Greens Have Shot at San Francisco Mayor's Office
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
SAN FRANCISCO — On paper, the job of San Francisco mayor is supposed to be nonpartisan.
In practice, it's been more than four decades since voters elected anyone other than a Democrat to run this city, where the political spectrum seems to run from left-of-center to liberaler-than-thou.
But now, a Democrat is facing an unexpectedly tight runoff election against a Green Party (search) candidate Dec. 9, and the mayoral race is attracting unusual attention from national Democrats still bitter over losing the governor's office to Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In a sign of the Democratic Party's anxiety, former Vice President Al Gore is scheduled to visit Tuesday and attend a fund-raising reception and campaign event for mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom (search).
"I think there is an enormous amount at stake," said Newsom, who has also secured endorsements from Democratic presidential candidates Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry. "We lost the governor's office and now our last bastion, northern California, is at play."
Mayor Willie Brown (search), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and U.S. Reps. George Miller and Loretta Sanchez also are backing Newsom, a city supervisor. The Democratic National Committee has provided strategy for the campaign.
Matt Gonzalez (search), Board of Supervisors president, would be the nation's most prominent elected Green if he became mayor.
Yet Gonzalez, a former Democrat who switched parties in 2000 while in a runoff election, has sought to downplay his affiliation.
"We want Matt Gonzalez to be a great mayor first and a great Green second," said Ross Mirkarimi, a Gonzalez spokesman. "Most progressive Democrats have more in common with Matt than they do a conservative Democrat like Gavin."
Newsom secured 42 percent, or 87,196 votes in last month's general election, emerging as the top vote-getter but failing to secure the majority needed to avert a runoff. Gonzalez came in second with 20 percent, or 40,714.
A poll released last week found Newsom leading 47 percent to Gonzalez's 39 percent, with the margin shrinking from a week earlier.
Both young, ambitious and camera-friendly, the two candidates differ greatly in style as well as substance.
Newsom, the son of a retired state judge who counts billionaire Gordon Getty as a family friend, owns several upscale restaurants and has raised $3.3 million in campaign contributions with the backing of the business community and organized labor.
Gonzalez, who spent a decade as a public defender and enjoys hanging out with struggling artists and musicians, has raised $401,000, much of it through quirky campaign events — featuring names like "Yoga for Matt" — that speak to his bohemian lifestyle.
Although they share many of the same views on civil rights issues, Newsom made his name as a politician with a tough-love approach to homelessness and stiffer penalties for panhandlers, ideas that have made him a lightning rod with the more liberal Gonzalez supporters.
"We welcome Gore to San Francisco, but he should know some things about my opponent," Gonzalez said. "Gore is a big environmentalist and the Sierra Club (search) graded Newsom a D and I earned an A+. He should know there are many Democrats backing me and the reason Newsom is doing so well is he gets Republican votes."
In San Francisco politics, likening opponents to Republicans is often a shorthand way of portraying them as too conservative to hold office. The GOP last elected a mayor in 1960.
Gonzalez wants to raise the city's real estate transfer tax on properties that sell for more than $1 million and put the city's electricity in the hands of a public authority, policies that Newsom has used to brand him as fiscally irresponsible and anti-business.
"There is not that hardheaded pragmatism there, which is what you need in the executive branch," Newsom said.
Both candidates have taken imagery fresh from California's gubernatorial recall in their campaigns.
Gonzalez, 38, tries to associate the wealthy, well-organized Newsom with the unpopular Gov. Gray Davis. Newsom, 36, maintains that Gonzalez is an untested ideologue working off a page from Schwarzenegger's playbook.
"Talk in generalizations, skip debates and then criticize everyone else for the way things are — it's a great strategy," Newsom said. "It worked for the governor."
Pollster David Binder said many Democrats who favor Gonzalez are not paying attention to the fact that he is from the Green Party.
"Gavin and the state Democratic Party would have to make this more of an issue to persuade some of the Gonzalez Democrats that they need to be more loyal to their party's candidate, but my gut tells me people don't care." |
