with a single mother and a driven coach. I buy trashy magazines to learn that kind of stuff. I want to see the games. (I don’t watch football on TV to learn about Brett Favre’s emotional unretirement; I want to see him throw the ball. And if they interrupted the game to give me an "NFL moment" I’d stop watching altogether.)

There are hundreds of events going on, and with the tape delay, we could see all kinds of stuff. The network could be switching from swimming to gymnastics to boxing to swimming … but no: more than half the prime-time show is devoted to truly awful little video clips about the lives of the players, or the age of the Chinese gymnasts (now there’s a hot new story) or someone’s personal tragedy.

Folks: I don’t care. Like most of us, I want to watch sports. Save your trashy specials for 60 Minutes.

And the comments, overall, are just horrifying. Did you know that the Romanian women’s gymnastics team just isn’t the same now that they don’t brutally abuse the children? I mean, look at those errors, that sloppy attitude! The athletes were actually smiling and talking to each other before they took the balance beam, and when one woman fell, she still got a hug from her coach. Back in the days of Nadia Comaneci, that would never have happened. Tragedy what’s happened to that team.

(I’ll give Bob Costas a break — if you get an interview with the president of the United States, you break away from the gym to air it. And he actually asked some professional questions. But watching Bush there, grinning like some kind of nervous idiot with a caffeine twitch, was so creepy it was almost unbearable.)

IN OTHER NEWS: Police Commission member David Campos is making a big stink about Mayor Gavin Newsom’s willingness to violate the Sanctuary City law. His point: if immigrants won’t contact the police for fear of getting deported, the cops can’t do their jobs. That, by the way, was one of the reasons San Francisco became a sanctuary city. He’s asking for a special hearing on this, and I hope it leads the commission to stand up to the mayor and say that it’s more important for SF cops to be able to work with immigrant communities than for Newsom to look tough on immigrants in his campaign for governor.

The Democratic County Central Committee is preparing to endorse candidates for supervisor, but so far, there’s little indication the panel will adopt ranked-choice voting recommendations. In District 9, that seems a shame — there are three good candidates (Campos, Mark Sanchez and Eric Quezada), and two (Quezada and Campos) are Democrats. Voters can choose up to three candidates in ranked order; the DCCC ought to consider doing the same.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

They’re tearing up Bernal Heights. I came back from vacation and all the streets around my house were blocked off with "no parking" signs and the heavy equipment was ripping the pavement open. We’re getting new sewer pipes, which is a fine thing. Your neighborhood will be in the queue pretty soon; it’s a citywide project, and in the end it will cost $4 billion.

A lot of that money will go for digging trenches in the streets. Trenching and backfilling is pricey, tens of thousands of dollars a block. And it’s making me crazy that we’re spending all that money on excavation contractors and we’re not taking advantage of the opportunity.

Every ditch I see, every detour sign, every annoyed resident who can’t find a place to park, makes me want to scream. We’re doing all this work for the sewer lines, which are a crucial part of the civic infrastructure. Why aren’t we using the same money, the same equipment, the same holes in the streets to lay electrical and fiber optic cable?

Fiber’s cheap — compared to the cost of bringing all the gear out, hiring the people to operate it, putting the dirt back in the holes, and pouring new blacktop. The thin wires that could carry the world’s information system directly and cheaply to every house in the city is on the order of what Sup. Ross Mirkarimi likes to call "decimal dust." Electrical conduit, which will one day be the backbone of a city-owned power system, costs a little more, but not that much.

Face it: we’re going to do all this at some point anyway. I’m an optimist (about San Francisco, anyway), and before long Gavin Newsom will be gone, and we’ll have a mayor who believes in the public sector, and public power and public broadband will be the order of the day. And running those utilities underground makes perfect sense in a city where earthquakes make elevated electrical wires a visible hazard.

But since nobody at City Hall is putting up a modest amount of cash to do this now, in a few years we’re going to have to spend a whole lot of cash to dig up all the streets all over again.

Am I the only person who thinks this is insane?

I was way off on the St. Lawrence River, in a place that had no Internet access and only spotty cell phone reception, so I missed the news that Sen. Dianne Feinstein was sorta, maybe, kinda thinking about running for governor of California. It was a chilling little welcome-home message for me. Anyone who lived through the days when Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco ought to share my revulsion at the idea of her running the entire state. She’s a Democrat only in name; on economic issues, she’d be as bad as Gov. Schwarzenegger. She’s also an autocrat — and with term limits, there’s nobody in the Legislature who could stand up to her.

The deals are already in the air; Willie Brown just floated out a key one in the Chron. Maybe Gavin Newsom would drop out of the governor’s race, and Feinstein would give him her US Senate seat if she wins.

What a rotten concept. If Feinstein runs, she needs real competition. Feinstein vs. Jerry Brown would be fascinating, and Newsom ought to stay in too. I’m not terribly impressed with the way he’s run the city either, but in the end, I think she was a lot better at being bad than he is.

It’s good to be home.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s not an easy time to be celebrating. The Bush administration has driven the economy into the toilet. After more than five years, the nation is still fighting a foolish, unnecessary war in Iraq. Unemployment is rising, and so is the cost of living.

But it’s also been a banner year for grassroots democracy. Barack Obama, the antiwar candidate, the upstart, took on and defeated the vaunted Clinton operation, and did it in large part with little pieces. He raised millions from small donors and mobilized activists on the ground in a way we haven’t seen in too many years.

And that energy is alive and well in San Francisco. The city that defied Washington and forced the legalization of same-sex marriage, the city that remains the heart of the antiwar movement, will be leading the way toward a more sustainable energy policy this fall. District supervisorial campaigns are well underway, with the mobilizations and energy coming not from big campaign donors and powerful interests but from ordinary people who live here and care about their community.

That’s the spirit we celebrate in this Best of the Bay issue.

There’s a lot more democracy in our selections this year — more selections and ideas from our readers, more input from our community. Our cover art and the illustrations inside reflect the activist traditions and inspirations of this city.

It’s bleak out there in America, but hope lives in places like San Francisco. And that’s a great reason to be proud of all that is the Best of the Bay.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

A couple of years before term limits ended her career as a supervisor, the late, great Sue Bierman took out the homeless-bashers one day with a legendary burst of honesty and logic.

It was the late 1990s, when the Board of Supervisors was made up almost entirely of the handpicked mistresses (his word, not mine) of then-Mayor Willie Brown. Substantive debate was rare.

This particular day, the item before the supervisors was a plan to crack down on alcohol consumption in Golden Gate Park. The wealthier and more uptight denizens of the surrounding neighborhoods were all atwitter about homeless people drinking, and the board was prepared to direct the police chief to round up the miscreants and send them to jail.

Then Bierman weighed in. Excuse me, she said, but the park is where these people live; it’s their home. "And when I’m in my home in the evening, I often have a gin and tonic," she said. "Why do we want to tell homeless people that they’re any less than I am?"

Yeah, some people laughed, but she was dead serious. And she was right.

I thought of Bierman when I read the latest screed by C.W. Nevius, the Chron‘s suburbanite columnist, about a civil grand jury report pointing out what astute housing activists have known for some time now — that many of the panhandlers on the street aren’t homeless people.

Walk through the Tenderloin and actually talk to the people hanging out on the street, and you’ll learn that many live in the supportive housing or low-cost units that the city and nonprofit housing agencies have built or renovated in the past few years. Visit one of their tiny, single-room apartments and you’ll realize why they spend a lot of time on the street; nobody wants to be cooped up in a tiny space all day.

But to understand why panhandling — the horrible evil that has Nevius so up in arms all the time — still goes on, you need to understand something else, a point he left out of his columns.

When Gavin Newsom ran for mayor on a program called "Care, Not Cash," he had a plan: give people a place to live — but in exchange, cut their welfare checks to almost nothing. The CNC recipients get a roof over their heads, which is wonderful, but they then have to survive on about $50 a month plus food stamps.

It’s not enough. So they panhandle.

I’m sorry, but I’m with Sue Bierman. When I come home at night, I immediately pop a cold Bud Light. If I lived in an SRO, I’d do the same thing. And if I couldn’t work or couldn’t find work, and my food stamps wouldn’t pay for beer, I’d panhandle for a six-pack. Better believe it.

Not every person who drinks needs treatment, and not every drug user is an addict. Some are, and the city needs to do what it fails to do now, and provide treatment on demand. But some people who line the streets and ask for spare change are just like the rest of us — except that thanks to Newsom’s program, they’re broke all the time.

Want to stop panhandling? It’s easy and fairly cheap. Raise General Assistance to a level that supports a decent, humane life (and yeah, that might include a beer now and then.) Otherwise, quit whining. Because panhandling is going to be a fact of life.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Back in 2001, San Francisco came within 500 votes of approving a public power system in an election marred by lingering evidence of fraud. Ballot boxes were removed from the Department of Elections (under a bizarre, never-documented threat of anthrax poisoning) and box tops were later found floating in the bay. I still think we actually won that election. And it’s hard to see how we could have done it without organized labor.

The Central Labor Council backed public power. Service Employees International Union Local 790 poured resources into it. The labor-environmental coalition that came together around building a city-run system that would rely on clean energy was unprecedented.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. knows this. That’s why the company is trying mightily to keep labor from backing this year’s Clean Energy Act. And at the center of that battle is Mayor Gavin Newsom’s chief political consultant and close advisor, Eric Jaye.

The Clean Energy Act, as we point out on page 5, would give the city control of its energy future and put San Francisco at the forefront of national efforts to reduce carbon emissions. It also opens the door to public power — and Jaye has been hired by PG&E to try to keep the supervisors from putting it on the ballot, and to defeat it if they do.

He has a powerful weapon to use: labor’s determination to pass a giant bond act to rebuild San Francisco General Hospital.

A billion-dollar bond act is a tough sell, and harder still during a recession. Labor is also making a big push for progressive supervisorial candidates in Districts 1, 3, and 11. And the labor council director, Tim Paulson, tells me that he really wants to keep the city’s disparate and sometimes fractious labor unions united around those goals.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, PG&E’s union, will oppose any public power measure, any time, no matter what it says, and IBEW walked out of the labor council in 2001 over the issue. Now Jaye is telling labor people that the Clean Energy Act (and other issues that are "crowding" the ballot) may undermine public support for the hospital bond. "I have an early poll showing that these other measures have a negative impact on the hospital," Jaye told me. "I have been pointing to that fact and asking if we really need to do [the Clean Energy Act] this year."

John Whitehurst, who is running the SF General bond campaign, says his polls show that there was no correlation between an affordable housing set-aside measure and the hospital bonds, and presumably the same is true of the Clean Energy Act. On the other hand, he says, "if Jaye runs a campaign that says ‘Gee, the city can’t do anything right,’ it could create problems for the hospital measure."

Would Eric Jaye threaten the SF General bonds (which his client, Gavin Newsom, strongly backs) to keep labor from backing public power? He insisted to me that he would never do that, and that he and the mayor fully back the bonds. But PG&E, I think, cares nothing about the hospital — or the city — and will do whatever it can to scuttle this measure.

So will labor be intimidated by the threat of divisiveness (from the IBEW) and the political scare tactics from PG&E — or will labor leaders tell the mayor to knock it off?

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was dreading the drive home from Lake Shasta. Sunday afternoon. The end of a major holiday weekend. Every car in Northern California would be converging on the Bay Bridge right around the same time I got there. Figure two hours from the Carquinez Bridge to the toll plaza. Hot weather. Tired, hungry kids who have to pee. Nowhere to go, no way to move. An impatient driver (me), who can’t stand waiting five minutes in a grocery store line, stuck in an endless, hellish queue with no outlet for the anger except to crab at my long-suffering partner. It wasn’t going to be pretty.

We did what we could. We got up early Sunday morning, de-fusted the boat, pulled into the dock by 11 a.m., and got on the road by noon. But still: 210 miles to San Francisco. We’d hit the Bay Area right about 3 p.m., along with every other auto-mad idiot who drove somewhere for the Fourth of July.

But a funny thing happened: we cleared Vacaville, and Crockett, and Vallejo, and I kept waiting for the traffic to hit. And then Albany and Berkeley and … whoa: we were on the bridge approach at 3:15, not one single stop-and-go spot, and the bridge was no worse than a typical pre-rush-hour weekday afternoon. It seemed as if nobody was driving.

Nobody is a bit too strong of a term — there were still plenty of people on the road. But for the first time in a decade, the California State Automobile Association reported a decline in car use over the holiday. "Less disposable cash and an overall increase in travel expenses have caused Californians to postpone or downsize their holiday getaways," CSAA spokesperson Cynthia Harris announced.

You could see that up at the lake, where rows of empty houseboats sat at the dock. Part of it was the incessant media coverage of the fires (in fact, Shasta was fine). But the biggest factor was the price of gas. At $4.50 a gallon, people don’t drive as much.

This is good.

For the first time in many, many years, people are talking about fuel efficiency again. I’m obsessed with it: change the oil, keep the car tuned and the tires inflated, and our utterly uncool Saturn wagon, with two-wheel drive and a small, weak four-cylinder engine, gets almost 40 mpg on the highway. We burned maybe 12 gallons round trip, which cost a little more than $50. Twice what it cost a few years ago, but not a deal-breaker. All of a sudden, the SUVs are grounded, and we’ve got the trick ride.

And I started to think: imagine what would have happened if courageous politicians in California had put a $2-a-gallon tax on gas five years ago. The SUVs and Hummers would be long gone. Public transit would be booming. And with 1.5 billion gallons of gas sold per year in the state, there would be $3 billion more each year in new revenue. Enough to fund huge improvements in urban transportation systems. The high-speed rail line to Los Angeles would be well underway. Traffic (and pollution, and global warming) would have dropped dramatically.

Yeah, the price of gas hits hard on working-class people who have to drive. I get that. It’s not the world’s most progressive tax. But the price has gone up anyway (as we all knew it would eventually) — and now all of that money is going into private oil company profits instead of going into public benefits. Something to think about.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Look, I get the gun thing. I started shooting a .22 rifle in third grade, and by the time I was 11 I had a gold National Rifle Association Sharpshooter medal on my wall. Even in my advanced, protogeriatric condition, I can still pop the logo on a Budweiser can at 50 feet; I did it two months ago, in upstate New York, with my nephew and namesake, who is a proud teenage redneck. Tim lives in a small town, wears camo, smokes the adults at paintball, and loves his firearms.

My brother, his dad, goes along with this reluctantly — in his household, there are very strict rules about gun use. The .22 and the .177 have trigger locks, and my brother keeps the only key in his pocket. The ammunition is locked up separately. And he has informed his son that anything you kill, you eat — which discourages any potshots at squirrels and birds. I can live with that.

I also have a friend in San Francisco who hunts, and I’m more than happy to go to his annual pig roast and consume the sweet, juicy, wonderful wild boar he pegged in Sonoma County.

So I get it. There are people who love target shooting, and since I was one of them many years ago, I understand. There are people who think it’s cool to go shoot a pig or a turkey or a duck and take it home for supper: since I think it’s one of the world’s great experiences to catch a bass or a trout and do the same thing, it’s hard to be critical.

But the United State Supreme Court decision last week wasn’t about my nephew’s .22 or my friend Rich’s hunting rifle. It was about whether cities can do anything remotely at all meaningful to keep 14-year-olds from shooting each other on the streets.

It’s about whether kids in Hunters Point and the Western Addition will live to graduate from high school. It’s about whether the desperate young people who are doing robberies in the Mission District and Bernal Heights will wind up shooting someone and spending the rest of their lives in prison over a bag of groceries and a hundred bucks. It’s about whether someone the age of my kindergarten daughter will take a bullet in the head one night and die from the crossfire while she’s asleep in bed.

Let’s face it: this is about handguns and assault rifles, about weapons that have very little use in hunting, that are rarely part of any sporting tradition, and that exist almost entirely for the purpose of killing other human beings.

The unnamed man who is suing — with the NRA’s money — to win the right to own a handgun in San Francisco public housing claims he needs a weapon to defend himself. I’ve been studying self-defense for 17 years now, and let me tell you a not-so-secret fact: guns are a terrible method of protection. If you own a gun in a city, the odds are far better that it will kill you or a loved one than that it will save your life. Guns don’t deter crime; they encourage crime.

And for my dear friends on the left who say that the Second Amendment protects us all from government repression, let me politely suggest that if the Marines invade San Francisco, the pistol in your attic won’t be much help.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera is fighting back on the NRA lawsuit, aggressively. He has to keep it up; this is madness.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Chronicle has suddenly discovered that the middle class is leaving San Francisco.

Staff writer James Temple broke the news on the front page of the Sunday, June 23 paper with a lead sentence that boggles the mind in its insight and news value: "The number of low- and middle-income residents in San Francisco is shrinking as the wealthy population swells, a trend most experts attribute to the city’s exorbitant housing costs."

I don’t want to downplay the importance of this story. It could have (and should have) been written a decade ago, when Willie Brown was mayor and city planning policy, combined with the dot-com boom, started San Francisco on the path toward becoming the first fully gentrified big city in America. And I’m always frustrated when a daily newspaper reports after the fact on something that could have been prevented, or at least slowed, back when the story first became a story.

But the news is still news today, and the fact that the Chronicle has facts and figures and demographers denouncing and community leaders deploring means the problem will be getting some additional attention this fall. That matters, because this November, the future of San Francisco will again be on the line.

And that could be a very good thing.

Calvin Welch, who has been fighting for a progressive city longer than many of today’s activists have been alive, remembers the summer 1972 state ballot: "You had George McGovern. You had the Coastal Commission [Act]. You had the farmworkers [labor law]. You had marijuana [decriminalization]. And you had every constituency on the left coming out to vote for them all. And they all won."

This fall in San Francisco we will have perhaps an even greater perfect storm: a proposed rebuild of SF General Hospital, which is a huge priority for organized labor. A housing justice measure that sets aside money for affordable housing (and could help address the single biggest issue in the city, something even the Chronicle now puts on page 1). A green energy and public power measure (which would shift energy policy toward renewables and bring in millions of dollars). Two new revenue measures that tax the wealthy. Six seats on the Board of Supervisors, including three swing districts that will determine whether the progressive majority that has controlled the board since 2000 will remain intact. And all of that will happen in the context of the Obama campaign and a massive statewide mobilization to protect same-sex marriage.

We are a fractious crew, the San Francisco left, but if we can come together this fall, share resources, and run some sort of large coalition campaign for progressive values, this could be an election for the ages.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Ask any elected Democrat in San Francisco about the governor’s budget, and you’ll get an instant answer: it’s awful. It’s brutal. It sucks. Education, housing, the environment … everything we care about is being gutted because the governor and the Republicans in Sacramento won’t raise taxes.

Which is absolutely correct.

Now ask those same Democrats what they think about Mayor Gavin Newsom’s budget. In too many cases, the answer’s a little slower, and a little softer. Gee, it’s too bad that the economy, and Washington and Sacramento and all of these other forces out of our control leave us no choice but to tighten our belts and do things that none of us really wants to do. Gee, Gavin doesn’t like cutting either, but he has to balance the books. Gee, it’s certainly not the mayor’s fault.

Which is absolutely wrong.

The governor of California is not the only chief executive who can look for revenue solutions to a budget shortfall. The mayor of San Francisco can do that too. In fact, Newsom wouldn’t have to look far: Supervisor Aaron Peskin has introduced two measures that together could bring in a minimum of $30 million per year and, in good years, $80 million or more. That’s about a quarter of the budget deficit, enough to save a whole lot of city services, city jobs, and city resources for the needy.

Both tax measures are aimed at the wealthier end of the spectrum. One would raise the transfer tax on real estate sales of more than $2 million. Few first-time homebuyers would see any impact at all, and the ones who do … well, if you can afford a $2 million house, you can pay a reasonable transfer tax. The biggest revenue would come from major downtown commercial property sales: when the Bank of America Building is sold for $1 billion, none of the investors are paupers and the corporations, real estate investment trusts, and financiers involved have all done quite well under the George W. Bush administration’s tax cuts. This is, for the most part, a tax on the rich.

The second measure would eliminate a loophole in the business tax law that allows some partnerships, like law firms, to avoid payroll taxes. See, if you’re a partner in a firm and you earn "profits" in the form of a partnership payout as opposed to a "salary," then the money you make doesn’t get taxed by the city. Most of these outfits are big firms that can afford to pay the city’s business tax. It’s only fair: companies that don’t operate on the partnership model have to pay taxes, and so should everyone else.

The two measures need a vote of the people, and passing any tax is hard. It would help immensely if the mayor endorsed these progressive taxes — and I guarantee that if a Democratic legislator in Sacramento introduced a statewide tax bill hitting the exact same group of people for the exact same amount of money, Newsom and all his Democratic allies would support it (and if the governor vetoed the bill, those same Democrats would denounce him).

The measures would take effect in the middle of the next budget year, and the income could make Newsom’s river of red ink a good bit smaller. He could, in theory, endorse the measures, work for them, and include the revenue in his proposed budget. But so far Peskin hasn’t heard a word from Newsom’s office on this. Neither have I.

Gavin? Hello? *

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Mark Leno took a huge political gamble this spring, and if he had lost, he would have lost big.

It was hard enough challenging an incumbent state Senator in a Democratic primary (and pissing off a long list of people, some of them powerful and all of them with long memories). But when it became clear that Joe Nation — a centrist (at best) Democrat from Marin — was joining the race, Leno was facing a dramatic challenge.

Imagine if Nation had won. Imagine if a progressive (if sometimes ethically challenged) lesbian from San Francisco had been tossed out of office and replaced with a straight white guy who was pals with the landlords and the insurance industry. The rap on Leno would have been vicious: he would have been the one blamed for losing a San Francisco seat, a queer seat, a progressive seat … it’s not fair, of course, since Carole Migden was the one who made herself vulnerable, but politics often isn’t fair.

And this would have been ugly. I was wincing to think about the comments the next day. Leno’s political career would have been toast. And this is a guy who loves politics, loves holding office. Talk about going all-in.

But Leno pulled it off, putting together a coalition of progressives and moderates and winning convincingly. And his job is only beginning.

Leno has to mend a lot of fences. A lot of people still don’t think he should have taken on Migden, and some of her supporters are going to be bitter for quite a while. Many think his victory empowered the wrong side of the Democratic party: the Gavin Newsom wing, the squishy center. A lot of people (including me) wonder how Leno will come down on the key contested supervisorial races this fall, when Newsom’s forces and the progressives will be fighting — literally — for the future of San Francisco.

If Migden had won, there would be no doubt about the future alignments: people who were with her would be in the game, and people who opposed her would be punished. That’s how she operated, for better and for worse. Leno is different; he’s willing to work with people who opposed him and try to build bridges. He tells us he’s not always going to be with Newsom on local issues and endorsements — and if that’s true, and if he keeps in mind that he needed the progressives to win (and that Newsom’s buddies at Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and the big landlords groups did their best to bump him off) — we may see some fascinating new political coalitions emerging. (We may also see more issues like Propositions G and F, in which Newsom, Leno, and the entire power structure supported the Lennar Corporation’s land grab.)

But first, there’s the Democratic County Central Committee.

The DCCC controls the local party, and the party’s money, and the party’s endorsements, all of which will be critical this fall. The progressive slate organized by Sups. Aaron Peskin and Chris Daly did very well, and now could control the committee.

But Scott Wiener, part of the more moderate wing, is still the party chair. Wiener’s a decent and fair guy, but he likes Plan C (a group that has horrible pro-downtown politics). Someone’s going to run against him. Then we’ll see what side everyone’s on.

Read the Potrero Boosters letter to Newsom opposing the Mirant retrofit (PDF)

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I think it’s safe to say that most people in the real estate business tend to oppose raising taxes on real estate. And generally speaking, you don’t find the industry well represented at dinners for urban environmental groups. But John Barry is different. He’s a Sunset District Realtor who is full of ideas about how to get the city more revenue, and after I ran into him at the San Francisco Tomorrow dinner May 21, he sent me a proposal he says would bring in more than $5 million a year.

Barry was digging around in property records recently and learned that a parcel out on 19th Avenue sold a year ago, in June 2007, for $2.5 million — and the new owners still hadn’t received a property tax bill. The owner "most likely won’t be getting the bill until July or later," Barry wrote. "He will then have another 30 to 90 days to come up with his payment."

Although the city will eventually get the money, the late property tax bill means that cash is sitting in a property owner’s bank account, earning interest that ought to go to the city. At the current tax rate of 1.141 percent of market value, which is typically the sale price, the lost interest on this one property is about $2,800. Multiply that times all the commercial and residential sales in the city, and Barry estimates San Francisco is losing some $5 million in interest every single year.

"Who is to blame? All of us," he wrote. "If taxpayers had been raising a fuss, the city would have found ways to do this all quicker."

When property changes hands, it typically goes through a title company and an escrow procedure and, at closing, a bunch of money changes hands. The buyer pays a whole list of fees — to the title company, the broker, the mortgage company, etc. Why can’t the city be in the mix?

Here’s how it could work, Barry suggests: "The title company calls the tax collector and says, ‘We are closing a sale in two days. The sale price is $1 million. Send us an interim estimated tax bill.’ The tax collector multiplies .01141 [the property tax rate] against $1 million and instantly prints an interim bill of $11,410 and e-mails it to the escrow officer."

Makes sense to me.

So the day I got Barry’s e-mail, I called Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting and left him a message saying I’d found him $5 million. He called back right away. I ran Barry’s idea by him, and he told me it was worth pursuing.

It’s a bit more complicated than it seems, he said, particularly with commercial property — which is where the big money is, anyway. In many cases the city doesn’t accept the sales prices as the actual value, and under Proposition 13, you can’t raise a tax bill once you set it. But I have great faith that City Attorney’s Office can figure a way around that.

Of course, Ting has another problem: he doesn’t have the staff to catch up on the existing backlog — and Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to cut his budget. "Nobody wants to stand up and fight to fund the tax man," he told me. That, of course, is lunacy. If you’re short of money, you don’t cut the folks who are bringing it in.

It’s hard to talk about taxing anyone, even in San Francisco. "I write this," Barry said, "because I am a founding member of the How a Realtor Can Commit Professional Suicide Club." But you know he’s right.

Is growth good?

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I heard one of the greatest environmental writers in San Francisco history speak last week, and his message was a bit different from what environmentalists are taught to believe today.

Harold Gilliam was born almost 90 years ago, and was writing influential articles and books about the Bay Area — and the urban environment — long before most of today’s activists were born. He was an opponent of nuclear energy in the 1950s when most of California, including his employer, the San Francisco Chronicle, thought this wonder of postwar technology would provide power that was "dependable, safe, and too cheap to meter." He was against developers filling in the Bay in the early 1960s. He was writing about the problems with freeways when that was heresy. When I first arrived in San Francisco in 1982, I was amazed that the Chronicle would print some of the stuff he was saying. The guy is a genius and a local treasure.

And at the annual San Francisco Tomorrow dinner, where he was honored with the Jack Morrison Career Achievement Award, he had a few things to say.

After a brief talk about his early career (and giving thanks to his editors for allowing him to infuriate Chronicle publishers), he told us he wanted to challenge conventional wisdom for a moment.

He talked a bit about the Transbay Terminal project, which he said would be a wonderful, crucial part of the city, a transportation hub for the future and maybe someday the home of a fast train to Los Angeles. Then he asked if the price was worth it.

Since nobody in California wants to pay taxes, the only way to fund this kind of grand civic project these days is to sell off the skyline, to let developers build giant high-rise towers that make the city more congested, more rich, and less pleasant. A lot of people think tall buildings mean progress; even a lot of environmentalists think building up is good. "And I remember," Gilliam said, "when everyone thought filling in the Bay was the way to grow."

Actually, Gilliam said, we all ought to question for a second whether growth is always good, or if it’s worth the cost.

Something to think about.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was having lunch with an old friend the other day, and, as usual, we got through our lives and kids pretty quickly and wound up talking about tax policy. I’m a great date.

I was explaining to her — well, yeah, I was lecturing, at some volume — about the problem with sales taxes and the value of parcel taxes and income taxes, and somewhere along the line I realized that the progressive leadership in San Francisco needs to think a bit more about small business.

See, my friend’s husband runs a small company, and she isn’t happy about the way the city’s universal health plan is financed. "If this is so important to San Francisco," she asked, "why aren’t we all paying for it, instead of just businesses?" Her idea: finance the program with a new sales tax.

Well, I support Healthy San Francisco and I think that, all things considered, Sup. Tom Ammiano did an amazing job of putting together a plan that is actually working. Ammiano told me last week that more than 20,000 people — formerly uninsured people — have signed up. This is a very big deal.

I realize it’s also a pain for a lot of smaller businesses, in part because the rules — specifically designed to keep unscrupulous employers from cheating — are complicated and hard to follow. And for companies that are barely making it, the tab for insurance can be brutal.

That, of course, is the overall problem with employer-based health insurance. But it’s the system we’re working under, and the complexity of creating a completely different model in one city would be, to say the least, daunting. In fact, there were a lot of employers in this city, many big retail outlets and national chains, that could well afford to pay for employee health insurance but instead dumped their workers on the overburdened public health system.

And restaurants, which are whining the loudest, have managed to stick their customers with the added cost, which frankly isn’t such a terrible thing: people who eat out a lot can afford an extra buck so the kitchen help can see a doctor when they’re sick.

And as I (ever-so-gently and quietly) explained over my $12 sautéed prawns, sales taxes are horribly regressive, even worse than small-business taxes. I’m right; she’s wrong. We had a hell of a lunch.

But I think her frustration ran a bit deeper than this one issue, and I hear it from a lot of others too: small businesses don’t seem to be part of the progressive coalition.

I understand why: a lot of small business people are conservative, particularly on fiscal issues. It’s really annoying how often small merchants side with the Chamber of Commerce and the big downtown forces. You can’t get small business groups to support any new revenue measures.

And the progressive supervisors have done a lot for small businesses — starting with enacting limits on chain stores, which have protected locally owned shops in several commercial districts.

There’s a lot more we can do: I’m still pushing for a progressive business tax (cut taxes on the bottom, raise them on the top). And a city income tax would pay for health insurance and a lot more.

But right now, many community merchants are feeling ignored, and our next progressive candidate for mayor needs to think about that. It’s a potentially powerful constituency — but for all the wrong reasons, it’s going in all the wrong directions.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Early in January 1992, with Bill Clinton poised to win the crucial New Hampshire primary, a woman named Gennifer Flowers came forward with a sordid tale of a 12-year affair with the young Arkansas governor.

Pundits proclaimed that the allegation by Flowers, a former TV reporter who later posed nude for Penthouse, would sink the Clinton campaign. Instead, Bill and Hillary appeared on 60 Minutes right after the Jan. 26 Super Bowl and, in a stunning performance, the candidate diffused the damage and went on to win the primary and the White House.

Years later, a political operative I know offered a bizarre story: Clinton’s senior advisors not only knew that Flowers would go public; they were happy she did it.

See, back then, my source said, polling showed that Bill Clinton was popular among women and educated liberals. His only problem was with the so-called working class white-ethnic men, the blue-collar guys who were Democrats but voted for Ronald Reagan. Those voters thought Clinton was weak, and that his wife was pushing him around.

The Flowers affair was bound to come out eventually, the operative told me. So the strategists figured that sooner was better. Of course, the morality voters and the sanctity-of-marriage crew would be aghast, but they weren’t going to vote for Clinton anyway. The blue-collar guys wouldn’t be offended at all; in fact, some would think a guy who had a Penthouse centerfold on the side wasn’t such a chump after all. And the women had nowhere else to go.

So why not control the release, let Bill and Hillary deal with it, put it behind them, and defuse its potential as an October surprise?

If that account is true, the strategy worked brilliantly.

I thought about Flowers when I saw the video of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright speaking to the National Press Club.

The news media and a lot of Obama supporters say Wright, after talking about the oppression of African Americans, derailed the campaign of the only African American ever to get close to the presidency.

But let me offer a strange but plausible thesis here: what if the Obama campaign not only knew what Wright was going to do, but quietly approved of it?

Think about it: Obama is about two whiskers from being the most powerful person on Earth. If he really wanted Wright to shut up, he could have made a few calls, and I suspect the guy would be cloistered behind closed doors for months. But no: the fiery minister went and attacked America and insulted Obama in a way sure to make huge headlines.

The result: Obama gets to denounce and distance himself from a guy who was going to be a problem in the fall. The damage was done early enough that it will be old news by October. Obama will still win North Carolina, be close in Indiana — and Clinton simply won’t have the numbers to win the nomination.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the story I was told all those years ago was a total fabrication. Maybe Gennifer Flowers and Rev. Wright acted alone. But I’ve watched enough presidential campaigns to know it’s entirely possible they didn’t.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I have something to say to Mark Leno, and I hope he’s paying attention.

Listen:

Our endorsement in the state Senate race, which you can read on page 13, was painful. We made the right call, and I stand behind it — but it wasn’t easy.

I still remember the year 2000, when San Francisco politics changed forever, when district elections turned the Board of Supervisors from a collection of political hacks — wholly owned by downtown and utterly loyal to a corrupt mayor — into one of the most progressive policy-making bodies in any city in America. That was the year Aaron Peskin, Chris Daly, Matt Gonzales, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval joined Tom Ammiano and, in one great political day, doomed the Willie Brown machine to political obscurity and paved the way for a living wage law, universal health care, community choice aggregation, real budget oversight, and a city where the grassroots actually mattered.

And you, Mark, were on the wrong side of history. You went along with Willie Brown. You endorsed Lawrence Wong against Peskin. You endorsed Michael Yaki against McGoldrick. You were behind not only the sleazy Brown machine but a couple of truly lame candidates; those endorsements should embarrass you until the end of time. (Be serious — looking back at all that Peskin has done for San Francisco, can you actually say Lawrence Wong, who couldn’t even handle a job overseeing the Community College District, was the better choice? Mark, you are many things, but you are not a fool.)

If you win this election — and I think you will — you have some serious work to do bringing the queer community and the left back together. A lot of people are mad at their friends, and a lot of good allies are fighting. We’re losing sight of the prize, here. And while you had every right to challenge Carole Migden, and I’m glad you did, you also created this situation and you need to help fix it.

How do you do that? For starters, don’t attack Migden. She’s done enough damage to herself. And she’s done a lot for this community. Your campaign consultants will want to send out nasty hit pieces (they’re probably already printed), but you have to stop them. And if you don’t get that, if you think winning is more important than anything, then you’re as bad as Bill and Hillary Clinton, who seem to believe it would be better to elect a Republican than concede defeat to another Democrat. Don’t go there. The collateral damage would be immense. It’s not worth it.

And show a little independence. This November don’t let yourself side with another group of worthless supervisorial candidates who are simply Gavin Newsom clones.

When you refused to criticize Mayor Newsom’s bloody budget, you blamed the governor and told us you didn’t want to see "the good guys fighting." I have news for you: When it comes to the city budget, Gavin Newsom is not one of the good guys. He is our own Arnold Schwarzenegger, refusing to raise taxes and instead cutting programs.

And his allies, the downtown forces furious about the progressive board, will want to put another group of regressive sycophants in office this fall. You have no business being a part of that.

Mark, I like you, but this endorsement was a great leap of faith for me. Show me I wasn’t wrong.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I like Muni. I always have. I know that makes me strange and sick, but I’ve always enjoyed riding the buses and trains, and my kids love riding the buses and trains, and in the end, despite all the problems, it’s one of the great things about San Francisco.

Then there are days like April 20.

It wasn’t an unusual Sunday; sunny, a bit chilly. There was, of course, the grand stoner holiday, and people were flocking toward a 4:20 convergence in Golden Gate Park, but one would think the folks at Muni would realize such a cosmic event was in the offing and plan for it.

One would be wrong.

We joined a small group waiting for a westbound bus at Haight and Divisadero. The sign told us the next bus was coming in five minutes; Michael and Vivian sat on the horribly uncomfortable seats designed to keep homeless people from sleeping on them, and in about 10 minutes along came a 6 Parnassus. It slowed down enough for us to see that it was standing room only (but nowhere near as bad as the 14 Mission is every day), then pulled away without taking on passengers.

Okay: bus too crowded. Driver decides no more passengers can fit safely aboard. It’s called "passing up" a stop, and it happens. Typically there’s another, emptier bus just behind. And sure enough, the sign said a 71 Haight/Noriega would be along in three minutes.

Well, seven minutes, actually — and then the same thing happened again: full bus, no stop. At this point there were maybe 30 people at the bus stop, and some had been waiting quite a while and were getting pissed. After a while, along came another 71 … and passed us up. The corner was getting crowded; people were yelling at the bus, chasing it, running into the street, and trying to climb in the back door when it stopped in traffic. Not exactly safety first.

Eventually we walked, which was fine, except that Vivian, who at six is already a slave to fashion, was wearing shoes that looked lovely but weren’t exactly designed for a hike so she wound up with blisters, and I had to stop and get her some Band-Aids and beg for new socks at a shoe store. Such is life in the big city; I can’t really complain that much.

But there’s an issue here that intrigues me: What is Muni supposed to do in this situation? It doesn’t seem as if this should be an impossible management problem. A Muni controller could, for example, radio the next five buses on the Haight Street line and tell them each to pass up alternate intersections so everyone gets a chance to ride eventually.

I called Judson True, a nice guy who has the unfortunate job of handling press calls for Muni this week, and he told me Muni does the best it can at line management — that in theory, someone watching the Haight Street line should have radioed in the problem (I think the drivers ought to do that too) and a controller should have been able to shift more buses to that line. I suspect this may have been a screw-up. But one thing that happens when you keep cutting the Muni budget is that the ranks of controllers and line managers — those middle-management "bureaucrats" Matier and Ross and the like always whine about — start to thin out. And this shit happens.

You wonder: how often do these people who complain about government spending actually ride the bus?

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