The Times has an excellent, lengthy piece on various candidates for governor in California in 2010 — Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown, Meg Whitman, in particular.
We always seem to have a lot of Bay Area types in the comments here, so I ask: what has Newsom been like as mayor of San Francisco? What was Jerry Brown like as mayor of Oakland?
I really liked these comments from Jerry Brown:
It has been falling to Brown, once known as Governor Moonbeam, to bring the discussion back to earth. While other candidates evoke the “myth” and the “dream” and the “epic disaster” that is California, Brown is more likely to speak of “the mundane quality of the enterprise,” that enterprise being state government.
Brown delights in deflating overblown rhetoric. Everything is deemed a “crisis” today, he said with a smirk. “Instead of having ‘stars,’ at some point we had ‘superstars.’ Instead of having ‘stores,’ we had ‘superstores.’ So there is an escalation in the rhetoric because of the difficulty penetrating to the consumer.”
We live in a time where only ex-hippies regard governing as a gig and not as a made-for-tv movie.
Rey
Not from Cali, but according to Tupac- California knows how to party!
SGEW
Jello Biafra on “Zen Fascist” Jerry Brown, circa 1979:
Circa 2002:
The times, they are a changing.
Rosali
In any other place,
1- partying and drinking with an underaged female,
2- an affair with the wife of an employee
3- going to alcohol rehab while in office
would be spell disaster for the candidate. Not sure if that’s enough to hurt Newsome.
Woody
Perfectly illustrating one of my favorite complaints: the transmogrification of the “citizen” into the “consumer.”
Consumers are stupid, individualized, alienated, selfish, interested only in the best “deal” for themselves.
On the other hand, citizens (pre-consumerization) could be thought to be part of some shared enterprise, in solidarity with other “citizens,” concerned with the commons which defines them as what they are citizens of.
I have always wondered who was the first representative of the people who changed the definition of those whom he represented from “American Citizens” to “the Murkin consumer.” The memory of that person should be 1) known and 2) covered in ignominy.
Happy Holiday, Citizens!
Lyle
As mayor and as a city supervisor, Newsom is solidly a fiscal conservative and, unfortunately, a pol more into soundbites than policy. His governing style is positively Bush-like in how he sticks to his talking points, avoiding dialogue, and tries to play the press. As supervisor his claim to fame was pushing for a Guiliani style approach to homelessness and the “Care Not Cash” initiative which took away cash subsidies for the homeless (the initiative claimed the money would go to funding services but critics claimed the law didn’t bother making sure that would happen).
And while he got plenty of praise for his “bravery” in his stance on same-sex marriage, there’s no risk in making a big show for your support of gay rights in San Francisco, especially when you’re just beginning your first term and can wait for the country to catch up with you. (It’s also a great counter-argument to the talk of his fiscal conservatism, which he’s always dismissed as ridiculous because he’s socially liberal… and since most of the media can’t differentiate, he consistently got away with it.) His marrying of gay couples in 2004 put him in the national spotlight while increasing his approval ratings among his constituents.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Rosali: What would hurt Newsom is also on the other end of the spectrum: The alternative paper The Guardian despises him as well as many progressives in town, for being a big growth downtown corporatist.
I was away for all of his tenure but I lived back home there the first five months of this year, and the Gaurdian did a big “We endorse Gavin Newsom!” article one day, complete with his huge smiling face on the cover of the paper, which when in my amazement I read it, turned out to be absolute snark and fairly viciously so. They gotcha-ed quite a few people with that apparently, the next week they said the angry letters “how can you support this guy??” were pouring in.
The irony is that of course to the Orange County people he’s some sort of hippie libertine as you describe.
What this means for his being elected Governer, who knows. I doubt he could get elected with all that double whammy, myself.
Dave Latchaw
Gavin’s politics are OK; the problem is that he’s just a total dick.
me
That song was written 30 years ago. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.”
geg6
Gavin Newsome is one handsome guy, which considering the shallowness of what I’ve seen of Cali politics is enough to get him elcted to the governor’s mansion. I certainly don’t live in the Bay Area, CA, or even the West Coast. But what I’ve read of Brown’s tenure in Oakland was, I think, impressive and based on actually getting things done for the good of the city and its citizens. How that would translate in the face of the insanity that is the legislature there, I fear would be as successful as Sarah Palin’s prose.
DougJ
Hey, is the Guardian still obsessed with some inscrutable PG&E scandal? They were when I lived there.
Dennis-SGMM
That anyone would want to be governor of my fair state should be taken as proof that they are too crazy to do the job. The governor should be chosen for a one year term by a lottery of all registered voters.
Bob In Pacifica
Brown over Newsom. Gavin is lightweight. Brown can win a statewide election, again. Newsom is backed by Getty money. Who knows what money is backing Brown?
Regarding the snark about The SF Guardian, maybe if more investigative reporting had been done about the power companies Enron wouldn’t have stolen billions from California and started this freefall.
Bill E Pilgrim
@geg6: Well, he was Governor before. Did okay.
dadanarchist
Gavin Newsom is a pretty face, a friendly front, a rentboy for the Getty family and for downtown business interests in San Francisco as well as classic limousine liberals like John Burton (the dean of San Francisco politics). In San Francisco, unlike many other places, even the rich vote Democratic.
It is difficult to understand, often, that in San Francisco there is a vicious split between centrist, corporate Democrats – like Newsom, former mayor Willie Brown, Dianne Feinstein, and much of the Democratic Party establishment – on the one hand, and progressive and social democratic minded progressives (ranging from Democrats to Greens to Independents) – like most of the Board of Supervisors and the local neighborhood associations – on the other hand. The reason Golden Boy is bored is that the DFH’ers control the Board of Supervisors and block his attempts to make the city more inaccessible to the average joe at every turn.
I recommend the Bay Guardian as a source for explaining why so many people in SF detest Newsom, so much so that in his first run he only won with 52% against Green Party candidate Matt Gonzales.
BR
Every person from SF I know thinks Newsom is a failure as a mayor. He likes to do high profile events, jet set around the country, and leave the hard tasks of running the city to others. Plus he’s likely to have even more distracting personal scandals that will sap his ability to get things done were he elected governor.
The best choice for Gov. is CA Sec. of State Debra Bowen, but it appears that she’s not inclined to run right now.
I may have to vote Brown as the best of the bad options.
coffeegirl
I was speaking with a Gavin “insider” (and no, that isn’t some sly reference to “teh ghey” thing!) yesterday–they seem to believe that JB will pull out of the race. Me? Not buyin’ it. Also.
We could do a lot worse than GN or JB (in fact we have…..).
Bill E Pilgrim
@Bob In Pacifica: Yeah I’m not sure anything about the PG&E scandal was inscrutable, just that only papers like the Guardian bothered to investigate it much.
burnspbesq
So long as we are stuck with our current state Constitution, it hardly matters who is Governator von California. The place can’t be governed. The day after I drop my kid off at college, my house is on the market.
Bill E Pilgrim
Here’s the Guardian’s snark endorsement. An excerpt:
It goes on like that. Pretty funny in parts.
burnspbesq
I actually think that of all the candidates who are either in or expected to get in, Meg Whitman has the best track record as an administrator; you don’t do what she did at eBay without serious management chops. But the wingnuts extraordinaire in the state Senate won’t let even a less-than-pure Republican run the state. And although she is rich and white, there is the small matter of that missing Y chromosome.
geg6
Bill E. Pilgrim: Yeah, I know. But as I remember it, he was continually smeared with the “moonbeam” stuff and his relationship with Linda Ronstadt. They made him out to be a nut with his head in the clouds and his manly parts obsessed with rock stars. At least, that’s how he was portrayed here in Western By God PA. Whereas he’s gotten good press from his gig in Oakland, which is considered to be more horrific an urban wasteland than even Cleveland, Detroit, or Baltimore around here. That’s quite a turnaround in perception, especially around here.
Bob In Pacifica
dadanarchist, that’s why I thought that Matt Gonzalez should have run against Pelosi instead of running with Nader as an independent. With all the hostility over FISA and other Dem folds during the last year of BushCo, the City of SF actually offered a unique opportunity for a real progressive to win a House seat. San Francisco is the only place in the country where someone could run on a platform much farther to the left than Pelosi and beat her.
There would have been money issues, but he certainly could have outcampaigned her. The district is so compact and there are enough liberal news outlets that Gonzalez, if he’d been so inclined, could have exploited them. No offense to Cindy Sheehan (okay, maybe a little offense) but she offered no opposition to Pelosi at all. How popular was she? I was at a picket line last summer where she showed up and I got more applause than her.
Bill E Pilgrim
@geg6: Gotcha.
Well, that was more of a national smear line than what people said locally (e.g. Doonesbury, in one of the rare times I found Trudeau, who I think is a genius, really annoying for going with the brain-dead right wing east coast easy cliche jokes) so it hurt his chances for President more than anything else.
I’ve been away from California since the late 90s so I know very little about his time in Oakland, except what friends and family who live there told me which usually amounted to a story about how they were robbed at gunpoint, again, so his name didn’t come up much.
LarryB
I live across the Bay, but work in the City. From that vantage point Newsome has done reasonably well. All of his faux pas have been mostly outwardly facing (e.g., the infidelity scandal, 1st gay marriage hooplah, Prop 8 (a.k.a., 1nd gay marriage hooplah), Iraq) W.r.t. running the city itself, at least there haven’t been any major corruption or police brutality scandals while he’s been in office, which is unusual. Also, the perennially fractious city council hasn’t declared a fatwa against the Mayor that I can recall. Such had been staples of previous administrations.
San Francisco, like many cities, has a big homeless population. It’s a hugely divisive issue as you might expect given the liberal population and the importance of tourism. Newsome was elected, in part, to deal with it in a kinder, gentler, way than Rudy Gulliani’s storm trooper tactics. He tried, but his “kinder, gentler” efforts were ultimately doomed by budget limitations. So he fell back on the jackboots, but he did substantially reduce the number of homeless you see wandering around downtown. On the other hand, Newsome put a lot of prestige into a big municipal energy utility initiative last Fall and lost. At any rate, Downtown San Francisco hasn’t fallen apart while he’s been in office: The streets are clean and the roads are paved.
So, his record is mixed, but it’s at least as good as DiFi and she went on to be a U.S. Senator.
srv
Gavin is Nancy Pelosi without the skirt. He will find new and innovative ways to serve the Republicans in Sacramento as Nancy does in DC. Except when they see an opportunity for themselves, in which case it will probably cost the national party dearly (ie, Gavin deciding Gay Marriage was the bomb at exactly the most opportune moment for the Kerry campaign).
Nellcote
I remember Jerry Brown’s tenure as governor fondly. He was decades ahead of the times with regard to environmental issues. It seems a little strange that he’s running again all these years later but given the choices available I’ll probably vote for him again.
Didn’t Meg Witman get fired from McCain’s campaign for being incompetent?
Graeme
I’m with Dennis-SGMM. I don’t think it matters who gets elected, because they’ll be powerless to do anything in the face of the gerrymandered nuttiness of the Legislature. This state is fucked.
I think Gavin has a mixed record as Mayor of SF. Not as bad as he could be. I’ve seen a lot of comments about how he’s attractive enough to appeal to the denizens of SoCal, so maybe he can win. I doubt I’ll be voting for him.
Andrea
Nellcote, I think it was Carly Fiorina who was banished from the McCain campaign. A friend had some personal dealings with Whitman so f**k her too. My old rep, Tom Campbell, is running. He’s a mostly non batshit crazy Republican but he doesn’t have the $$$ of Whitman or Steve Poizner, the current insurance commissioner. Poizner ran for assembly in my district and has a ton of money, too.
sbjules
I voted for Jerry Brown’s father who was inexplicably defeated by Ronnie Reagan (ugh!). Yes, I’m old! Voted for Jerry & thought he was a great governor–I especially liked that he drove a Plymouth & slept on the floor (reportedly) of his apartment.
He’ll get my vote again, I hope.
I’m not in the Bay area; I live in Santa Barbara (aka Obama country).
Joshua Norton
Yes. And it’s not “inscrutable” at all.
When Hetch Hetchy was first opened, PG&E bribed the entire Board of Supervisors to steal the electric power that was being generated, supposedly to run the City for free.
When it came time to run the power lines into the City the contractor “discovered” that he hadn’t ordered enough cable to go the entire distance so he “temporarily” hooked into PGE’s lines to complete the job. That was back in the 1900’s and PGE has been paying bribes ever since in order to keep the City’s power running through their lines and sell it for a profit.
Just Robber Baron business as usual.
Pennypacker
Newsom brought national attention to gay marriage as an issue. You can call it a political stunt. You can also call it the right thing to do.
I didn’t start out liking Newsom at all, and I voted against him when he first ran. But I’ve grown to respect him since.
Joshua Norton
I like Gavin, but I don’t think it’s his time right now.
Brown is more popular state-wide and has raised a ton more money. And he hasn’t even declared that he’s going to run yet.
DougJ
That wasn’t meant as snark. I was just curious about that.
gwangung
Anybody who can’t remain faithful to a first wife that looks like Newsom’s first wife isn’t somebody I can respect. Levels of Jack Ryan failure….
tammanycall
@BR:
THIS.
Amanda in the South Bay
Meg Whitman is a typical Silicon Valley bigwig-she’s no more inclined to raise taxes than a wingnut from Orange County. The Silicon Valley set is composed of rich assholes, hardly inclined to want to figure a way out of the current mess, regardless of their political party (can you tell I hate where I live?). We just barely survived our first MBA president-we don’t need no stinking MBA affluent scum from Atherton.
Whew, talk about rage!
burnspbesq
@Joshua Norton:
1. You do understand (I assume) the inherent absurdity of applying contemporary moral and ethical standards to events that happened a century ago. Different time, different mores. The events you refer to, and the subterfuges by which Los Angeles interests captured the rights to Owens Valley water, not only weren’t considered criminal at the time, they weren’t even considered untoward. “Chinatown” is fiction.
2. “Bribe” is a word with a definite legal meaning. Are the payments “ever since” that you are referring to within that meaning, or are they payments that while perfectly legal, you find somehow offensive?
Not meaning this as a challenge, just curious.
gwangung
Actually, any exec who came of age during the IPO/housing bubble should be looked at with great suspicion. They were able to take advantage of one set of circumstances–but that’s no guarantee that they can adapt to another set of circumstances. Most successful entrepreneurs can build a company during one set of circumstances, but ask them to manage a company? Um, good luck…
jcricket
Overpay for Skype? Fail to articulate a strategy that would grow in the face of threats from places like Amazon, Overstock and Craigslist?
I doubt eBay will survive as an independent entity for more than another 5 years. Traffic is down, listings are down, and competitors are gobbling its lunch/marketshare across the board.
Plus on the political front she’s sold out the gays so she can survive the GOP primary (presumably). No on Whitman, no on anyone GOP. The Democrats in CA aren’t great, but the Republicans, and anyone who gives them cover (this includes “moderate” Republicans like the current Gov) need to be voted out of office.
Someone needs to start articulating (slowly) the positive case for raising taxes. CA has an admirable social safety net, and while I realize there may be problems around the edges regarding the sustainability, demolishing it because Democrats can’t argue in favor of taxation and the rump-Republicans left in office are anti-tax, is fucking stupid.
Travis
I live in Berkeley, work in SF. Some random points.
I’ve seen Newsom when he appeared at a business function and gave a quick speech that the crowd (~1k) loved. It was a funny, charming speech with no notes. I was amazed by how magnetic he was to women.
My wife did a consulting job for Newsom in his first year in office, where she put dollars & cents on a good, progressive initiative he had advocated. It was about a six month project where she worked with his staff, and met him at the end to deliver the results. She found him quite competent and engaged. She also found it funny that as you go further into the inner sanctum, the staff got progressively better looking. One particular conclusion I make on this and other issues is that he was trying to make progressive actions work, but they had to make economic sense. in SF, people don’t necessarily focus on the second part, and so he always got a lot of static.
I think he’ll do fine in a pan-California race. He had conflicts in San Francisco that won’t be as important state-wide. No idea how the personal messiness of his life will play out.
On Brown – he seemed competent and engaged in office. My Oakland friends said he made a world of difference. For whatever reason, my time at the Oakland gym always coincided with him, and I can say he has an impressive fadeaway jump shot for an old white dude.
trollhattan
Hardly know where to begin.
Whitman would be an absolute disaster. Anybody who watched her skipping around the Republican national convention last summer sucking up camera time knows she loves herself some attention. She’s a bloodless empty suit billionaire who doesn’t wear a suit, and she has certainly perfected the fine art of pulling things out of her ass. First it was fix the state budget by laying off 30,000 state employees. Now it’s lay off 17,000 “mid-level bureaucrats.” By Monday it will be “Lay off everybody with a “T” in their name.”
How we ended up with billionaires who can’t even seem to read the damn budget and recognize where the money is actually spent–rather than where it’s spent in their heads–is a sad byproduct of the dot-com days, when you had to be either innovative or lucky. Meg=lucky. We can’t afford to test her luck twice. Poizner is her male counterpart, and also has eyes on the same prize.
Gavin’s not ready, na-ga-happen. I’ll say it’ll fall to Jerry, and we could do a lot worse. Until the last few months I thought it didn’t matter one bit who sat in the big chair, but Ahnold has convinced me otherwise. We would have had a deal last week despite the typically intransigent Republican bloc in the legislature had Ahnold not waved his veto pen around chanting “Nein, nein, nein.” Jerry’s a pragmatist and damn smart, and would have cut and signed a deal by now.
We’re a year and a half out so there will be plenty of surprises before the 2010 vote. I’ll close by noting the state’s peculiar tendency to elect “moderate” Republican governors. Since I’ve lived here we’ve had precisely one liberal: Jerry Ver. 1.0. Folks who think of the state as a liberal beehive have no useful explanation for this phenomenon.
Mayken
@burnspbesq: I hope your kid is going to an out of state school. UC and CalState are both about to get royally screwed – even more than usual that is – along with every other service of the State. Waiting for my IOU as I type.
dday
This is not your father’s Jerry Brown. He’s now a self-described “born-again tax-cutter,” tough-on-crime bipartisan fetishist. Actually, since 1978, when Prop. 13 was passed while he was Governor, he tried to cut deals with the Howard Jarvis crowd. And we’re still living with the consequences of that lack of leadership.
Gavin, of course, isn’t much better.
And as said upthread, the truth is that you could have Noam Chomsky or John Birch as Governor, and nothing would change under this fundamentally broken political process.
Mike P
I’ve lived in SF for over 8 years (and am back from a stint in grad school for the summer at the moment) and I agree with the general tone of the comments about Gavin. He hasn’t really left a mark on the city, outside of his very visible efforts on gay marriage. As far as a statewide general election, he’s going to get creamed in the Central Valley and behind the Orange Curtain for his gay rights stance and his infidelity. He should do ok in LA and SF and some of the other cities.
I don’t know who Jerry Brown’s constituency is. I mean, he’s going to be the sober, older statesman in the race, but I don’t know how excited people are going to be about him.
Wittman could be trouble if she draws a lot of support in Silicon Valley, which is a place where, generally speaking, that Gavin should do well.
Bob In Pacifica
SGEW: As someone who voted for Jello Biafra (twice) I have to agree with his 2002 statement.
Travis: Actual competence seldom has much to do with general elections. Witness our current governor. I know that either of them in the Governor’s mansion would be better than what we have now.
Even though the courts first ruled for same-sex marriage and then upheld its takeback with Prop 8, it was Newsom who was there at the beginning. I’m not saying that it was too soon to push for gay marriage, but it seemed badly timed and helped the Repubs elevate it to a national issue and was a major social issue in sinking Kerry in 2004.
In the Prop 8 go-round Newsom was featured prominently in supporters’ commercials, and not favorably. The Repubs would drape gay marriage around his neck in any statewide race.
On the other hand, even though Jerry Brown argued against it as the state AG (and lost), he doesn’t seem to be tarred by it like Newsom. Plus, he’s got much greater popularity statewide and has more money. I think he’s a more viable candidate outside of San Francisco, maybe even inside SF.
trollhattan
Here’s a pretty good take on Whitman from Huffpo:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/whitmans-sampler-the-ex-e_b_170436.html
She’s either not terribly bright or simply doesn’t care that she operates in some parallel universe. Makes me wonder what sort of staff she surrounded herself with at ebay.
Dave C
We don’t just need a new governor, though we do need that. We need a new friggin’ constitution!
LD50
Until the 2/3rds majority rule in the state senate is abolished, Californi’s problems are unsolvable. I have no idea why anyone would want to be governor nowadays, unless they need the benefits.
LD50
@trollhattan:
Dude, if that happened, you’d be screwed worse than anyone here.
Max Renn
@tammanycall:
Seconded.
Sadly, no. He was not a good mayor in Oakland. Dellums, alas, has fared little better. Brown was dreadful on housing and education as Mayor, and kowtowed to SF on Port matters.
Dennis-SGMM
I’ve got it! I’ve got it! Palin resigned as governor of Alaska so that she can move here and run for governor of California. It’s all a part of her master plan.
Travis
@Bob In Pacifica: True, except executive competence also extends into running a campaign. One thing I liked about Obama, outside of his politics, is that he just had a well-run campaign.
I don’t think gay marriage, pro or against, will be an absolute filter on who gets elected governor in CA. Of course it is a hot issue, and the GOP will push on that button non-stop. Ultimately, this is a state with large financial problems, and they will worsen considerably as this governor’s race continues. And as I’ve always said, you can’t vote against someone 2 or 3 times because you really hate him: a SF mayor wasn’t going to win too many votes in the central valley no matter what.
I’m making the opposite of a prediction: I think it’s all up in the air and impossible to predict at this point. I would not count Brown or Newsom out for any one reason. I personally don’t like Whitman, but what California voters can approve has frequently amazed me, so who knows.
Marshall
My son lives in San Francisco. Whenever the topic Gavin Newsom comes up, that will start a 5 minute rant on how bad a mayor he is. He is not like that about any other politician, but he (and his friends) all despise Newsom.
Joshua Norton
Hmm. You sound like more like a PG&E PR apologist playing with words rather than someone who is “just curious”. You’d first of all have to read and understand the entire Raker Bill.
What happened back then is comparable to the Health Care reform issues of today. A big corporation was at risk of losing their profit margin so they fight it through bribery, corruption, and political influence. PG&E is not supposed to access to the power period. It’s not some footnote shrouded in the mists of time. It’s a battle still going on today.
Marshall
That sure isn’t what you will hear if you go to the Owens Valley. And there is the little matter of the repeated dynamiting of the aqueduct in the 1920’s. Here is a clue : if people react to your activities with dynamite, they may be described as untoward.
This page gives a view of the water wars, and the St. Francis Dam disaster that at least partially resulted from them. Did give us a good Frank Black song, though.
halle
Either Brown or Newsom would make a better Gov than our current one, but each have drawbacks. Brown knows how Sacramento works and how to get things done, but he’s unpredictable, and not necessarily interested in lots of subjects. Although he had a good enviro record in the 70’s, and his AG office has been good on climate change, he also went around while he was mayor of Oakland giving speeches bragging about he was able to evade other enviro laws as mayor. And the AG’s office under Brown has been out to lunch on all of the banking and stock fraud issues of the last years.
Newsom on the other hand I think generally has good policy positions — he was right on gay marriage (and in a million years, Matt Gonzalez wouldn’t have done the same, and he sure didn’t care what happened to Kerry). He also focused city resources on neglected neighborhoods, provided thousands of apts for homeless people, instituted a bunch of new renewable resources programs like running city fleet trucks on used grease from restaurants and building a 5 MW solar plant, and was stymied by the Board on some like trying to get free citywide wifi up and running (which the so-called progressives vetoed because it wouldn’t provide free fiber-optic cable citywide and so it was discriminatory. or something), but he’s been unwilling to take on the police and fire depts because he’s wanted their endorsement so badly for Gov. So those depts have been money sinks for the past years, and completely out of date. He did just this month bring in an outsider for police chief, but it should have happened years ago. If he’s not willing to take on those depts when he had 75% approval ratings, then what’s he going to do in Sac?
Also, to the commenter who says they’ve seen Gavin give speeches off the cuff and without notes and be witty and knowledgable, i’ve seen that too. I’ve also seen Brown do it.
Linus
I’ve lived out here in the East Bay Area for 2 years now, and my vote is certainly up for grabs. I’d be most inclined to listen to someone who talked seriously about the need to reform how the state is governed (2/3 rules, the longest constitution in the universe, etc.)
theo
Ignore the Bay Guardian’s perspective on the race. It’s the party organ of hippies who settled down, bought rent controlled houses and became NIMBYs. By crusading against growth they’ve done more than any other single organization to promote the gentrification they claim to oppose. Instead of dealing with real issues affecting the city, they nurse an 80-year old grudge over the Raker Act.
Basically, it’s the paper that always looks backwards, the National Review of independent newspapers. It’s so bad it makes its competitor the SF Weekly, a lightweight, snark-heavy rag owned by libertarian monopolist jerks from Phoenix, look like the New York Times.
Also, Newsom is a dick and a poseur, and Whitman was the worst CEO in Silicon Valley. Jerry Brown is getting a little old but has decent advisors.
Zippy
@LD50 https://balloon-juice.com/?p=23606#comment-1288544
Good point. Henceforth, just call me “Zippy.”
Turgidson
I thought Newsom started out really well as Mayor. Willie Brown had been OK but horrifically corrupt and isolated before him, so govt basically did nothing the last year or two of his administration. Gavin came in and seemed genuinely motivated to make the City a better place to live. He sided with the workers over the hotels in the Unite Here strike, which was pretty awesome of him, considering how everyone was suspicious that he was a pro-business stooge. Crime and the homeless population went down after he announced initiatives to deal with them. I really thought he had a bright future.
That phase only lasted a year or two, though.
Then he legalized gay marriage and became a national lightning rod. I love that he did the right thing – even though it was “inconvenient,” those types of things always are. I think it was after this that he seemed to lose interest in actually governing the city. The Supervisors, who worked with him reasonably well in the first couple years, started veering away from him, he then had the “slept with a top aide’s wife and might be an alcoholic” phase. Since then I can hardly think of anything useful he’s actually done as mayor. I was shocked that there was no credible candidate against him when he ran for re-election. He only seems interested in publicity and pushing the affair scandal far enough down the memory hole that it won’t hinder his higher aspirations.
I still want to like Newsom, but he makes it hard. I didn’t bother to vote in the last mayoral election and might vote for Sir Moonbeam in the gov primary.
dadanarchist
I wonder if perhaps Tom Campbell isn’t the sensible choice?
The more I read about him the better he sounds.
And I say this as a died-in-the-wool leftist.
He sounds sensible and if there is one thing I’ve learned recently, sometimes it takes moderate Republicans like Campbell to do sensible things. Perhaps only somebody like Campbell could get taxes raised, the budget sorted out and even call a Constitutional Convention.
Of course, the problem is that about 36% of the California Assembly is stilled controlled by distilled essence of wingnuts. Until they disappear I’m not sure anybody can run the place since everything requires a super-majority.
Why is focusing on the enforcement of the Raker Act stupid? How much money could that generate for the state budget?
tatere
My impression of Brown as Mayor was that he talked a lot but that not much really happened that wouldn’t have happened anyway. But that’s pretty vague and could be wrong.
Newsom is a bullshit artist but it’s our bullshit, which is a bit of a change.
The comments people have made about the structural problems in California are true, but that doesn’t make the Governor irrelevant. If anything, it’s the opposite.
We need some serious constitutional revisions. Through a convention, or through initiatives, however. But we must break the 2/3 stalemate on budgets and taxes, we have to repair the ruin that Prop 13 brought to city and country finances. That work will be much harder if it has to be done in opposition to the Governor; the Legislature and Democratic leadership will be bad enough.
Brown is on record as saying that Nothing Can Be Done. He is not going to back any kind of “radical” measures. I don’t know how he imagines that he will get anything done but then rhetoric is easier than results. I like him and I’ve voted for him countless times but he is just the wrong guy for the time.
Newsom, I dunno. I think maybe he would at least pretend to have the right intentions – not so much leading as hovering off to the side. But, blech.
I sure hope we get some other choices.
burnspbesq
@Joshua Norton:
Right. The ad hominem attack always comes in handy when faced with a question you don’t want to answer.
burnspbesq
And for the record, my personal view on who should get electricity from the Hetch Hetchy dam is “nobody.” The thing should be removed tomorrow. Its construction was an environmental tragedy of unfathomable proportions. Anyone who bitches about the Owens Valley and benefits from Hetch Hetchy is the worst kind of hypocrite.
MobiusKlein
@theo:
Gotta go with theo – even when I agree with the positions of the SFBG, I abhor their reasoning.
Joshua Norton
@burnspbesq: There was nothing “ad hominem” about it. Just an acknowledgment that I wasn’t being pulled in by all the “dog whistle” words that, coincidentally, are identical to what PG&E has been using to respond to their critics in order to keep their strangle hold on San Francisco’s electricity and the $250 million a year they collect from the residents and businesses.
KG
@58: no, Campbell is not a sensible alternative. This is a pet peeve of mine as a lawyer, he wants to create some sort of “loser pays” system for civil case, as a means of cutting down on “frivolous” lawsuits. He’s a lawyer (though apparently not licensed in California) and teaches law in California yet doesn’t know that we already have something like that. The loser pays costs but not attorney fees. I just don’t take him seriously when he has missed something that should be so easy for someone in his position to know
Count me among those who thinks the entire system needs to be undone and rebuilt.
Lastly, my take this far out, from behind the Orange Curtain is that Whitman is probably the GOP frontrunner. I’d be willing to give Brown a chance, but right now I’m not really impressed with any of them
Mike P
Any candidate that’s serious about fixing California needs to really articulate why there needs to be a constitutional convention so that we can end the suicidal two-thirds provision for modifying the budget and they need to talk about abolishing Prop 13. It’s the only way the state can save itself.
Brachiator
A good piece, but it is sad and ironic that there are no California newspapers capable of covering the state in depth. And the focuses on potential candidates kinda muffles the writer’s lack of an understanding of California regional politics. For example, the Times piece describes Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
But the story doesn’t note that the mayor dropped his gubernatorial bid in part because of a series of local stories that show him to be a publicity hound more interested in photo-ops than in running the city. An indie paper got ahold of the mayor’s appointment schedule and found that during one period of time 80% of the mayor’s schedule was devoted to public appearances. And Los Angeles Magazine recently ran a cover piece which branded the mayor as a failure.
Villaraigosa has also had his problems with an affair with a local news reporter which led to a separation from his wife and is currently dating another local news reporter. This kind of thing, mayoral infidelity, may also continue to dog Newsom, particularly with conservative and some Latino voters.
Travis — She also found it funny that as you go further into the inner sanctum, the staff got progressively better looking.
This makes Newsom’s operation sound like a political version of the obnoxious image obsessed clothing chain Abercrombie and Fitch. This is not good for a guy who once seduced his campaign manager’s wife.
Max Renn — Sadly, no. He was not a good mayor in Oakland. Dellums, alas, has fared little better. Brown was dreadful on housing and education as Mayor, and kowtowed to SF on Port matters.
This is true, but a lot of folks write Oakland off as un-recoverable. Brown will be able to sell himself based on his past experience in general and his current role as State Attorney General. His tenure in Oakland may help him statewide with black voters, while Newsome has to overcome the handicap of being mayor of a city which appears to be undermining its black residents.
Ken
I have two Jerry Brown anecdotes. Around 1994 he was at a BART Station where I worked and asked the janitor for help buying a ticket. After showing Jerry the routine, the janitor commented “And you wanted to be President?” Brown laughed and took it pretty well. A lot of folks wouldn’t.
Also, a few years ago, he and a few other politicians were instrumental in helping to convince BART management to settle contract negotiations with the various unions that represent workers at BART. BART management was so happy with the results, they have vowed to never let “the politicians” get involved with the negotiations again.
Joshua Norton
That will never happen. It may be amended to exclude business property, but the limits on residential property tax are here to stay. Even people who buy a house at today’s prices may resent their older neighbors smaller tax bill, but they are still protected on how much their current taxes can be increased.
grimc
@theo:
*cough* Carly Fiorina *cough*
Joshua Norton
@grimc: cough Carly Fiorina cough
Also.
tcolberg
@Marshall: Not only did residents respond with dynamite, but LADWP had to build actual “forts” along the aqueduct to defend pumphouses from saboteurs. You can still drive out and see them today, though they are no longer staffed.
@Joshua Norton: We are so screwed.
Brachiator
@Mike P:
We are way beyond this now. California State Democratic legislators see that the state has two functions: to deliver services to the people of California; and to ensure that state public employee unions have perpetually increasing wages and pension benefits.
Unfortunately, in serving the public employee unions, the legislature is willing to cut state services.
On top of this, state revenues have been declining so rapidly that if you abolished Prop 13 and the 2/3 budget vote requirement tomorrow, you still would not be able to raise enough taxes in order to come up with a balanced budget.
dadanarchist
The great irony being that he inherited this trend from his predecessor, Willie Brown, the first and only African-American mayor of San Francisco.
A particularly hilarious example of this trend was when the city tore down the admittedly horrible Western Addition projects to replace them with modern mixed use housing. They were then pegged as mixed-income units, except that in the turnover something like 2/3rds of the former residents, mostly African-American, were shit out of luck and had to move out of the city.
Of course, this helped anchor the redevelopment of the Hayes Valley area, where Golden Boy’s flagship PlumpJack is located.
demimondian
@Joshua Norton: There’s a difference — HP has been making money since Fiorina got the boot, and largely as a result of policies she implemented. Whitman? Yeah, not so much.
oaklandish
Here is an East Bay Express piece on Jerry Brown, which provides a nice overview timeline. Read that for context before digging into the weeds on any particular issue.
Over two-thirds of Oakland voters are registered democrats — so as you can imagine the politics and coalitions are very different than they are for statewide offices. The most relevant things are his attempts at structural reforms (e.g. strong mayor). Oakland government was (and still is) deeply dysfunctional. The state is too, though in different ways.
Zuzu's Petals
@sbjules:
Ah, Pat Brown, the “last real Governor” of California. Built/expanded a world class university system. Built a world class infrastructure … while his successors did little but run it into the ground.
You know what they said about Reagan’s tenure as Governor:
“It may not have been well done, but at least it got Brown on both sides.”
Ta-dum.
burnspbesq
@Joshua Norton:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Strictly speaking, your argument isn’t, by the definition set forth above, ad hominem. It’s the illegitimate offspring of ad hominem and strawman: instead of attacking or appealing to a characteristic or belief I actually, have you imputed to me characteristics or beliefs I don’t possess, and attacked your convenient fiction.
And you still haven’t answered the question.
hal
I think the problem in CA is that we only seem to react to name recognition. Where are the nobodies trying to build a name for themselves out of their accomplishments? Instead, it’s all people who are famous on some level or another. Hell, that’s the only reason Arnold even one. If anyone else had been the candidate (like Issa, who funded the who recall so that he could be Governor), Davis would probably have won.
Brachiator
@hal:
California politicians have done everything than can to disregard the will of the people and to ensure themselves permanent jobs. They gerrymandered districts to ensure that some areas would be safely Democratic or Republican, and the Republicans were so eager to get some safe seats that they agreed to become in effect a permanent minority party.
And then both parties reacted to term limits by playing a game of musical chairs, jumping from office to office to stay in politics, with unnecessary commissions used as placekeepers for pols who don’t have an assembly seat of state office that they can run for.
But this also means that there are backroom deals made to decide who will be allowed to run for a termed-out seat. And this is where name recognition comes into play. An old hand, or the sibling, child or spouse of an old hand, gets priority over any newcomer. And about the only time that a candidate can bypass the system is if he is independently wealthy enough (former LA mayor Richard Riordan) or notable enough outside politics (Governor Arnold) to get over on the political machine.
hal
@ burnspbesq
Only because in the past 5 days, on two separate blogs I have seen posters cut and paste the definition of ad hominem in response to someone else’s post…which I meant to put entirely in block…
http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem
Mike
I work in Oakland, though I don’t live there.
Brown was a great hands-on mayor, pushing lots of initiatives to improve the schools, to revitalize downtown, etc. Oakland had always had a weak mayor/strong city manager system. Brown pushed through an amendment to give the mayor more power, and then used it well. He was so popular he barely bothered to campaign for his reelection.
Then Ron Dellums succeeded Brown. Admirable though his service in Congress was, Dellums is not a strong executive, and the result has been chaos in the city government. Nothing works well and Dellums is extremely unpopular. (This was all very foreseeable: Dellums had never held an executive position and was unlikely to learn a lot of new skills at age 70. But he’d been a big name in the East Bay for 35 years and, to be blunt, was the only serious black candidate after eight years of a white mayor.)
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“Ignore the Bay Guardian’s perspective on the race. It’s the party organ of hippies who settled down, bought rent controlled houses and became NIMBYs. By crusading against growth they’ve done more than any other single organization to promote the gentrification they claim to oppose. ”
Damn, Theo nailed the Bay Guardian. Annoying reactionary NIMBYs is what they are, and opposing high-rise development in the 1980s meant spawl out to the central valley in the 2000s.
Anyway, to this SF resident, Newsom is an empty suit, who governs by press release. Having said that, SF has been hit less than other municipalities, thanks to a rainy-day fund.
Brown was a good Mayor of Oakland, and he’ll have my vote.
I’d vote for Campbell as a person: he was a good Dean of Berkeley’s B-school after Laura Tyson, and is a very smart man. However, he’d need to switch from the GOP before I’d vote for him. The CA GOP is just too full of crazy to vote for the rare sane candidate from them.
Tim in SF
@Dave Latchaw: Gavin’s politics are OK; the problem is that he’s just a total dick.
I worked on his 2004 campaign and met him many times. He always seemed very nice to me. Never heard nor saw him do anything dickish. At all.
Though, fucking your friend’s wife is pretty damn low.
Xenos
@hal: Re: ad Homenism — Personal attacks as a rhetorical device are what people mean when they use the term ad Hominem. Maybe the term should be reserved for certain formal logical applications. In any case, acting like a pedantic bastard is obnoxious, you wanker.
hal
@87
How dare you! I have never been with anyone under age in my life! Oh wait….oops, never mind.
JadedOptimist
My problem with Newsom is that, even when he’s right, it’s All About Him. Yes, he had the right idea on marriage equality, but his emphasis seemed to be not to encourage wider acceptance of the concept, but rather to make sure everyone knew that He, Gavin Newsom, Straight White Guy, had the CORRECT view on the subject. It’s the difference between using the power and prestige of your office to promote progressive change, and using a progressive position to promote your own power and prestige.
Brown, while he does not say he is looking to make structural changes in the State, is in a unique position to do so. He alone could persuasively make the comparison between California before Prop 13 and after. He could articulate a case for the current brokenness of the State based on past personal and family experience. Yes, he is more of a pragmatist now. But we are at a point where the pragmatic response to the situation is radical change.
Gavin Newsom anecdote: As a long-time member of the G.A.Y. Freedom Marching Band of Los Angeles, I have been in a whole lot (probably around 100) of Pride parades. Newsom’s campaign had a contingent in the Long Beach LGBT Pride Parade this year; the band was a few contingents behind. Newsom’s contingent was moving at a snail’s pace, making sure that EVERYONE along the route had stickers, buttons, signs, whatever to support his candidacy. One of the challenges of a parade is always to keep it moving. If one contingent moves slowly or stops, it creates a huge gap in the parade which sucks for the people watching, as well as for the contingents after the slowpoke. Parade organizers asked them to pick up the pace so as not to screw up the parade, to no avail. They had their agenda, and didn’t seem to care about the actual parade. Eventually, the parade organizers had the Band basically create a passing lane around Newsom’s contingent so the parade could continue. The only time I can recall ever doing something like that was to get around a float with a mechanical breakdown (and then only until it could be pushed/towed off the route).
The idea of participating in a LGBT Pride parade is to show your support for the community. Certainly with marriage equality as a major theme for the event, there would have been a lot of creative ways for the Newsom contingent to get noticed by emphasizing his role in that fight. But, for whatever reason, it got reversed, and to them the parade became an opportunity for the LGBT community to show OUR support for his candidacy for Governor. Disrespectful of his hosts for the day? Certainly. Narcissistic? Possibly. Likely to get my support? Nope.
YM
Newsom: From someone who works in the city government: wide, but not deep.
My impression as an SF resident for his term: He talks all the right talk, but doesn’t actually get anything followed through on. But, he did go out to Hunter’s Point (public housing project) and talked to them.
He’s shown up for progressive events that DKos has promoted. He campaigned at Obama events, shouting all the right progressive points. I think his heart is actually in the right place, but I’m not sure he’s hard or smart enough to actually get anything done.
I’d like him to be actually doing his job as mayor, rather than going around the rest of the state campaigning. The SF budget is in shambles. He should fix that before taking on Sacramento.
Brown: Made a nice hippy co-op in Oakland. Far better mayor than Dellums. Made great policy in the 70s. Especially something called rural class K code. – Basically made it so rural houses could have different code than those in the city, acknowledging that it’s hard to build things out in the boonies, that maybe you don’t need to heat every room, or put electricity in it. For all that he’s a radical, you’d hope conservatives would appreciate the freedom in that.
I prefer brown on a policy level. But I’m not sure how many NEW ideas he has.
Either would be better than another republican facilitating obstruction.