It’s Not Easy Being the Conservative One
Tony Hall would have livened up Thursday's ho-hum debate among nearly-indistinguishable candidates
Being the conservative outsider in the San Francisco mayoral race, the position staked out by Tony Hall, is a lonely business.
You get blackballed from events like Thursday’s mayoral debate because the sponsors, in this case the police and firefighter unions, don’t like your position on city employee pension reform.
You get personal on-the-record insults heaped upon you. To wit: “The people who do know him, the insiders, have a universally low opinion” of him, said Nathan Ballard, a Democratic strategist and former communications director for Gavin Newsom. “He’s a joke of a candidate, a fringe character.”
You get accused of being — gasp! — a Republican, even if you’re not. (Corey Cook, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco, notes that the last “out” Republican to win major elective office in San Francisco, where just 9.5 percent of voters so identify, was George Christopher, elected mayor in 1956.)
But Hall, a former supervisor who lives on the more conservative west side of the city, brings an important dimension to a race that is dominated by City Hall insiders. His supporters, he said, are “native San Franciscans who want their city back from the gang running the city,” a gang whose members “masquerade as liberals and Democrats but have been exploiting the taxpayers of San Francisco for 20 years.”
At a minimum, Hall, a father of seven who still performs as lead singer in a band called the Hallmarks, would have livened up Thursday’s desultory debate, which exposed the degree to which most major candidates hold all-but-indistinguishable positions.
“We do sound very similar at times,” acknowledged Michela Alioto-Pier, another former supervisor.
When Phil Ting, the assessor, was asked to explain how he differed from the other candidates, he told the crowd, “I’m a department head that runs a civil service department.”
Others did little better. “I am the lawyer for everybody in city government,” said Dennis Herrera, the city attorney. “That is why I am different from the other candidates.” David Chiu, the Board of Supervisors president, heralded his being “at the center of budget negotiations the last couple of years.”
Sigh.
If Ed Lee, the interim mayor appointed after promising he would never, ever run for a full term, joins the race this week, he will be just the most favored of a passel of City Hall denizens, many with long-standing ties to Newsom and Willie L. Brown Jr., another former mayor, and with loyalties to the city’s labor unions.
“The public service unions really run this town in so many ways,” said Joseph P. Russoniello, the former United States attorney for the Northern District of California. “They see Tony as a threat to their privileges.”
Russoniello said he supported Hall because of his fiscal conservatism. He sees in Hall the leadership of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, or William F. Weld, the former Massachusetts governor, both tough-minded East Coast Republicans.
Certainly, Hall has clashed with the city’s power structure. In 2005, when a board of Newsom appointees fired Hall as head of Treasure Island redevelopment, he left noisily, saying he had refused to cooperate with ill-conceived and seismically dangerous residential-development plans. Afterward, the city’s Ethics Commission investigated Hall’s use of campaign and office money, and it found violations amounting to a few hundred dollars. Hall, terming the investigation an act of political retribution, was fined $6,000 in 2009.
The whole experience left him loathing what he regards as a still-potent political machine run by Brown.
Hall’s disdain for what he calls the Democratic machine is enthusiastically reciprocated. Detractors deride him as a nutty wedding singer whose own plan for reforming the city’s pension crisis is laughably short of detail. Hall’s other proposals include cutting the city payroll by 10 percent and “revamping the nonprofit homeless industry,” the expensive network of nonprofit groups that are paid by the city to provide services to the city’s homeless population.
“Does that make me a conservative?” Hall asked. Well, in the context of San Francisco, yes, it does.
Hall, Cook said, “is the only one willing to tear down the system.” But the changes he proposes may be too radical for most city voters.
In any event, if Hall continues to be excluded from candidate forums, his ideas won’t get much attention. And that is a shame, because if Thursday night was any indication, this race badly needs ideas to debate.
This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.
Howard Epstein
Obviously "The City Family" is afraid to here other ideas the would benefit people who aren't part of "The City Family," like people who own or work for for-profit, private sector companies and other taxpayers.
Mayoral Debates
Excellent article, Elizabeth.
Tony is literally the only leading candidate that has any differentiation and certainly the only one expressing the concerns of the regular San Francisco taxpayers.
There is this notion that the western neighborhoods like St. Francis Wood, Sunset, Miraloma Park, are right wing! As a Miraloma resident, I can tell you nothing is further from the truth. Most of the people are quite liberal; we just want to be shed of Willie Brown machine politics. We would like to city to stop using property owners as the citie's ATM. We want a few potholes fixed and good schools our kids can walk to.
Tony Hall is our only chance at having a seat at the table.
George Smith
Leland Yee is liberal. Hall is very right wing! Brown is/was a thief and should be in jail!
Pembroke Instruments
Hall is only "right wing" in "Self Francisco".
George Smith
I know you are new here (and apparently corporate right), but we experienced hands know that Hall was a horrific supervisor who gave us Sean Elsbernd.
No person in the know would possibly support Tony Hall!
It would be a complete disaster!
Mayoral Debates
Gavin Newsom appointed Sean Elsbernd. I know Sean, he does nothing for D7. He comes across as an angry, complicated guy.
Hall is a commonsense moderate.
I agree with you on Slick Willie Brown and Ed Lee comes across as very sleazy, very much in the Brown mold.
Ananda Destefano
Amen!
Mayoral Debates
Elizabeth-
It would be a great help if the baycitizen or some other media group could provide live feeds for the debates. All I can get is selected bites on youtube. The people of SF need to know what these candidates are saying.
b s
Thanks for the article. I had never heard of Tony Hall. I remain undecided and would like to hear more about him and the other less known candidates. I find it disturbing that Mr. Hall was excluded from the debates...which seem quite unfair to me.
h. brown
Elizabeth,
This looks like a good place to pass the Matt Gonzalez picks on to your readers. Matt's got 20 years in the game and has served as President of the Board of supes. His choices and reasoning will surprise many.
http://www.fogcityjournal.com/wordpress/
Go Giants!
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M L
Mr. Hall one in a long tradition of "eccentric" libertine and iconoclast political figures in the City -- of whom Quentin Kopp is probably the figurative standard-bearer.
Mr. Hall would be taken more seriously were it not for his record of odd behavior. Nothing too odd, mind you, rather just enough to be written off by pretty much everyone in the city establishment.
So while his ongoing failure to garner momentum behind his various candidacies may have as much to do with his personality as with his politics, the fact remains that there are a lot of people in the city who agree with his positions on the issues.
They wait in quiet frustration for a candidate who has the poise, talent and curb appeal to carry the torch without getting doused by scandal.
Moderates in our city have a much higher standard they must hold to, if they ever hope to get real momentum. And so far, they end up washed out by their eccentricity or on the other hand, their demotivating dullness.
Pembroke Instruments
ML
I wish we had another conservative candidate but I'll roll with Hall because he is the only one objecting to a bloated and corrupt SF govt. All the others are for the status quo. At the recent SF POA Mayoral forum (Hall was excluded), the six that showed could not answer the simple question: what differentiates you from the other candidates at this forum?
They laughed and tried to come up with something and totally failed. At least Tony has come up with a plausible to response on "why vote for me".
s b
Tony Hall is an ethically-challenged former supervisor whose "star" waxed and waned about 10 years ago, maybe earlier.
We've had Tony Hall on the BOS. The city leveled ethics charges against him around 2008. Why? Asking campaign donors to pay his personal expenses in 2004. He threatened to sue the commission for defamation after he was fined. He cannot manage money. But wants to be mayor, and manage your money.
Adding Tony Hall to a debate isn't bringing in any "new" ideas, unless "new" means 2000.
h. brown
Wow,
Scott's full of it. The prime witness against Hall before a totally compromised Ethics Commission repeatedly took the fifth amendment when asked whether it was her who doctored the principle piece of evidence in the case against Tony or if she knew who did. The Lennar cabal has had it in for Hall since he challenged their rape of the island's (Treasure/Yerba Buena treasury.
Scott, we're all out front with our identities here. I'm a retired school teacher with a blog. My given name is Harold Brown and I'm not afraid to give it. What's your full name and where do you make your living?
If you're going to attack someone, do it full frontal with an ID.
Otherwise, you're just another cowardly troll assassin.
giants down 1-4
Bochy sticking with a struggling Jonathan Sanchez in 4th.
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s b
Are you serious? "Cowardly Troll assassin"? First, I have no fond memories of Mr. Hall's tenure on the board. Second, last time I checked, Tony Hall was found liable for a violation and paid an ethics fine. Every fact in my comment was accurate. You're trying to argue out of a legal finding as if it doesn't matter or never occurred. It did. Live with it.
As for your pride in being "out" in the comments, who cares. The site allows anon. commenting because the Internet is full of sick weirdos and identity thieves. If it's a problem for baycitizen.org, they can require full names. Show some respect for other people's opinions, even if you don't agree, rather than being intolerant. This is the fundamental flaw in San Francisco politics: we're tolerant, unless you don't agree.
h. brown
Scott,
Yeah, you're one of the "sick weirdos" on the internet. Yeah, Tony paid a small fine as did Carolyn Knee who was treasurer of the lefty Public Power campaign. In both cases Richard Mo, their 'attorney' who never passed the bar took orders from Jim Sutton and Mabel Ng to use the power of the commission to batter anyone left or right who opposed any of Downtown's candidates or PG&E. Ethics is like the mob, you have to pay them or you can't be involved in another political campaign.
I'm serious about your being a coward. Look in the mirror and that's what you'll see looking back at you. My email is h@ludd.net if you want to take this offline but I don't respond to anonymous posters.
Go Giants!
h.
h.
s b
I've read many of your comments and replies to comments, Mr. Brown, and you are prolific and opinionated, but essentially a caustic online bully. The comments were reported to the site administrator. Now please go take your meds....