By Tim Redmond
I don’t know what Heather Knight means by “ultra-liberal,” but to say that the San Francisco Democratic Party has taken a “sharp turn to the left” is a bit miselading. Yes, the progressives ran an agressive campaign and picked up some seats this spring, but most of the votes on most of the issues were pretty close to unanimous; public power, fro example, had support from across the spectrum. Same with most of the supervisors races.
In fact, the only reason the Democratic Party seems a little more progressive now is that it has so often in the past been controlled by moderates (and in the days of Willie Brown, by a political machine).
So what’s up with the “ultra-liberal,” anyway?
I mean, the word “liberal” used to mean someone who believed that government was part of the solution to social problems, that income ought to be redistributed and the weathy should pay their fair share and that taxes levied and collected in a progressive fashion should be used for programs to help the needy.
That describes most of the people the Chron is now calling “ultra-liberal.” It does not describe, for example, Gavin Newsom.
In San Francisco, taking liberal stands on social issues is easy. The economic issues are a lot more tough, and that’s where you can draw political lines. The Shorensteins, Walter and Doug, are (generaly speaking) social liberals who give money to Democrats, and they always have. But when it comes to regulating land use and development and taxing downtown — when it hits the Shorensteins in the pocket book — they’re as anti-tax and anti-regulation as most Republicans.
John Burton asked me once why I didn’t call him a progressive, and I told him that the difference between a liberal and a progressive these days is that progressives don’t trust real-estate developers. That’s just a small example, but it makes the point. The progressives in San Francisco stand for both social and economic justice.
Here’s what I think is going on: The Newsom camp is angry about the use of the term “progressive” to describe Newsom’s critics, because it implies that Newsom somehow isn’t progressive. (Honestly, by any meaning of the word, he’s not. Care not Cash was the opposite of a progressive program. His budget is the opposite of a progressive budget. On economic issues, he’s very much a centrist.)
But Newsom’s operatives have been putting pressure on the media, and I’m sure on the Chron, to change that terminology. So now that Chron has come up with the disparaging term “ultra-liberal.”
Really, based on the recent endorsement, the Democratic Party in SF today pretty closely reflects San Francisco values. The nasty label’s got to go.