Conservative

Historic preservation fight at the board

Zelda Bronstein
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3
Historic preservation fight at the board

The supervisors will hear a recommendation from the Rules Committee Jan. 25th to appoint Richard Johns to a seat on the Historic Preservation Commission. These things typically aren’t that controversial — but there will probably be a fight over this one. And it’s significant because of what it says about the new board committees appointed by board President David Chiu.


Background: The Historic Preservation Commission was created by the voters with the passage of Prop. J in 2008. Then-Sup. Aaron Peskin authored the ballot measure, which gave the panel real teeth, the ability to prevent the destruction of important pieces of local history — and mandated professional qualifications for six of the seven members. The goal: Prevent a mayor who cared nothing about preservation from appointing hacks and cronies to the board.


Seat number 4, for example, is set aside for a professional historian, someone with exensive academic background in California and Bay Area history.  As Mike Buhler, director of the San Francisco Architectural Heritage foundation, noted in a Jan. 3, 2010 letter to the Rules Committee:


The minimum professional qualifications in history are a graduate degree in history or closely related field; or a bachelor’s degree in history or closely related field plus one of the following:
1. At least two years of full-time experience in research, writing, teaching, interpretation, or other demonstrable professional activity with an academic institution, historic organization or agency, museum, or other professional institution; or
2. Substantial contribution through research and publication to the body of scholarly knowledge in the field of history.


Just before leaving office, Newsom nominated Richard Johns, a lawyer, to that seat. Johns has been active in the movement to restore the Old Mint and create a San Francisco History Museum, and he clearly has more than a passing interest in local history — but he doesn’t even remotely meet the qualifications for this seat.


He also happens to be married to Eleanor Johns, who was chief of staff to Mayor Willie Brown.


Johns has done some good volunteer work, but according to Peskin, he’s a perfect case study in what Prop. J was supposed to prevent. “We wrote the measure to ensure high professional standards and qualifications for each seat,” Peskin told me. “If they can get away with this, the voters got bamboozled.”


Or, as Robert Cherny, an eminent professor and historian at San Francisco state, noted in a Jan. 17 letter to the commitee:


I am concerned that this nomination will set a precedent that the professional qualifications established by the charter can be ignored if a mayor wishes to do so.


The other problem with Johns became clear in his Jan. 20 testimony to the committee, when he talked about the important of the need for change and growth in San Francisco — key words that anyone who has followed local politics knows are the mantra of developers who want to get rid of historic landmarks.


I asked Sup. David Campos, who was on the previous Rules Committee, about Johns’ qualifications, and he told me that you could make a strictly legal argument either way; the charter language could be interpreted by a court to allow Johns to slide in. But he also said he didn’t support the nomination. “I had to ask,” he told me, “is this the best we can do?”


Good point — this is a city full of professional historians. Is Richard Johns the best we can do?


The current Rules Committee — with two conservatives (Mark Farrell and Sean Elsbernd) and one progressive (the chair, Jane Kim), apparently thought so. His nomination was approved unanimously.


It’s only one seat on one commission, but the precedent is important: You can’t set professional standards for commissions then let the mayor ignore them an appoint his political allies. And historic preservation is under attack in the city: Sup. Scott Wiener just announced that he’s calling for a hearing on how the city’s “prioritization of historic preservation is impacting, and possibly undermining, other key policy objectives.” In a press statement, he complained about too many things having to go through the Historic Preservation Commission.


Most nominations that get approval at Rules slide right through the full board. That’s the problem with a Rules Committe stacked with conservative, pro-development supervisors.


In this case, though, we can expect a bit of a fuss. I know the progressives on the board won’t be unanimous in approving Richard Johns. 

SF’s new political era

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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31
SF’s new political era

news@sfbg.com

You can argue about what the word “progressive” means, and you can argue about the process and the politics that put Ed Lee in the Mayor’s Office. And you can talk forever about which group or faction has how much of a majority on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but you have to admit: this city has just undergone a significant political realignment.

Some of that was inevitable. The last members of the class of 2000, the supervisors who were elected in a rebellion against the sleaze, corruption, and runaway development policies of the Willie Brown administration, have left office. Gavin Newsom, the mayor who was often at war with the board and who encouraged a spirit of rancor and partisanship, is finally off to Sacramento. For the first time since 1978, the supervisors will be working with a mayor they chose themselves.

For much of the past 15 years, progressive politics was as much about stopping bad things — preventing Brown and then Newsom from wrecking the city — as it was about promoting good things. But the “politics of anti,” as San Francisco State political scientist Rich DeLeon describes is, wasn’t a central theme in the November elections, and this generation of supervisors comes into office with a different agenda.

Besides, one of the clear divisions on the board the past seven years was the Newsom allies against the progressives — something that dissipated instantly when Lee took over.

But the realignment goes deeper.

Until recently, the progressives on the board had a working majority — a caucus, so to speak — and they tended to vote together much of the time. The lines on the board were drawn almost entirely by what Newsom disparagingly calls ideology but could more accurately be described as a shared set of political values, a shared urban agenda.

There are still six supervisors who call themselves progressives, but the idea that they’ll stick together was shattered in the battle over a new mayor — and the notion that there’s anything like a progressive caucus died with Board President David Chiu’s election (his majority came in part from the conservative side, with three progressives opposing him) and with Chiu’s new committee assignments, which for the first time in a decade put control of key assignments in the hands of the fiscal conservatives.

 

A PROGRESSIVE MAJORITY?

The progressive bloc on the board was never monolithic. There were always disagreements and fractures. And, thanks to the Brown Act, the progressives don’t actually meet outside of the formal board sessions. But it was fair and accurate to say that, most of the time, the six members of the board majority functioned almost as a political party, working together on issues and counting on each other for key votes. There was, for example, a dispute two years ago over the board presidency — but in the end, Chiu was elected with exactly six votes, all from the progressive majority that came together in the end.

That all started to fall apart the minute the board was faced with the prospect of choosing a new mayor. For one thing, the progressives couldn’t agree on a strategy — should they look for someone who would seek reelection in November, or try to find an acceptable interim mayor? The rules that barred supervisors from voting for themselves made it more tricky; six votes were not enough to elect any of the existing members. And, not surprisingly, some of the progressives had mayoral ambitions themselves.

When state Assemblymember Tom Ammiano — who would have had six votes easily — took himself out of the running, there was no other obvious progressive candidate. And with no other obvious candidate, and little opportunity for open discussion, the progressives couldn’t come to an agreement.

But by the Jan. 4 board meeting, five of the six had coalesced around Sheriff Mike Hennessey. Chiu, however, was supporting Ed Lee, someone he had known and worked with in the Asian community and whom he considered a progressive candidate. And once it became clear that Lee was headed toward victory, Sup. Eric Mar announced that he, too, would be in Lee’s camp.

A few days later, when the new board convened to choose a president, the progressive solidarity was gone. Sups. David Campos, John Avalos, and Ross Mirkarimi, now the solid left wing of the board, voted for Avalos. Chiu won with the support of Mar, Sup. Jane Kim, and the moderate-to-conservative flank.

Now the Budget Committee — long controlled by a progressive chair and a progressive majority — will be led by Carmen Chu, who is among the most fiscally conservative board members. The Land Use and Development Committee will be chaired by Mar, but two of the three members are from the moderate side. Same goes for Rules, where Sup. Sean Elsbernd, for years the most conservative board member, will work with ideological ally Sup. Mark Farrell on confirming mayoral appointments, redrawing supervisorial districts, and promoting or blocking charter amendments as Kim, the chair, does her best to contain the damage.

You can argue that having independent-minded supervisors who don’t vote as a caucus is a good thing. You can also argue that a fractured left will never win against a united downtown. And both arguments have merit.

But you can’t argue any more that the board has the same sort of progressive majority it’s had for the past 10 years. That’s over. It’s a new — and different — political era.

What happens now? Will the progressives hold enough votes to have an influence on the city budget (and ensure that the deficit solutions include new revenue and not just cuts)? What legislative priorities will the supervisors be pushing in the next year? How will the votes shake out on difficult new proposals (and ongoing issues like community choice aggregation)?

Mayor Lee has pledged to work with the board and will show up for monthly questions. How will he respond to the sorts of progressive legislation — like tenant protections, transit-first policies, immigrant rights measures, and stronger affordable housing standards — that Newsom routinely vetoed?

How will this all play out in a year when the city will also be electing a new mayor?

 

IDENTITY POLITICS?

When Sups. Chiu, Mar, and Kim broke with their three progressive colleagues to support Chiu for board president — just as Chiu and Mar helped clear the path for Ed Lee to become mayor days earlier — it seemed to many political observers that identity had trumped ideology on the board. There’s some truth to that observation, but it’s too simple an explanation. There’s also the fact that Chiu strongly supported Kim, who is a personal friend and former roommate, in her election, so it’s no surprise she went with him for board president.

And the phrase itself is so laden with baggage and problems that it’s hard to talk about. It has come to signify a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups. “Rather than organizing solely around belief systems, programmatic manifestoes, or party affiliation, identity political formations typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context,” says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an ongoing research project by the students and faculty at Stanford University.

Although the notion of identity politics took hold during the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s — when liberation and organizing movements among women and various ethic and other identity groups fed a larger liberal democratic surge that targeted war, economic inequity, social injustice, and other issues — it’s also a political approach that has divided the populace.

“One of the central charges against identity politics by liberals, among others, has been its alleged reliance on notions of sameness to justify political mobilization,” says the Stanford Encyclopedia. “Looking for people who are like you rather than who share your political values as allies runs the risk of sidelining critical political analysis of complex social locations and ghettoizing members of social groups as the only persons capable of making or understanding claims to justice.”

Mar explains that the reality of identity politics and whether it’s a factor in the current politics at City Hall is far more complex.

“With me, David Chiu, and Jane Kim as a block of three progressive Asians — and I still define David Chiu as a progressive though I think some are questioning that — we all come out of what I would call a pro-housing justice, transit-first, and environmental sustainability [mindset],” Mar told us. “But I think because of our ethnic background and experiences, we may have different perspectives at times than other progressives.”

For example, Mar said, many working class families of color need to drive a car so they’ll differ from progressives who want to limit parking spaces to discourage driving. He also has reservations about the proposed congestion pricing fee and how it might affect low-income drivers.\

“I think often when progressive people of color come into office — Jane Kim might be one of the best examples — that sometimes there’s an assumption that her issues are going to be the same as a white progressive or a Latino progressive,” he said. “But I think kind of the different identities that we all have mean that we’re more complex.”

Campos, a Latino immigrant who is openly gay, noted that “as a progressive person of color, I have at times felt that the progressive movement didn’t recognize the importance of identity politics and what it means for me to have another person of color in power.”

But, he added, “I don’t think identity politics alone should guide what happens. A progressive agenda isn’t just about race but class, sexual orientation, and other things. It’s not enough to say that identity politics justifies everything.”

University of San Francisco political science professor Corey Cook told the Guardian that identity has always been a strong factor in San Francisco politics, even if it was overshadowed by the political realignment around progressive ideology that occurred in 2000, mostly as a reaction to an economic agenda based on rapid development and political cronyism.

“I’m not sure that identity wasn’t relevant, but it was swamped by ideology,” Cook told the Guardian. Now, he said, another political realignment seems to be occurring, one that downplays ideology compared to the position it has held for the last 10 years. “I’m not sure that ideology is dead. But the dynamics have definitely changed.”

Cook sees what may be a more important change reflected in Chiu’s decision to put the political moderates in control of key board committees. But he said that shift was probably inevitable given the difficulties of unifying the diverse progressive constituencies.

“It’s hard to hold a progressive coalition together, and it’s amazing that it has lasted this long,” he said.

There’s another kind of identity politics at play as well — that of native San Franciscans, who often express resentment at progressive newcomers talking about what kind of city this is, versus those who see San Francisco as a city of immigrants and ideas, a place being shaped by a wider constituency than the old-timers like to acknowledge.

“I’m honored to join Sups. Elsbernd and Cohen in representing the neighborhoods they grew up in,” Sup. Mark Farrell said during his opening remarks after being sworn in Jan. 8., sobbing when he thanked his parents for their support.

As he continued, he fed the criticism of the notion of ideology-based politics that has been a popular trope with Gavin Newsom and other fiscal conservatives in recent years, telling the crowd he wanted “to turn City Hall into a place based on issues and ideas, not ideology.”

Cohen also placed more importance on her birthright than on her political philosophy, telling stories about entering board chambers through the back door at age 16 when she was part of a youth program created by then-Mayor Frank Jordan, and with former Mayor Dianne Feinstein coming to speak at Cohen’s third-grade class. “I am a San Francisco native, and that is a responsibility I take seriously,” said Cohen, who graduated from the Emerge Program, which grooms women for political office,

“We will have another woman as president of the Board of Supervisors, and we will have a woman as mayor of San Francisco,” she added. And as the sole African American on the board, she also pledged, “I will be working to add more members of the African American community to the elected family of San Francisco.”

But what issues she plans to focus on and what values she’ll represent were unclear in her comments — as they were throughout her campaign, despite the efforts of journalists and activists to discern her political philosophy. In her public comments, her only stated goal was to build bridges between the community and City Hall and let decisions be guided by the people “not political ideologies.”

Oftentimes in recent San Francisco history, identity and ideology have worked in concert, as they did with former Sup. Harvey Milk, who broke barriers as the first openly gay elected official, but who also championed a broad progressive agenda that included tenants rights, protecting civil liberties, and creating more parks and public spaces.

Sup. Scott Wiener, shortly after being sworn into office, acknowledged the legacy of his district, which was once represented by Milk and fellow gay progressive leader Harry Britt, telling the crowd: “I’m keenly aware of the leadership that has come through this district and I have huge shoes to fill.”

Yet Wiener, a moderate, comes from a different ideological camp than Milk and Britt and he echoed the board’s new mantra of collaboration and compromise. “I will always try to find common ground. There is always common ground,” he said.

 

GETTING THINGS DONE?

Chiu is making a clear effort to break with the past, and has been critical of some progressive leaders. “I think it’s important that we do not have a small group of progressive leaders who are dictating to the rest of the progressive community what is progressive,” he said.

While he didn’t single out former Sup. Chris Daly by name, he does seem to be trying to repudiate Daly’s leadership style. “I think that while the progressive left and the progressive community leaders have had very significant accomplishments over the past 10 years, I do think that there are many times when our oppositional tactics have set us back.”

When Chiu was reelected board president, he told the crowd that “none of us were voted into office to take positions. We were voted into office to get things done.”

Some progressives were not at all happy with that comment. “I thought that was a terrible thing to say,” Avalos told the Guardian, arguing the positions that elected officials take shape the legislation that follows. As an example, he cited the positions that progressive members of Congress took in favor of the public option during the health care reform debate.

Talking about getting things done is “a sanctimonious talking point that fits well with what the Chronicle and big papers want to hear,” Avalos said. He said the Chronicle and other downtown interests are more interested in preserving the status quo and blocking progressive reforms. “It’s what they want to see not get done.”

Campos even challenged the comment publicly during the Jan. 11 board meeting when he said, “It’s important to get things done, but I don’t think getting things done is enough. We have to ask ourselves: what is it that we’re getting done? How is it that we’re getting things done? And for whom is it that we’re doing what we’re doing? Is it for the people, or the downtown corporate interests? I hope it’s not getting things done behind closed doors.”

Chiu said that, for him, getting things done is about expanding the progressive movement and consolidating its recent gains. “I think we all share a political goal. As progressives, we all share a political goal of getting things done and growing mainstream support for our shared progressive principles so that they really become the values of our entire city.”

To do that, he said, progressives are going to need to be more conciliatory and cooperative than they’ve been in the past. “I think it’s easy to slip into a more oppositional way of discussing progressive values, but I’m really pushing to move beyond that.”

The biggest single issue this spring will be the budget — and it’s hard to know exactly where the board president will draw his lines. “I have spoken to Mayor Lee about the need for open, transparent, and community-based budget processes and he’s open to that,” Chiu told us — and that alone would be a huge change. But the key progressive priority for the spring will be finding ways to avoid brutal budget cuts — and that means looking for new revenue.

When asked whether new general revenue will be a part of the budget solution, instead of Newsom’s Republican-style cuts-only approaches, Chiu was cautious. “I am open to considering revenues as part of the overall set of solutions to close the budget deficit,” he said. “I am willing to be one elected here that will try to make that argument.” But with his political clout and connections right now, he can do a lot more than be one person making an argument.

Chiu has always been open to new revenue solutions and even led the way in challenging the cuts-only approach to both the city budget and MTA budget two years in a row, only to back down in the end and cut a deal with Newsom. When asked whether things will be better this year given his closer relationship to Lee, Chiu replied, “I think things are going to be different in the coming months.”

During the board’s Jan. 7 deliberation on Lee, Sup. Eric Mar also said that based on his communications with Lee, Mar believed that the Mayor’s Office is open to supporting new revenue measures. He echoed the point later to us.

In addition to supporting the open, inclusive budget process, Mar called for “a humane budget that protects the safety net and services to the most vulnerable people in San Francisco is kind of the critical, top priority.

“I think it’s going to be difficult working with the different forces in the budget process,” he added. “That’s why I wish it could have been a progressive who was chairing the budget process.”

Mar said progressive activism on the budget process is needed now more than ever. “The Budget Justice Coalition from last year I think has to be reenergized so that so many groups are not competing for their own piece of the pie, but that it’s more of a for-all, share-the-pain budget with as many people communicating from outside as possible, putting the pressure on the mayor and the board to make sure that the critical safety net’s protected.”

 

CUTS WILL BE CENTER STAGE

But major cuts — and the issue of city employees pay and benefits — will also be center stage.

At the board’s Jan. 11 meeting, before the supervisors voted unanimously to nominate Lee as interim mayor, Sup. Elsbernd signaled that city workers’ retirement and health benefits will once again be at the center of the fight to balance the budget.

Elsbernd noted that in past years he was accused of exaggerating the negative impacts that city employees’ benefits have on the city’s budget. “But rather than being inflated, they were deflated,” Elsbernd said, noting that benefits will soon consume 18.14 percent of payroll and will account for 26 percent in three years.

“Does the budget deficit include this amount?” he asked.

And at the after-party that followed Lee’s swearing-in, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, who caused a furor last fall when he launched the ill-considered Measure B, which sought to reform workers’ benefits packages, told us he is not one to give up lightly.

“We learned a lot from that,” Adachi said. “This is still the huge elephant in City Hall. The city’s pension liability just went up another 1 percent, which is another $30 million”

Chu agreed that worker benefits would be a central part of the budget-balancing debate. “Any conversation about the long-term future of San Francisco’s budget has to look at the reality of where the bulk of our spending is,” she said.

Avalos noted that he plans to talk to labor and community based organizations about ways to increase city revenue. “I’m going to work behind the scene on the budget to make sure the communities are well-spoken for,” Avalos said, later adding, “But it’s hard, given that we need a two-thirds majority to pass stuff on the ballot.”

Last year, Avalos helped put two measures on the ballot to increase revenue: Prop. J, which sought to close loopholes in the city’s current hotel tax and asked visitors to pay a slightly higher hotel tax (about $3 a night) for three years, and Prop. N, the real property transfer tax that slightly increased the tax charged by the city on the sale of property worth more than $5 million.

Prop. N should raise $45 million, Avalos said. “I’ve always had my sights set on raising revenue, but making cuts is inevitable.”

 

THE IDEOLOGY ARGUMENT

Newsom and his allies loved to use “ideology” as a term of disparagement, a way to paint progressives as crazies driven by some sort of Commie-plot secret agenda. But there’s nothing wrong with ideology; Newsom’s fiscal conservative stance and his vow not to raise taxes were ideologies, too. The moderate positions some of the more centrist board members take stem from a basic ideology. Wiener, for example, told us that he thinks that in tough economic times, local government should do less but do it better. That’s a clear, consistent ideology.

For much of the past decade, the defining characteristic of the progressives on the board has been a loosely shared urban ideology supported by tenants, immigrant-rights groups, queer and labor activists, environmentalists, preservationists, supporters of public power and sunshine and foes of big corporate consolidation and economic power. Diversity and inclusiveness was part of that ideology, but it went beyond any one political interest or identity group.

It was often about fighting — against corruption and big-business hegemony and for economic and social equality. The progressive agenda started from the position that city government under Brown and Newsom had been going in the wrong direction and that substantive change was necessary. And sometimes, up against powerful mayors and their well-heeled backers, being polite and accommodating and seeking common ground didn’t work.

As outgoing Sup. Daly put it at his final meeting: “I’ve seen go-along to get along. If you want to do more than that, if you think there’s a fundamental problem with the way things are in this world, then go-along to get along doesn’t do it.” When Chiu announced that the new progressive politics is one of pragmatism, he was making a break from that ideology. He was signaling a different kind of politics. He has urged us to be optimistic about the new year — but we still don’t know what the new agenda will look like, how it will be defined, or at what point Chiu and his allies will say they’ve compromised and reached out enough and are ready to take a strong, even oppositional, stand. We do know the outcome will affect the lives of a lot of San Franciscans. And when the budget decisions start rolling down the pike, the political lines will be drawn fairly clearly. Because reaching across the aisle and working together sounds great in theory — but in practice, there is nothing even resembling a consensus on the board about how the city’s most serious problems should be resolved. And there are some ugly battles ahead.

Chiu stiffs progressives on key committee appointments

Sasha Cuttler
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Belying his repeated claims to being part of the progressive movement, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu has ousted his progressive colleagues from key leadership positions on board committees, placing fiscal conservatives into the chairs and majorities on the three most important committees and giving downtown interests more control over city legislation and projects than they’ve had in a decade.

Most notably, the chair of the Budget & Finance Committee was taken away from Sup. John Avalos – who challenged Chiu for the board presidency on Saturday – and given to Sup. Carmen Chu. While Chu did work on budget issues as a staffer in the Mayor’s Office before being appointed supervisor, which Chiu cited in support of his decision, she has consistently voted with the three-member minority of fiscal conservatives throughout her tenure as supervisor, opposing even the most widely accepted revenue proposals and progressive initiatives.

Chiu also placed himself in the swing vote role on that committee, naming Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and Jane Kim as the permanent committee members and Scott Wiener and himself as the temporary members who serve on the committee from March 1 through budget season. Asked if that was intentional, Chiu told us, “Sure was.” With the city facing a budget deficit of almost $400 million after seven years of budget deficits that were closed almost entirely through service cuts and fee increases – rather than general revenue increases targeted at the city’s richest individuals and corporations – the committee will be a key battleground between progressives and fiscal conservatives this year.

“The makeup of the committee reflects a real need for collaboration at this time of transition,” Chiu said of the Budget Committee. But Sup. David Campos was among the many progressives calling the committee assignments a major political realignment, telling us, “I don’t see how you can look at the committee assignments and not see some kind of realignment. The progressives are no longer in control of the key committees.” Avalos called it, “the price of moderates voting for Chiu.”

Also disappointing to progressives were Chiu’s choices for the Rules and Land Use committees. On the Rules Committee, which confirms mayoral appointments, approves the placement of charter amendments on the ballot, and will play a big role this year in approving the redrawing of supervisorial districts in the wake of the 2010 Census, Chiu named Kim and Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Mark Farrell, the latter two childhood buddies who represent the city’s two most conservative districts.

The committee takes the lead role in proposing the board’s three appointees to a task force that will draw the new legislative lines, as well as reviewing the other six appointees (three each from the Mayor’s Office and Elections Commission) and approving the plan that the task force produces. Downtown groups are expected to use the opportunity to negate the gains progressives have made in electing supervisors, probably in collaboration with Elsbernd and Farrell, a venture capitalist new to politics.

“Sean and Mark understand that if they push things through Rules that are outside the mainstream of who the board is, I expect that the full board will stop them,” Chiu told us. He also emphasized that Kim is chairing the committee, a role that can influence what items the committee considers: “On Rules, Sup. Kim will set the agenda there.”

Chiu sounded a similar rationale in defending a makeup on the Land Use & Economic Development Committee, to which he named new Sups. Scott Wiener and Malia Cohen – who were backed by development interests and opposed by tenant groups in last year’s election – along with Sup. Eric Mar as chair.

“With Eric at the helm, he will do a very good job at fighting for neighborhoods, tenants, and other interests,” Chiu said. But Avalos noted that Mar will have his hands full trying to manage a high-stakes, high-profile agenda with little help from his colleagues. “There’s a lot on Eric Mar’s shoulders. It’s his coming of age moment and he’ll have to step up big time to run that committee,” Avalos said.

Avalos said he was disappointed to be removed from the Budget Committee after working on it for eight of the last 10 years, first as Sup. Chris Daly’s legislative aide and then as a supervisor. “But I’m going to work behind the scene on the budget to make sure the communities are well-spoken for,” he said.

Chiu said he has gotten assurances from both Chu and Mayor Ed Lee “about the need for an open, transparent, and community-based budget process.” Carmen Chu echoed the point, telling us, “My hope is that this year the budget is going to be a very collaborative and open process.”

But on the need for need for revenue solutions, which Avalos has said are vital, David Chiu only went this far: “I am open to considering revenues as part of the overall set of solutions to close the budget deficit.” And Carmen Chu wouldn’t even go that far.

“At the end of the day, we need to take into account the context of the state budget, in terms of new cuts and taxes, because anything we do will be on top of the state level,” she told us, adding this about the revenue measures that she opposed last year, “We need to ask who do these measures really impact.”

For progressives, the only bright spots in the committee appointments were Avalos chairing the City Operations & Neighborhood Services Committees, with Mar and Elsbernd also serving; and Sup. Ross Mirkarimi chairing the Public Safety Committee, with Cohen and Campos on it as well.

“I told people I was going to be fair in committee assignments and I have been,” Chiu said.

Sarah Phelan and Tim Redmond contributed to this report.

Will the “real” progressives please stand up?

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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9

Before Ed Lee was unanimously appointed interim mayor at the Jan. 11 Board of Supervisors meeting, Sup. David Campos delivered a speech about the progressive movement in San Francisco.

“Progressives are no longer in control of this Board of Supervisors,” Campos noted. “We have a president of the Board of Supervisors who was elected without a clear progressive majority, and who was elected with a clear backing of the moderate block of supervisors.”

Speaking to the notion that supervisors were not elected to take positions, but to get things done, an idea aired by Board President David Chiu, Campos demurred. “I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say that none of us are elected to take certain positions,” he said.

“It’s important to get things done,” Campos continued. “But I don’t think getting things done is enough. We have to ask ourselves, what is it that we’re getting done? How is it that we’re getting things done? And for whom is it that we’re doing what we’re doing?”

Would things be done in the interests of the people, Campos wanted to know, “or the downtown corporate interests?”

Would things be done in a transparent way? “I hope we’re not getting things done behind closed doors,” Campos said.

Campos also took issue with the implication that “progressives cannot get things done.” He pointed to district elections, universal healthcare, domestic partner benefits, and police reform as accomplishments of the progressive community.

Despite Campos’ pronouncement that progressives were on the losing end, nearly every elected official who stood to speak throughout the course of the historic day uttered the P-word — including Lee himself.

“I was a progressive,” Lee said during his inaugural speech, “before progressive was a political faction in this town.” Lee pointed to his history of fighting for the rights of African Americans and Latinos, his move to establish a whistle-blower program, and his role in creating a recycling program for the city as evidence of his progressive credentials.

Supervisors Eric Mar, Ross Mirkarimi, and Chiu also touched on the issue of progressive politics in comments delivered before Lee was unanimously appointed. “Progressive politics needs to qualify its new definition,” Mirkarimi said, “which is more than just who we are by name or

by ethnicity or culture but by what we stand for.” Mirkarimi also spoke about the transition representing an opportunity to “inject a level of smart politics, not necessarily branded as a progressive or moderate or conservative, but smart politics that take us forward.”

Mar spoke about “our changing progressive movement,” and Board President David Chiu countered Campos’ charge that progressives had lost their control of the board, saying, “I do believe that the majority of this board shares progressive values.”

Chiu also said he believed that there is “a danger in an overly narrow definition of what is progressive.”

At this point, given so many different opinions and affiliations with the label, the very word “progressive” is starting to take on a confusing quality. Does this stem from a lack of a better term? Is it simply that many people with different sets of alliances and perspectives, sometimes at odds with one another, nonetheless identify as “progressives?”

Or is does this new, more complex version of “progressive” relate to the void left behind by two polarizing figures, who drew definitive battle lines between “progressives” and “moderates” by staking out furious opposition to each other? The transition of power in City Hall was marked not only by the introduction of new elected officials in the board chambers and Room 200, but by the departure of former Sup. Chris Daly and former Mayor Gavin Newsom, both towering white men known for relishing the limelight, delivering long-winded addresses, and waging fierce battles against their enemies.

If those elected officials once viewed as the solidly progressive block – former Sup. Chris Daly and Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, and Ross Mirkarimi – were swept out of power with this shift, as Campos suggested, their political label seems to have survived intact. Despite the approving nod of the board’s moderates and two business-friendly powerhouses who hold tremendous sway even if they don’t hold office, the city’s top two officials — Chiu and Lee — nonetheless seemed eager to be associated with “progressive” values.

About pragmatism

Zelda Bronstein
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8
About pragmatism

I want to say a word about pragmatism, about Sup. David Chiu’s contention that “we were voted into office to get things done.” 


I’ll all for pragmatism. I’ve even for compromise sometimes. And I’m certainly in favor of getting things done. But just for a moment, I want to take a step back and remember what Chris Daly (who was actually quite good at getting things done) said during his final board meeting:


“I’ve seen go along to get along. If you want to do more than that, if you think there’s a fundamental problem with the way things are in this world, then go along to get along doesn’t do it.”


Daly’s tactics weren’t always terribly helpful. And working with people who don’t always agree with you doesn’t necessarily mean “going along to get along.” But I share Daly’s basic premise: There are fundamental problemws with the way things are in this city, and “getting things done” has to be about changing the situation. It’s not enough to keep the lights on and the cogs spinning; the city under Mayor Newsom went in the wrong direction, and the new administration has to take a new path.


Civility is good, as far as it goes. Reaching across the aisle and forming a progressive-centrist alliance, as Paul Hogarth suggests, can be useful. But President Obama quickly learned the dangers of an obesssion with bipartisanship, and while we all try to work together, we have to remember: The financial interests that supported Newsom and the conservatives on the Board of Supervisors don’t want to compromise on the big issues. They don’t want substantive change. They want to win, on their terms. And sometimes you just have to fight back.


So the question for 2011 is this: How much is David Chiu a fighter who is willing to use his substantial political capital to push for a progressive agenda? At what point will he say, gee, love working with all of you but some things are right and some things are wrong and there really are two opposing visions of this city and only one of them can win?


I remain the optimist, as always. But naming Carmen Chu, who is strongly opposed to taxes and is one of the most fiscally conservative members of the board, as Budget Committe chair, is enough to make me nervous. 

Judge Kopp to run for D.A.?

Zelda Bronstein
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Judge Kopp to run for D.A.?

Yep: Quentin Kopp, the 82-year-old former supervisor, former state Senator, retired Superior Court judge and political fixture in this city for four decades, is being talked about as a potential challenger to the new district attorney, George Gascon.


I just talked to Kopp, and he confirmed that a lot of people have approached him about running in November, and while he’s not a candidate at this point, he hasn’t ruled it out. “If I do run — and I have to think about the rigors of a campaign — I would run on a platform of using the district attorney’s office to root out political corruption,” he said.


Kopp has always been fairly conservative on law-and-order issues and is a supporter of the death penalty. His political base has always been on the West side of town. But in a typically untraditional fashion, Kopp has become a bit more liberal in his later years — and has always been a strong supporter of open government and a foe of political sleaze.


And he seems to be in good health and certainly hasn’t lost his political vigor. (And, he reminds me, the legendary DA of New York, Robert Morgenthau, served past his 90th birthday.) So Kopp would be a formidable candidate in what’s shaping up to be a fairly large field.


Never a dull moment in this town.

Chiu and pragmatism win over the new board

Sasha Cuttler
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13

Despite the re-election of David Chiu as president of the Board of Supervisors today, there was a palpable shift in the political dynamics at City Hall. “Ideology” has been deemed a dirty word by a majority of the Board of Supervisors, while the politics of identity and “getting things done” is the new imperative.
That shift was most evident in the 8-3 vote for Chiu, with progressive Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, and Ross Mirkarimi supporting Avalos for the post through two rounds of voting. Chiu won it on the second round after fiscal conservative Sup. Sean Elsbernd withdrew his nomination, with he and his other three backers – Sups. Carmen Chu, Scott Wiener, and Mark Farrell – all supporting Chiu in the second round.
“This year represents a changing of the guard, a transition,” Chiu told us, noting the departure of both Mayor Gavin Newsom and supervisors that include Chris Daly. “We’re going to have to get past the oppositional politics of personality.”
In place of a progressive politics based on principled positions and aggressively challenging the influence that powerful downtown interests still exert on City Hall, Chiu is advocating for more pragmatic solutions to the considerable challenges facing the city, starting with a projected budget deficit of almost $400 million.
“None of us were voted into office to take positions, we were voted into office to get things done,” Chiu said.
His approach has occasionally earned him the scorn of progressives over the last two years, particularly in Chiu’s high-profile compromises with Newsom over cuts to Muni and city programs, business tax breaks, and other issues, as Avalos noted. But as Avalos told Chiu, “Clearly today, you have been validated in your hard work.”
Chiu was backed in both rounds of voting by progressive Asian-American Sups. Jane Kim and Eric Mar, both of whom also struck pragmatic notes in their comments. But they also noted that the board’s new civility and diversity are progressive values. “I think this new board represents the evolution of the progressive movement in San Francisco,” Mar said.
Newsom has been pointedly criticizing the notion of ideology for years – apparently unaware that his anti-tax, pro-business philosophy is an ideology – and it was echoed by several supervisors, including Farrell, who said he wants “to turn City Hall into a place based on issues and ideas and not ideology.”
Now, we’re all left to wait and see what kinds of issues and ideas take root. We’ll have much more on an extraordinary week at City Hall – with a new board and new incoming Mayor-select Ed Lee – in next week’s Guardian.

City Hall’s mad political swirl

Sasha Cuttler
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City Hall’s mad political swirl

It was common knowledge around City Hall that Chinatown power broker Rose Pak and former Mayor Willie Brown were lurking behind the sudden emergence of Ed Lee as the pick for interim mayor, but Bay Citizen reporter Gerry Shih does an excellent job showing how it actually went down in a story that appeared in today’s New York Times.

Pak is also expected to orchestrate a big show of Chinese-American power during this afternoon’s Board of Supervisors meeting, and progressive supervisors tell the Guardian that they have been personally lobbied by Pak to get behind Lee. Some supervisors hold out the hope that Michael Hennessey might still have a shot, or that Ed Harrington might be put back in play, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Lee seems like he’ll be the guy, at least with this board.

In addition, the rumor mill is buzzing that David Chiu will declare his candidacy for mayor in the coming weeks, although other sources indicate he hasn’t made a final decision yet. And given that the new board still has to confirm the current board’s selection, don’t be too surprised if someone makes a play to name Chiu as interim mayor, but that’s a longshot.

Following right on the heels of today’s interim mayor vote will be tomorrow’s swearing in of the new board and vote on president, which Chiu would like to hold onto. But after crossing his progressive colleagues on Tuesday to support Lee over Hennessey, most progressives are expected to push for Sup. John Avalos, while fiscal conservative Sup. Sean Elsbernd is also expected to make a bid for the presidency. None appear to have six votes yet.

Despite media reports about the board’s “progressive majority,” the current political dynamics don’t really give any faction a majority, with identity politics holding heavier sway than ideology right now. So the only prediction that political watchers can make right now is that it’s going to be interesting.

Daly goes down swinging

Sasha Cuttler
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7

The League of Pissed of Voters made a Daly roast video honoring the “biggest asshole in San Francisco politics”

Between last night’s epic Chris Daly Roast and Daly’s crazy-man antics on Tuesday night, Daly is ending his 10-year tenure on the Board of Supervisors in fitting fashion: as a passionate leader of the progressive movement who has also been its – and his own – worst enemy.

A huge crowd packed The Independent to honor and make fun of Daly and other political figures, and it definitely had the feel of an alcohol-fueled progressive love-fest, right down to conservative Chronicle columnist CW Nevius taking a pie in the face after stepping off the stage for the evening’s most tedious session behind the microphone.

Well, at least it was until Daly took the mike, going on and on in often tasteless fashion and resisting efforts by his wife, Sarah Low, and others to get him to give up the spotlight. Daly just isn’t ready to leave the stage yet, despite buying and running the Buck Tavern, soon to be renamed Daly’s Dive. He’s even half seriously talking about running for mayor.

But for all of Daly’s many accomplishments – he is the most productive supervisor of his era and the most passionately progressive – his personal grudges also create problems for the movement. On Tuesday, Daly led the effort to name Sheriff Michael Hennessey as interim mayor, twisting Sup. Eric Mar’s arm to get him to come along, only to fall one vote short.

Even though Hennessey and Ed Lee are similar figures, Daly turned Board President David Chiu’s support for Lee into an act of epic ideological betrayal, aggressively menacing Chiu at the meeting and shouting at him, “I will haunt you! I will politically haunt you! It’s on like Donkey Kong.” He spoke over his colleagues as they had the floor and tried to talk, including repeatedly yelling at Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, “You are a representative of the rich!” And when the board reconvened after a short recess, Daly remained in the audience, periodically flipping the bird to the board.

But for all Daly’s current ire toward Chiu, it should be noted that Chiu became board president two years ago because Daly led the opposition to Sup. Ross Mirkarimi becoming board president, giving Chiu far more political power than he would otherwise have. Daly has long prided himself on his good political instincts, and at times he has indeed been a masterful political tactician, but his ego sometimes gets the better of him. He’s hyper competitive and just wants to win, even when victory carries an unacceptable price.

When the new Board of Supervisors takes the oath of office at noon on Saturday, the progressive movement will lose a passionate leader in Chris Daly. But as it elects a new president and its political dynamics take shape, someone will need to take Daly’s role as the whip and conscience of the board, a role even his enemies acknowledged that he played.

“Chris, I think San Francisco is better because you served,” Sup. Sophie Maxwell said on Tuesday, gritting her teeth in praising someone who has at times scorned and belittled her. It will be interesting to see how Daly’s role is filled on the new board, and whether we can still have the passion without its pitfalls.

Chiu rejects DA job and defends his support for Lee

Sasha Cuttler
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Amid speculation that he was angling to be appointed district attorney – and questions about whether that goal influenced his support for Ed Lee to be named interim mayor – Board of Supervisors President David Chiu has issued a press release announcing that he’s withdrawing from consideration for the DA’s job.

“Right now my strong belief is that I can best serve San Francisco from City Hall. The challenges ahead of us will require a new level of collaboration between our elected leaders—many of them new to office—and all San Franciscans who care about the future of our incredibly diverse and inclusive City,” Chiu said in the prepared statement, thanking Mayor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris for their consideration and for recent meetings with Chiu on the appointment.

When I spoke with Chiu yesterday afternoon, he said that he was leaning against taking the job, partly out of concern that Newsom would replace him with a fiscal conservative like Joe Alioto Jr. “I would not want to leave my seat to someone whose perspective on issues is drastically different than mine,” Chiu told me.

He also strongly emphasized that there was no connection at all between his discussion with Newsom over the DA appointment and with Chiu’s pivotal support for Lee, and Chiu said Newsom did not raise the issue during their conversations. On Tuesday, Chiu broke with his progressive colleagues to be the sixth vote in favor of Lee.

Chiu said that he has long been supportive of Lee and Chiu disagrees with the assertion that Lee is a less progressive pick than Sheriff Michael Hennessey, who had the support of five progressive supervisors. “He’s someone who has tremendous progressive roots,” Chiu said of Lee, noting that Chinese-American progressives have long considered him one of their own. “We have been working with Ed Lee for years and we know where his heart is.”

Chiu argued that Lee is experienced in a broad range of city functions and issues while Hennessey’s knowledge of city government issues is limited mainly to law enforcement. While the strong and sudden support for Lee among fiscal conservatives has been worrisome to many progressives, Chiu noted that “unfortunately, the moderates are far more disciplined than we are on the progressive side.”

“We have many competing and diverse constituencies that led us to be unable to get to consensus around one candidate,” Chiu said.

The current Board of Supervisors will convene for a final time at 3 p.m. tomorrow to vote on Lee after progressive supervisors successfully pushed for a delay in the vote on Tuesday. In addition to Chiu and the five supervisors to his ideological right, Sup. Eric Mar has announced that he will also support Lee, and Sups. John Avalos and David Campos said they are open to backing Lee after they get the chance to speak with him.

Hennessey, Lee and change

Zelda Bronstein
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Hennessey, Lee and change

I’m not surprised that Randy Shaw is defending Ed Lee and arguing that either Lee or Mike Hennessey would be fine as interim mayor:


Ed Lee is not Gavin Newsom. Lee has dedicated his life to public service, spent years as a poverty lawyer, and has proved an outstanding administrator over the past two decades.


Shaw worked with Lee way back in the 1980s, when they were both young, underpaid lawyers doing housing work for some of the poorest San Franciscans. Both of them were doing crucial work that nobody else would handle; both of them were making San Francisco a better place. While I sometimes disagree with Shaw (and he seems to be all about attacking the Guardian these days) we have been close allies over the years on almost all the issues that matter. And I’m not going to attack Ed Lee or suggest that he’s forgotten his roots in immigrant rights and poverty law.


Here’s what I will say: If Ed Lee is interim mayor, you can expect very little change in Room 200. There’s a reason that Newsom wants Lee in office, and it’s not that he was a great progressive lawyer once. Newsom (and Sean Elsbernd, who nominated Lee) don’t want to see the mayor’s staff infrastructure — the people really running the city — dismantled. They don’t want any real changes in how business is done — and how the budget is addressed — from the way things worked the past seven years.


Lee hasn’t survived (and thrived) under so many different mayors by rocking the boat. He would be a cautious administrator who, I suspect, would avoid anything controversial (like tax increases on the wealthy or big cuts in the bloated Fire Department). Ed Lee is not Gavin Newsom — but his staff will be Gavin Newsom’s staff and, through the inertia that is San Francisco bureaucracy, not much will change in the next 11 months.


That’s what the conservatives on the board want, and I understand that. I don’t think Hennessey would make dramatic changes, either — the whole idea of a caretaker mayor is that the person who fills out Newsom’s term won’t try to put his own stamp on city government. (And let’s remember, Hennessey sided with Newsom on privatizing jail health services) But I think Hennessey would bring some new blood into the office and would be more likely to consider an approach to the budget that differs significantly from what Newsom has offered.


Everyone agrees that Lee is a smart, competent manager; that’s why he won unanimous approval as the City Administrator, an office that doesn’t involve major policy initiatives. So if you think things are basically okay in San Francisco, and you don’t want any major policy shifts out of the Mayor’s Office until after the next election, Ed Lee will do a fine job for you. That’s not demonizing him; that’s just explaining the reality here.


Me, I don’t think things are okay in this city at all. I’m looking for dramatic, profound, radical change in the next mayor. I’m not going to get it from either of these interim candidates, but after talking to Hennessey, I think if the supervisors pushed for a better, more progressive budget, he’d go along. I’m not so sure about Lee. And the fact that Newsom and every member of the conservative wing of the board wants Lee over Hennessey says something to me. These people aren’t fools; they don’t want any surprises. That’s why they’re making this move.


I’ve been wrong before. Hope I’m wrong this time. Maybe Mayor Ed Lee will support $250 million worth of new revenue measures, like a city income tax and a business tax overhaul that makes the biggest companies pay more. But if that was part of his agenda, I suspect Elsbernd and Newsom would have a clue — and then he wouldn’t be their choice.


 


 

Backroom Ed Lee mayoral deal raises suspicions

Sasha Cuttler
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11

Last night’s dramatic eight-hour Board of Supervisors meeting, at which six supervisors suddenly came together around naming City Administrator Ed Lee to succeed Gavin Newsom as mayor, was a classic case of backroom dealing making, the full results of which the public still doesn’t know. And it is those unknowns that have progressives rightfully pissed off and distrustful of the choice.
On the surface, both Lee and the progressives’ preferred pick, Sheriff Michael Hennessey, are similar figures who fit Newsom’s demand for a nonpolitical caretaker mayor. He has publicly said both would be acceptable, and both have some impressive progressive credentials as well.
Lee was a civil rights attorney who help run the Asian Law Caucus before being hired by then-Mayor Art Agnos as an investigator for whistleblower complaints, and he’s worked for the city ever since, serving as executive director of the Human Rights Commission and director of the Department of Public Works. Newsom moved him in the powerful post of city administrator in 2005 and he was recently approved for a second five-term for that job, unanimously approved by the Board of Supervisors.
Sup. Bevan Dufty and other supervisors had even talked to Lee about being interim mayor, and he has consistently said that he didn’t want it – until a couple days ago. That’s when Newsom and the fiscal conservatives on the board suddenly coalesced around Lee, who apparently changed his mind while on a trip to China, from which he is scheduled to return on Sunday, although that might be moved up now that the board has delayed the vote choosing him until Friday afternoon.
That delay was won on a 6-5 vote, with moderate Sup. Sophie Maxwell heeding progressive requests for an opportunity to at least be able to speak with Lee before naming him the city’s 43rd mayor. “I don’t think we should make such a decision blindly,” Sup. John Avalos said.
It was a reasonable request that neither the fiscal conservatives nor Board President David Chiu, the swing vote for Lee in what his progressive supporters angrily call a betrayal, would heed. And the question is why. What exactly is going on here? Because it’s not just progressive paranoia to think that a deal has been cut to maintain the status quo in the Mayor’s Office, as Newsom’s downtown allies have desperately been seeking.
Just consider how all of this went down. Sources have confirmed for the Guardian that Chiu met with Newsom at least twice in recent days, and that Newsom offered Chiu the district attorney’s job, hoping to be able to put a fiscal conservative into the D3 seat and topple a bare progressive majority on the board. Chiu reportedly resisted the offer and tried to influence who Newsom would name to succeed him, and we’ll find out as soon as today who the new district attorney will be.
Closed door meetings also apparently yielded Lee as Newsom’s choice for successor mayor, with both Chiu and Sup. Eric Mar initially inclined to back Lee, who would be the city’s first Chinese-American mayor. After pushing his colleagues for weeks to name a new mayor, Daly tried to thwart the Lee pick by initially seeking a delay, then finally persuading Mar to go with Hennessey as his first choice.
“Politically, he will work for the other side, my progressive colleagues,” Daly said at the hearing, calling it “the biggest fumble in the history of progressive politics in San Francisco.”
As the deliberations began, Mar called Lee his mentor at the Asian Law Caucus and someone whom he respects, but that he preferred to keep Lee in his current post and to support Hennessey, who got five votes on the first round, while Lee got four, including Chiu.
Dufty – who said that he would be supportive of Hennessey for mayor – and Sup. Sophie Maxwell abstained from voting for anyone during the first round. On the second round, Maxwell went with Lee, leaving Dufty as the kingmaker. But rather than decide, he asked for a recess at 8:45 pm, and he and Maxwell went straight to Room 200 to confer with Newsom.
When the board reconvened, Dufty announced his support for Lee. Dufty denies that Newsom offered him anything, but he did confirm that Newsom indicated a preference for Lee and a willingly to help Lee return to his current post next year, which requires some tricky maneuvering around city ethics laws. Similarly, Chiu denies that his support for Lee was anything less than his unconditional preference.
But it’s hard to know. After weeks of Newsom playing games with leaving the Mayor’s Office to assume his duties at lieutenant governor (a stand egged on by his downtown allies and Chronicle editorial writers), it seems likely that Lee has given them some kind of assurance that he won’t rock the boat or side with board progressives on key issues.
Some progressives aren’t ready to accept that Lee will be our next mayor, believing that Chiu, Dufty, or Maxwell can still be shamed into changing their minds, but that seems unlikely. Instead, progressive Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, and Ross Mirkarimi just want to talk to Lee and they hope to be convinced that he’ll work cooperatively with the board and not simply be a Newsom puppet.
“I have been open and I remain open to supporting Ed Lee,” Campos said in support of the motion to continue the meeting to Friday at 3 pm, the day before the new Board of Supervisors is sworn in.
But he and the other progressives are openly questioning the Lee power play. After all, Campos said, his nomination of Hennessey was already an olive branch to Newsom’s side, saying he wasn’t the progressives’ first choice but simply the most acceptable from Newsom’s list. “It was in the spirit of one side of the political spectrum saying to the other side, ‘We want to come together,’” Campos said.
Instead, it was a backroom political deal with carried the day, a deal that Chiu went along with.
“I feel amazingly betrayed right now,” Jon Golinger, Chiu’s campaign manager, told us after the meeting. “It’s a shock…Process-wise, Ed Lee came out of nowhere.”
And that’s antithetical to the progressive values on transparency and public process. So now, it’s up to Lee, Chiu, and the other involved in this deal to fill in a few of the many blanks, and to assure the public that this choice is in the best interests of the whole city.

A swing to Lee — Daly ballistic

Zelda Bronstein
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45

Bevan Dufty emerged from his meeting in the mayor’s office to say he was ready to vote for Ed Lee. The deal was cut; we don’t know what it is, but that’s what happened. And Sup. Chris Daly is ballistic.

“This is,” he just said, “the biggest political fumble in the history of progressive politics in San Francisco” and he put the blame directly on Board President David Chiu, the sixth progressive vote who went with Lee over Hennessey. As much as he liked Ed Lee as a person, Daly said, “politically, he will work for the other side.” He then told Chiu he would “haunt” him politically and announced, “it’s on like Donkey Kong.”

Then Avalos asked for a recess “to go in some back room” and with minor disagreements, the board is in recess until 10:15.

Wow. What a moment. What a totally bogus way for a new mayor to be chosen for this city. Ed Lee wasn’t even on the radar, wasn’t under consideration, had said he didn’t want the job, until some deal was cut at the last minute. Nothing against Ed Lee, but you can’t be an effective mayor of this city when you jump into things at the last minute, with no chance for anybody to talk about or evaluate your credentials. And he’s clearly the mayor of the conservative board members — and David Chiu has joined them.

I’m not as angry as Chris Daly — that would be hard — but I’m disappointed.

 

Dufty the swing vote — and talking to Newsom

Zelda Bronstein
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5

The Board of Supervisors has gone into recess with a split vote on either Ed Lee or Mike Hennessey as interim mayor. One supervisors have voted no on both nominees — and now holds the power to decide who the next mayor will be.

And Bevan Dufty, the wing vote, along with Sophie Maxwell, was just seen walking into the mayor’s office.

Not the way anyone thought this would come down; David Chiu wasn’t even nominated, and Art Agnos, who at one point looked close to the magic number of 6, only got 3 votes. It’s going to be close, with all the conservative supervisors voting for Lee and all the progressives except Chiu voting for Hennessey. It’s entirely possible that we’ll have at least a prospective new mayor tonight — that is, if Newsom ever decides to leave town.

 

 

Going commando

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Going commando

CHEESY, SLEAZY CINEMA Last year found Jack Abramoff a peculiarly hot commodity at the movies, especially if you consider he spent most of the year in federal prison and hadn’t exercised his own Hollywood ambitions in nearly a quarter-century.

But then his recent on-screen exposure was not of an ilk he’d have chosen for himself: as subject of a documentary (2010’s Casino Jack and the United States of Money) and biographical drama (plain Casino Jack, also 2010) both depicting the now-infamous Washington, D.C., lobbyist as personification of that Shrub Era conservative jingoism, corrupt backdoor business deals, egomania, and greed that helped land us in our current economic craphole. And which got him four years, ending last month even as former Republican House Majority leader and BFF Tom DeLay faced the start of his own money-laundering slammer stint.

Abramoff was not likely to have enjoyed either portrait, not even as semi-sympathetically (albeit poorly) portrayed by Academy Award-winning thespian Kevin Spacey in the weaker film. If he’d been able to invent his own starring vehicle, no doubt it would have been more a flatteringly bold cross of 1987’s Wall Street (the Michael Douglas part), 1960’s Exodus (the Paul Newman as he-man crusader for Israel part) and 1980s Rocky-Rambo Stallone (the whole enchilada, from bulging biceps to rippling Old Glory and Commie-wasting weaponry). In the Reagan America of his physical if not yet political prime, he really was a bit of all those things: bodybuilder, Zionist, rabid anti-Red.

Whether he ever harbored dreams of being a celluloid hero, or was always content to become a real-life Supermensch, Abramoff did once make a movie — exactly one — exemplifying his beliefs and self-image in suitably cartoonish fashion, before realizing Hollywood’s corridors of power were puny game for a real man. So he moved on to the more hallowed halls of D.C. and Manhattan. But first, there was Red Scorpion.

This 1988 actioner starred 6-foot, 5-inch Swedish meatball Dolph Lundgren, hot from playing the robo-Russkie villain in Rocky IV (1985) and He-Man in Masters of the Universe (1987), as a “perfect killing machine” sent by evil Soviet commanders to assassinate a resistance leader in a fictive African nation under the thumb of Communist oppressors.

Tending not to play well with others, Lt. Nikolai Rachenko spends his first night here in jail for “disorderly conduct” — after a few drinks he’d kicked open a saloon door, beat up half the patrons, and machine-gunned the joint. Boys will be boys. He shares a cell with a local freedom fighter (Al White) and an American reporter (M. Emmet Walsh at his formidably most-obnoxious). For no obvious reason our steroid miracle of a KGB enforcer decides moments later to switch sides and help them escape. This effort requires killing about a million extras playing Russian and Cuban military occupiers to the tune of Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly.” (Because nothing says “Democracy rocks!” like the orgasmic trills of an African American queen.)

Slowly-dawning ability to feel empathy for suffering peoples indicated by the heavings of his perpetually oiled torso and completely unintelligible mutterings, Nikolai is recaptured by former masters and made to endure homoerotic torture. He escapes again, staggering through the desert alone, shirtless and shiny. Bushmen rescuers teach this Golden Bwana something or other — like Billy Jack, he sweats, grunts, and hallucinates toward enlightenment — and give him a scorpion tattoo as diploma.

Now armed spiritually as well as abdominally to do good, his reappearance in civilization spurs Walsh to call this juiced Russki “the gutsiest goddamn sonuvabitch I ever met.” (Arne Olsen’s screenplay, from the brothers Jack and Robert Abramoff’s story idea, is seldom even this articulate.)

The climactic triumphant popular uprising at one point hinges on Lundgren lifting a truck out of a sandtrap with his bare bulging guns, a bit included purportedly because Jack Abramoff was an iron-pumping addict himself at the time. (What makes the scene funnier is that it evidently occurred to no one that Nikolai’s load would be lightened if Walsh got his fat ass out of the truck cab for a minute.)

A movie rife with bad dialogue badly spoken — you’ll gulp as White seemingly enthuses “When we arrive there will be a celebration and much fisting!” — ends aptly with the worst pronunciation ever of “Fucken’ A.” Our heroes are then freeze-framed while strolling over another umpteen freshly killed Commies.

Red Scorpion was shrugged off as what it basically was, yet another Rambo ripoff arriving toward the tail end of that subgenre’s lifespan. (A theatrical flop, it did well enough on tape and cable to prompt 1994’s in-name-only sequel Red Scorpion 2, on which the Abramoffs got executive producer credits.) There certainly are more cheap, inept, laughable, senseless, just plain dumb films of its ilk — though this one does excel at dumbness — and unlike many it does have one good joke, involving a grenade and a decapitated hand. Otherwise, if not for its primary motivator’s subsequent antics, Red Scorpion would be just another forgotten B-grade cultural relic.

But the Beverly Hills-raised Abramoff — who spent the earlier part of the 1980s as an aggressive far-right youth activist — intended this first-last cinematic venture as a stealth combo of dynamite popular entertainment and anti-Red Menace propaganda. He modeled the character of “Mombaka’s” resistance savior Sundata (played by Ruben Nthodi) on real-life Angolan anti-Marxist rebel warlord Jonas Savimbi, a darling of later Cold War hawks. (Others would soon call him “a charismatic homicidal maniac.”)

It is still debated whether Red Scorpion‘s $16 million budget was secretly funded primarily by the South African government and/or military. Abramoff denies it — though he had already spearheaded support of the apartheid regime as College Republican National Committee chairman and founder of the dubiously named think tank, International Freedom Foundation. In any case, once protestors got wind of the production shooting in South Africa-controlled Namibia — defying an international boycott — a skittish Warner Bros. pulled out as distributor. (Scorpion was then picked up in the U.S. by Shapiro-Glickenhaus, who later gave us 1990’s Frankenhooker and 1992’s Basket Case 3: The Progeny.)

The shoot was fraught. Some actors and crew complained they were never paid; production was suspended for three months when money ran out; star attraction Lundgren was apparently quite the hulking handful on and off set. Afterward, Abramoff — who’d converted to Orthodox Judaism at age 12 after seeing Fiddler on the Roof (1971) — blamed the film’s potty-mouthed and violent excesses on director Joseph Zito (of future Tea Party fan Chuck Norris’ own 1985 anti-Commie classic Invasion U.S.A.) He founded something called the Committee For Traditional Jewish Values in Entertainment as penance.

That noble latter endeavor was abandoned about five seconds later, however, since by then Abramoff realized he had better things to do than mess around with pansy-ass showbiz. Among his future, better-known achievements — the ones that got him top billing as Inmate 27593-112 — were bilking casino-owning Native American tribes, keeping third world factory sweatshops safe from investigation, pimping Congress to myriad corporations, and otherwise pedaling corruption ’round the globe, all while clutching family values and raving against the Godforsaken liberals. He was ever so righteous about doing wrong.

Today, he’s free, if uncharacteristically silent, having finished both his hoosegow stint and a halfway-house stay during which he worked for below minimum wage at a Baltimore kosher pizzaria. One suspects he will not be flippin’ pie in the future, however. Sibling Robert Abramoff is still in the biz, producing such fascinating-sounding recent projects as 2009’s Pauly Shore and Friends, 2009’s Jesus People: The Movie, and 2010’s Dino Mom.

Lundgren, recently looking fine (if downsized) in 2010’s all-star Expendables, now directs his own direct-to-DVD action vehicles. Still fighting the good fight, alongside Israeli special forces and South African mercenaries, Savimbi died in a hail of machine-gun fire eight years ago. That event helped end Angola’s civil war after nearly three decades. And Red Scorpion lives on, more or less. I found my used VHS copy at Rasputin Music for 50 cents. Fucken’ A!

Eat, pray, defend chick lit

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Eat, pray, defend chick lit

caitlin@sfbg.com

LIT I read Eat, Pray Love a while ago, and I’m nervous to tell you that I liked it. Ever since bottle blonde Julia Roberts assumed her best worried-kitten face for the book’s film version, no self-respecting lit snob would ever admit to having enjoyed Elizabeth Gilbert’s account of her year of finances-be-damned travel, healing from divorce, and fulminations on the belabored pursuit of love.

The release of her follow-up, Committed (Viking Adult), a socio-historical look at marriage couched in the story of Gilbert’s own unexpected union to her green card-challenged hubby Felipe — and the announcement of her Jan. 14 appearance at the Yoga Journal Conference — goaded me to examine just why people are down on Gilbert. After perusing the con side (a blog called Drink Curse Hate was enlightening) I found that the ire seems to hinge on two precepts: that she is self-centered, and that her writing is what we diminutively refer to as chick lit. Well three, if you count complaints about her flippant usage of Eastern spirituality for self-help. But I’m not sure I have much to answer back to on that front.

First, a self-centered writer? Well stomp my keyboard and call me Danielle Steele. Writers write because we think we have something interesting and important to say. There are plenty of writers who write about themselves, and only themselves, and whom people fall over themselves to love. Hey, David Sedaris. Eat, Pray, Love is indeed all about Gilbert, but that doesn’t make it uninteresting. Glamorous travel writer leaves unsatisfying marriage, mends heart with an empowering trek around the world, yoga, Italian food, and impressively hunky Brazilian men encountered along the way. Hate on, haters, you’d write about it if it happened to you.

Second, chick lit. Literature written for chicks, by chicks, about chicks — am I getting the definition right? This term can stop being a pejorative one yesterday, as far as I’m concerned. And really, any book that teaches women that it’s okay to long for more than children and complete kitchen sets (which EPL does in spades) should be applauded in these uncertain times.

The funny thing about Gilbert is that before Eat, Pray, Love, she had a thriving writing career. Her creative nonfiction books were about men, of all things: an account of the macho culture of a Maine fishing village (named Stern Men) and the tale of an awe-inspiring, if prickly master outdoors-man (this titled The Last Man in America). Gilbert was a regular contributor at Spin and GQ, for which she penned the article on her days bartending at one of Manhattan’s most testosterone-heavy dives, Coyote Ugly Saloon. There was a movie based on that one, by the way.

“I couldn’t believe that Disney wanted to buy this story, it was so raunchy,” Gilbert tells me over the phone from the converted New Jersey church where she and Felipe had set up shop just prior to the onset of Eat, Pray, Love fever. “I still don’t know how they did it — I was like no! I can still smell the vomit.”

No, she could never have anticipated the last book’s zeitgeist-level success. No, she doesn’t expect Committed to replicate those sales numbers. The Eat, Pray, Love mania was “like a big circus parade going on just outside my door nonstop. I spend my day washing dishes and doing laundry and then I look out the window and go, ‘Wow, there’s that circus out there — they have dancing bears!’ and then I go back to doing what I’m doing.”

As far as she’s concerned, the book was the pinnacle of her career — and that’s fine. “The definition of a phenomenon is that it only happens once and you don’t know why it happened.”

But my money’s on Committed to be a success in its own right. The premise: Gilbert’s just not that into marriage. But marry she must, to secure Brazilian hubs Felipe the right to live in the country they’ve made their home, so she embarks on finding out what the hell it is about societally recognized partnership that people down through history have found acceptable, even appealing. She comes up with divergent and fascinating tidbits: that early Christians eschewed marriage, a socially conservative writer’s thesis that marriage is in itself a subversive act.

I read the book in a day. Gilbert’s conversational flow carries you through her life’s intimate details, like the transcribed list of personal faults she complied for Felipe. (She includes her need for attention and overly enthusiastic cold shoulder, yet leaves out the inevitability that every iota of their relationship will at one point be discussed by book clubs around the country.) A tone as engaging as hers has rarely been applied to the question of what marriage means in this day and age, and it’s refreshing to see that matter given some thought — even if her research is by her own admission not exhaustive. Hey, I probably wouldn’t have read the book if it had been.

I wanted to give the book to my newly sprouted crop of married friends, see how my mom reacts to Gilbert’s conclusions on child rearing, copy a chapter on the importance of solo travel for my boyfriend to read.

But they’d probably make fun of me. Elizabeth Gilbert? Please, that’s chick lit.

YOGA JOURNAL CONFERENCE: AN EVENING WITH ELIZABETH GILBERT

Jan. 14, 7:30 p.m.,

$29–$39 conference attendees, $49–$59 regular admission

Hyatt Regency

5 Embarcadero Center, SF

(800) 561-7407

www.yjevents.com

 

2010 Offies!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
2010 Offies!

tredmond@sfbg.com

When a major conservative political movement starts using a name that typically refers to the act of scrotal fellatio, you know it’s morning again in America. In 2010, the teabaggers came home. They nominated candidates who think masturbation is selfish and wonder why monkeys aren’t still evolving into humans. They held rallies urging the government to “get out of my Medicare,” which happens to be a government program. Their leaders praised dictators and urged women who had been raped to look at the bright side of things.

And those were just the headlines.

It’s hard to imagine a year that could be worse than 2010 — but it was a great vintage for the Offies.

Presenting the Off Guard awards for the silliest, most insane, and absolute worst of the year that was.

AND SHE FIGURES IF WE ARREST EVERYONE WITH BROWN SKIN, WE CAN FINALLY GET THIS SORT OF BEHAVIOR UNDER CONTROL

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer told reporters that illegal immigration resulted in beheadings in the desert.

BUT AS LONG AS YOU DON’T TOUCH YOURSELF WHEN YOU THINK OF THE DEVIL, IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY

Christine O’Donnell, the Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware who decried masturbation as a “selfish act,” said she only dabbled in witchcraft and had just one date on a satanic altar.

EXCEPT THAT WE ALREADY ARE, AND WE ALREADY ARE

Jerry Brown said he opposed the state’s marijuana legalization measure because “we can’t compete with China if we’re all stoned.”

LOOK BUSY

A Pew Research Center poll showed that 41 percent of Americans think Jesus will return in the next 40 years.

HEY, IF WE’D JUST CREATED THE WORST ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER OF THE DECADE, WE’D WANT A LITTLE BREAK, TOO

A few days after the worst oil spill in U.S. history, BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward complained that he wanted his life back.

BUT HE SWEARS HE’LL STOP AT BEHEADINGS

Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said if he were governor he’d give the National Guard live ammunition to shoot at immigrants on the border.

AFTER ALL, IF THEY’RE NOT IN AN AIRPLANE, THEY CAN’T DO ANY DAMAGE

GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina said that people on the federal no-fly list should have the right to own guns.

OOH, WHEN YOU TALK TOUGH LIKE THAT YOU ALMOST SOUND LIKE SOMEONE WHO COULD STAND UP TO THE REPUBLICANS. OR MAYBE NOT

President Obama asked whose ass he should kick at BP.

IT’S OKAY, THOUGH, AS LONG AS THEY WEREN’T ENGAGING IN ANY SELFISH ACTS

Staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission got caught spending as much as eight hours a day downloading porn at the office.

AND SOMETIMES GOP CANDIDATES ARE NITWITS

Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle praised Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for his efforts to privatize that country’s retirement system, saying “sometimes dictators have good ideas.”

YEAH, COME ON, WHY CAN’T YOU LOOK AT THE BRIGHT SIDE OF THINGS?

Sharron Angle said that women who have become pregnant as the result of rape or incest should “turn lemons into lemonade.”

DAMN GUMMINT TRYING TO INTERFERE WITH PRIVATE BIDNESS

GOP Congressman Joe Barton of Texas apologized to BP for a White House “shakedown.”

YES, AS A MATTER OF FACT I DO OWN THE WHOLE GODDAM SCHOOL

Meg Whitman’s son threw softball equipment over a fence to kick a group of computer science and physics students off the Princeton rugby field.

NICE, SINCE THOSE GROUPS ALL GOT ALONG SO WELL

GOP Senate candidate Chuck DeVore compared Palestinian activists to Nazis, Fascists, and Communists.

AND OF COURSE, THAT WORKS SO WELL WITH MODERN MANAGED CARE

Nevada banned chicken costumes from the polls after Nevada Senate candidate Sue Lowden said that people should barter with doctors for health care the way “our grandparents would bring a chicken to the doctor.”

ANOTHER GREAT MOMENT IN THEOLOGY FROM THE MAN WHO BROUGHT YOU THE PEDOPHILE PRIEST COVER UP

Pope Benedict said it was okay for male prostitutes to wear condoms.

SO HE’S GOT THAT GOING FOR HIM. WHICH IS NICE

Formerly classified State Department cables revealed that the premier of Korea is still an excellent drinker.

ACTUALLY, THEY TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE TEA PARTY AND DECIDED THEY WERE BETTER OFF AS THEY ARE

Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell said that evolution was a myth; after all, she wondered, “why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?”

THE CHURCH HAS ALWAYS BEEN KNOWN FOR ITS SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE

The Vatican announced that the ordination of women and the abuse of children were both “grave crimes.”

THAT’S OKAY, IT WILL LOOK GOOD ON HIS RESUME

Gavin Newsom decided to run for lieutenant governor after saying he didn’t know what the job was.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK, CIA EDITION

The United States held high-level negotiations with a supposedly senior Taliban operative who turned out to be a Pakistani shopkeeper.

BUT WAIT — HOW WILL WE KNOW IF WE’RE SUPPOSED TO WORRY OR NOT?

The Department of Homeland Security abandoned color-coded safety alerts.

THE INTELLIGENCE AND CULTURAL TASTE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IS SIMPLY STAGGERING

Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol, made it to the final round of Dancing with the Stars.

WHICH MAKES HIM ENTIRELY QUALIFIED TO SERVE AS A REPUBLICAN POLITICIAN

Dan Quayle’s son ran for Congress in Arizona and admitted that he had been posting on “dirty Scottsdale” under the name of Brock Landers, a sidekick to porn star Dirk Diggler.

IS HE ONE OF THE NAZI FASCIST COMMUNISTS, TOO?

Rand Paul said Obama’s criticism of BP was “un-American.”

WAIT — WAS THAT A BROWN ALERT?

The California Highway Patrol shut down its South Lake Tahoe office after officers found an anal vibrator and thought it was a bomb.

HONESTY IS JUST PART OF THE PROCESS OF RECOVERY

Tiger Woods admitted that he sucked.

EXCEPT THAT IT MOSTLY BENEFITS THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY

Vice President Joe Biden called the health reform bill “a big fucking deal.”

IT’S THOSE CUTE WOODEN SHOES, YOU SEE

NATO Commander John Sheehan said Dutch soldiers were too gay.

DAMN, AND HE’S SUCH AN ATTRACTIVE MAN. I’M SURE THE TSA FOLKS WERE REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO IT

John Tyner told Transportation Security Administration officials in San Diego that if “you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.”

AND HE WASN’T EVEN TALKING ABOUT HER

Sarah Palin demanded that Rahm Emanuel apologize for using the term “fucking retarded.”

 

SINCE WE ALL KNOW THOSE PEOPLE DON’T KNOW HOW TO SPEAK IN PUBLIC

MSNBC Host Chris Matthews was so excited by an Obama speech that he said he “forgot he was black.”

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. spent $50 million on a ballot initiative to stop public power, and lost after getting soundly defeated in every county where the utility has customers.

YOU MAY BE PART OF THE FAMILY, BUT WHEN IT COMES TO MY POLITICAL CAREER, HONEY, YOU’RE OUT THE DOOR

Meg Whitman fired her housekeeper when she found out she was in the country illegally.

BUT THEY’RE ALIKE ANYWAY, RIGHT?

Sharron Angle defended a campaign ad depicting menacing-looking Hispanic men by telling members of the Hispanic Student Union at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that many of the members looked Asian.

OF COURSE, SHE SKIPPED THE FIRST FEW AMENDMENTS — BOOORING!

Christine O’Donnell said she couldn’t find anything about the separation of church and state in the Constitution.

BECAUSE IN A FIREFIGHT, THE FIRST THING ANYONE WOULD BE THINKING ABOUT IS HIS SERGEANT’S CUTE ASS

Sen. John McCain said he opposed ending “don’t ask, don’t tell,” talked about all the soldiers and Marines who lost limbs, and said that “when your life is on the line, you don’t want anything distracting.”

SINCE WE ALL KNOW THAT HEALTH INSURANCE MAKES YOUR PEE SMELL FUNNY

Federal judge Henry Hudson asked Obama administration officials whether the new health care plan was similar to forcing all Americans to eat asparagus.

SO IT’S JUST AS WELL THOSE PEOPLE ON THE NO-FLY LIST HAVE THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS

Sharron Angle said that the Obama administration’s policies might require “Second Amendment solutions.”

IT’S PERFECTLY FINE FOR HOMOSEXUALS TO ATTEND MARRIAGE CEREMONIES, AS LONG AS THEY’RE JUST THE HIRED HELP

Sir Elton John played at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding.

SURE, GREAT FUN. JUST LIKE SHOOTING YOUR FRIENDS WITH A HUNTING RIFLE

Dick Cheney said he had been a “big supporter of water boarding.”

DAMN, SUPERVISOR, THE OFFIES WILL MISS YOU

Chris Daly vowed to say “fuck” at every single board meeting in 2010.

RCV lessons for the SF mayor’s race

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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12
RCV lessons for the SF mayor’s race

OPINION Elections using ranked choice voting (RCV) in both San Francisco and Oakland contain important lessons for the upcoming SF mayoral election. Rather than rely on traditional endorsements and funding advantages, winning candidates need to get out in the community, meet people, and build coalitions.

Jean Quan became the first Asian American woman elected mayor of a major city by coming from behind to beat the favorite, former state Senate president and powerbroker Don Perata. Perata outspent her five to one, but Quan countered by attending far more community meetings, forums, and house parties. She would knock on the door of a voter with an opponent’s yard sign and say, “I know I’m not your first choice, but please make me your second or third choice.”

She also reached out to her progressive opponents, especially Rebecca Kaplan, saying, “In case I don’t win, I think Rebecca should be your second choice.” As a result, Quan received three times more runoff rankings from the supporters of Kaplan, who finished third, than Perata did. That propelled Quan to victory.

Perata, meanwhile, used the traditional front-runner strategy of spending more money. His campaign never figured out that he needed to seek the second and third rankings from the supporters of other candidates by finding common ground.

A similar story also played out in SF’s supervisorial Districts 2 and 10. In those races, victors also won by coming from behind and picking up more second and third rankings from other candidates’ supporters.

In D10, some people seem to think that winner Malia Cohen wasn’t a strong candidate because she wasn’t one of the top-two finishers in first rankings. But this reflects a misunderstanding of this race’s dynamics. In the final results, Cohen finished third in first rankings (not fourth, as the early results showed), yet she was only five votes behind Tony Kelly for second place and only 53 votes behind Lynette Sweet in first place.

So Cohen was as much a front-runner as either Kelly or Sweet in an extremely close race with 22 candidates. She prevailed by picking up more second and third rankings from other candidates’ supporters, resulting in an African American candidate winning this traditionally black district.

Note that if D10 had used San Francisco’s old December runoff, the voter turnout would have plummeted from the high of a November gubernatorial race, and the winner would have won with a handful of votes. The RCV system worked to pick the candidate preferred by the most voters in a single November election.

In D2, fiscal conservative Mark Farrell beat the progressive’s choice, Janet Reilly. But this district is not a progressive one, and that’s supposed to be one of the benefits of district elections (which was a progressive reform), i.e. each district is able to elect its own representative who conforms to the majority of its district instead of what Big Money interests want. Unfortunately, that also means a progressive candidate probably won’t win a nonprogressive district. Farrell built an effort that attracted more second and third rankings from other candidates’ supporters, allowing him to come from a point behind to win a close race.

That’s the way you win with RCV. With no clear frontrunner, the candidate who can draw significant numbers of second and third rankings is most likely to win. In our overly adversarial, winner-take-all society, the incentives of RCV to find common ground and build coalitions with ranked ballots is a relief for most voters. Mayoral candidates should take note. 

Steven Hill is author of 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy (www.10Steps.net), Europe’s Promise (www.EuropesPromise.org) and other books, opeds, and articles. Visit his website at www.Steven-Hill.com.

Look forward in anger

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Look forward in anger

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL/YEAR IN ART The year in art is ending on a note both sour and defiant. On Nov. 30, Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough, caving to criticism voiced by conservative politicians and religious groups, ordered the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video A Fire in My Belly from the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” It was a cowardly decision; one that ultimately has undermined the credibility of Clough and his institution.

It’s unfortunate that it took an act of censorship to get art — specifically, art by an openly gay artist responding to the darkest hours of the AIDS crisis — back into the national conversation, but the chorus of condemnation coming variously from journalists and critics, art museum associations, and even The New York Times editorial page, has helped to do just that.

Additionally, Wojnarowicz’s piece, which was uploaded to Vimeo by his estate and New York’s PPOW Gallery soon after it had been taken down in Washington, D.C., has undoubtedly been seen by more viewers in the past month than it had at the Smithsonian, or perhaps even in past installations (as of writing this column, the uploaded version has received more than 18,000 views).

This will probably continue to be the case as more galleries and museums across the country, in an impressive show of institutional solidarity, screen and/or install A Fire In My Belly. Locally, SF Camerawork and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts held screenings earlier this month. Southern Exposure will continue to show the piece through mid-February, and SFMOMA is scheduled to screen the full-length version of the video in early January.

While I agree with Modern Art Notes’ Tyler Green that SFMOMA’s commitment to screen A Fire in My Belly is “a turning point” in this whole debacle (New York’s four biggest art museums have remained silent on the matter), I find his characterization of SFMOMA as “America’s most conservative, play-it-safe modern-and-contemporary art museum” a bit harsh. Certainly, this year’s recently revealed SECA winners — three of whom, it must be noted, have been past Goldie recipients, including 2010 winner Ruth Laskey — attest to the fact that, for every groaner of an exhibit (“How Wine Became Modern,” anyone?), SFMOMA is also committed to supporting artists whose work cannot be dismissed as “play-it-safe.” For starters, the memory drawings of Colter Jacobson, one of this year’s SECA winners, certainly fall along the continuum of queer portraiture displayed in “Hide/Seek.”

This is not to encourage wishful thinking. While it’s hard to imagine a San Francisco art institution doing something along the lines of the Smithsonian, I don’t think anyone expected a reignition of decades-old culture wars, let alone in the very city where the Corcoran Gallery infamously canceled a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit in 1989. The shorter our cultural memory, it seems, the greater is our propensity to repeat the lowest moments of our history.

So, over the past few weeks, I’ve been going over the works, exhibits, and events that I was thrilled did happen here, all glorious reclamations of our Convention and Visitors Bureau’s tagline, “Only in San Francisco.” Here is an in no way complete rundown of some of the art I didn’t cover in this column for a variety of reasons (scheduling conflicts, in-the-moment preference, critical laxity), save for the works themselves.

 

L@TE, BERKELEY ART MUSEUM, MOST FRIDAY NIGHTS

Turning staid-by-day museums into hip nightspots for hip young folks has been the hip thing for institutions to do for some time now. Thankfully, the Berkeley Art Museum knows how to do it right. Skip the catered canapés and light show, and focus on programming that is truly varied and more often than not, locally-minded — from Terry Riley celebrating his 75th to Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart improvising film soundtracks, from performance artist Kalup Linzy singing dirty love songs to outré Mexican B cinema— all for next to nothing.

 

CARINA BAUMANN, UNTITLED (2) (2008-09), 2ND FLOOR PROJECTS, JAN.–FEB.

At first I couldn’t see the woman’s face in Carina Baumann’s Untitled (2). I stared into the slate-like surface (actually, translucent white film developed on aluminum), incrementally adjusting my height, until the blackness stared back. The effect was not one of shock, as with the mirrors at the end of Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride, in which the holographic undead crowd in with your reflection. Baumann’s art asks for patience and slow adjustment, and in return, regifts your sense of sight.

 

“SUGGESTIONS OF A LIFE BEING LIVED,” SF CAMERAWORK, SEPT.–OCT.

Perhaps most germane to the issues about queerness, identity politics, and representation now being raised (again) by Wojnarowicz-gate and the “Hide/Seek” exhibit, this group show put together by Chicago-based curator Danny Orendorff and SF native Adrienne Skye Roberts took “queerness” out into the desert, helped it cast off the much-tattered coat of identity politics, and asked a group of artists, activists, and filmmakers to record its unfettered visions of things to come (many of which, as the resulting work testified to, are being lived out right now).

 

MATT LIPPS, “HOME,” SILVERMAN GALLERY, APRIL-JUNE; R.H. QUAYTMAN, “NEW WORK,” SFMOMA, THROUGH JAN. 16, 2011

Although Matt Lipps is a photographer and R.H. Quaytman is a painter, they tweak their respective mediums in these unrelated shows to arrive at a similar kind of flat sculpture, which flickers between abstract prettiness and representational heavy-lifting. Lipps’ densely layered photographs of assemblages — in which variously colored photographs of domestic interiors, cut into facets and taped back together to form the original image, become backdrops for cut-out reproductions of Ansel Adams landscapes — collapse foreground and background, personal space and photographic history. Quaytman, working in dialogue with the poetry of Jack Spicer and SFMOMA’s photo archive, silk-screens images from the museum’s holdings onto beveled, wooden panels of various sizes, augmenting them with flashes of Easter eggs-like color and glittering crushed glass.

 

ERIK SCOLLON, “THE URGE,” ROMER YOUNG (FORMERLY PING PONG), JULY–AUG.

Although nothing will top his porcelain casts of assholes that littered Ping Pong Gallery like so many discarded sand dollars for the 2009 group show “Live and Direct,” Eric Scollon’s more recent solo exhibit at the gallery, “The Urge,” continued to queer form and function. The 50 or so small porcelain works, painted in the blue and white style of Dutch Delftware and arranged in pun-laden groupings, smartly played off ceramics’ dual cultural status as both a “fine art” and kitsch object, while throwing shade at modern art’s conflicted relationship to ornament. Speaking of which, if only I had a Scollon for my tree.

 

ANDY DIAZ HOPE, “INFINITE MORTAL,” CATHARINE CLARK GALLERY, THROUGH JAN. 1, 2011

Diaz Hope’s dazzling sculptures owe as much to his engineering background as to, as he puts it in an e-mail, a “revisiting of childhood thoughts about mortality and infinity.” Their mirrored, crystalline exteriors yell “Gaga!” but once immersed in their kaleidoscopic guts, they are, much like Yayoi Kusama’s infinity boxes, meditation chambers built from carnival ride components. Simply beautiful stuff.

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