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Sneaky campaign to draft Lee sullies political environment

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At a time when City Hall is taking on several important issues – from the budget and pension reform to massive projects such CPMC’s mega hospital and housing project and the redevelopment of Parkmerced and Treasure Island – an ambitious cabal of political operators bent of convincing Mayor Ed Lee to break his word and run for office is poisoning the environment under the dome.

A series of unfolding events over the last week makes it clear that Sup. Jane Kim’s campaign team – political consultants Enrique Pearce and David Ho, Tenderloin shot-caller Randy Shaw, and their political benefactors Willie Brown and Rose Pak – are orchestrating another campaign to convince Lee to run for office, apparently abandoning the mayoral campaign of Board President David Chiu.

The Bay Citizen reported that Pearce was pursuing creation of a mayoral campaign that Lee could simply step into, while blogger Michael Petrelis caught Pearce creating fake signs of a grassroots groundswell for Lee over the weekend. That effort joins another one by the Chronicle and a couple of downtown politicos to create the appearance of popular demand for Lee to run despite a large field of well-qualified mayoral candidates representing a wide variety of constituencies.

And then today, Shaw joined the effort with a post in his Beyond Chron blog that posed as political analysis, praising the John Avalos campaign – an obvious effort to ingratiate himself to the progressive movement that Shaw alienated by aggressively pushing the Twitter tax break deal and Kim’s candidacy – while trying to torpedo the other mayoral campaigns, calling for Lee to run, and offering a logic-tortured take on why the public wouldn’t care if Lee breaks his word.

Pearce and Ho – who sources say have been aggressively trying to drum up support for Lee in private meetings around town over the last couple weeks – didn’t return our calls. Kim, who is close to both Chiu and Avalos, told us she is withholding her mayoral endorsement until after the budget season – which, probably not coincidentally, is when Lee would get into the race if he runs.

Fog City Journal owner Luke Thomas, who Petrelis caught taking photos for Pearce over the weekend – told us Pearce’s Left Coast Communications, “hired me in my capacity as a professional photographer to take photographs of people holding ‘Run Ed Run!’ signs and should not be construed as an endorsement of the effort to draft Ed Lee into the mayor’s race.”

In an interview with the Guardian last week, Lee reiterated his pledge not to run for mayor – which was the basis for his appointment as a caretaker mayor to finish the last year of Gavin Newsom’s term – but acknowledged that Pak and others have been actively trying to convince him to run. Pak has an open disdain for candidate Leland Yee and fears his ascension to Room 200 would end the strong influence that Pak and Brown have over the Mayor’s Office and various department heads.

“I am not running. I’ve told people that. Obviously, there is a group of good friends and people who would be happy for me to make a different decision, so they’re going to use their time trying to persuade me. I’ve told them I’m not interested and I have my personal reasons for doing that but they’re not convinced that someone who has held this office for five months and not fallen into a deep abyss would not want to be in this office and run for mayor. I’ve been honest with people that I’m not a politician. I’ve never really run for office nor have I ever indicated to people that I’d like to run for mayor of San Francisco. That’s just not in my nature so it’s been a discussion that is very foreign to me that has been very distracting for me in many ways because I set myself a pretty aggressive piece of work that this office has to get to. The way I do it is very intensely. I do meet a lot of people and seek their input before I made a decision,” Lee told us.

Even Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who nominated Lee for mayor, told the Chronicle that he doesn’t support the effort to pressure Lee into running and he feels like it could hurt sensitive efforts to craft compromises on the budget and pension reform. When asked by the Guardian whether he would categorically rule out a run for mayor, Lee told us he would.

“I’ve been very adamant about that yet my friends will still come up to me and they’ll spend half their time talking to me about it. And I say thank you, I’m glad you’re not calling me a bum and trying to kick me out,” Lee told us, noting that Pak – a longtime ally who helped engineer the deal to get Lee into office, for which Chiu was the swing vote, parting from his five one-time progressive supervisorial allies in the process – has been one of the more vociferous advocates on him running.

Asked whether there are any conditions under which he might change his mind, Lee told us, “If every one of the current supervisors in office asked me to run and those supervisors who are running voluntarily dropped out.” But Avalos says he’s committed to remain in the race, and his campaign has been endorsed by three other progressive supervisors.

A different Mayor’s Office

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A group of Guardian reporters and editors met with Mayor Ed Lee June 2, and while the mayor and I don’t agree on everything, I have to say: It was refreshing.


Refreshing because the mayor has a sense of humor and doesn’t act like an infallible monarch. Refreshing because his office looks like, well, a working office. Refreshing because he smiled, was polite and never said “I dispute the premise of your question.”


What a difference.


Under Willie Brown, the mayor’s office was an imperial sanctum. If His Royal Williness deigned to favor one of his servants or subjects with the boon of a royal visit, you were expected to crawl on your hands and knees and kiss the floor. 


When Gavin Newsom was the occupant, the place was a cross between a museum and an Architectural Digest showplace — not a scrap of paper on the desk, every hair perfectly in place, the Robert Kennedy pictures and books lined up perfectly for the visitor to admire.


Both mayors treated the press with hostility. Both expected to be treated as potentates. The mayor was better than you and I — and you needed to understand that right away, or risk disdain and dimissal.


Ed Lee isn’t doing what I want with the budget. He’s not talking about raising taxes on the rich. He’s probably going to go along with ParkMerced and maybe even Treasure Island. He signed the Twitter tax break. I worry (a lot) about his ties to past corrupt regimes.


But he’s happy to have reporters in his office. He’s got stacks of reports on his desk and a notepad that suggests he’s actually reading them. He showed us his private “man cave” in the back, and offered us walnuts. He’s not always right on policy, and I don’t think he should run in the fall … but he’s not a jerk. And given the recent history of San Francisco mayors, that’s pretty radical.


  

Editor’s notes

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tredmond@sfbg.com

The candidates for mayor of San Francisco are already lining up endorsements — the Sierra Club held its interviews April 23, which seems awfully early to me, since some of the most interesting contenders in this town (Tom Ammiano, Matt Gonzalez) have a tendency to jump in at the last minute. And the filing deadline isn’t until August.

But the sooner the big names and organizations are lined up and the money is locked in, the harder it will be for anyone to pull off an August surprise. So unless the redistricting commission seriously messes with Mark Leno’s state Senate seat or Ed Lee bows to the pressure from Willie Brown, Rose Pak, and their allies and decides to go back on his promise and seek a full term, we’re probably looking at a rough approximation of what the voters will face in November.

With John Avalos in the race, the ballot’s become a lot more attractive to progressives. It’s not as if the other major candidates don’t have a lot to offer, and in some cases, they have a lot to offer to the left. There are smart, experienced, qualified people running.

But let’s be honest here: David Chiu, Dennis Herrera, Phil Ting, Leland Yee, and Bevan Dufty all operate somewhere in the squishy political center, a place where tax breaks for corporations are okay, where “homeownership opportunities” tend to trump the needs of tenants, where deals with big private developers are sculpted around the edges but never rejected outright, and where cuts in services are a larger part of the budget solution than taxes on the rich.

Michela Alioto-Pier is off on the far right of the San Francisco political world, and if she looks at all credible and gets any significant traction (and that’s a big if) she’ll be downtown’s favorite candidate. But until now, there was nobody holding the solid progressive banner.

I don’t think that means Avalos’ appeal is limited to the left; he’s in a swing district, and he’s very popular there, and he can talk about small business and community development and open, honest government. He doesn’t sound like a crazy radical; he’s polite and respectful and listens to people.

But I’m glad we have a candidate who won’t try to argue that 25 percent affordable housing at Treasure Island is something to be proud of, or that the Twitter tax break will create jobs, or that social inequality can’t be addressed through local policy. I’m glad there’s someone who can push the discussion and debate out of the middle, can force some of the others who want progressive support to take strong stands, and can liven things up a bit. Because without him, all of the candidates were sounding a lot alike — and I really don’t want to be bored this fall.