Erik Verduzco/The Bay Citizen

Ed Lee at his election night party on Nov. 8, 2011.

On election night a couple of weeks ago, former Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr. of San Francisco celebrated Mayor Edwin M. Lee’s victory in style at the downtown Palace Hotel, toasting friends as he twirled through the room.

The next morning, Brown went on public radio and lashed out at one of Lee’s unsuccessful challengers, Dennis Herrera, the city attorney.

Brown said that Herrera should forfeit his job. “You decide to run for some other office — you probably should resign your job,” he said. “Period.”

This has been an especially awkward few weeks at City Hall, where Herrera and several other former candidates are gingerly getting back to work after flinging allegations of fraud, corruption and incompetence at one another during a particularly acrimonious mayoral race.

By all accounts, the soft-spoken Lee, who campaigned on the promise of restoring civility to San Francisco politics, seems eager to cease hostilities. The mayor was seen chatting and shaking hands with Herrera on the City Hall steps the day after the election.

He has also had polite, if uncomfortable, conversations with David Chiu, the president of the Board of Supervisors, another candidate who sometimes criticized Lee during the campaign.

But the same could not be said for Lee’s two closest associates: Brown, his political patron, and Rose Pak, the Chinatown power broker.

A week after Brown chastised Herrera, Pak told a Chinese-language newspaper that she was considering running next year to oust Chiu from his district seat. Pak chided Chiu, who won office three years ago with her help, for not heeding her counsel. She offered a Chinese proverb: “Remember the source of the water you drink.”

The episode highlighted the paradox of Lee’s brief political career to date: his close association with two of the city’s most polarizing and powerful characters has been both instrumental to his rise and a frequent source of distraction.

Last summer, even before Lee entered the race, his critics called for an ethics investigation after an independent group steered by Pak raised tens of thousands of dollars in a campaign to entice Lee to run. The group was cleared of wrongdoing. In October, Lee again came under fire when his rivals said that supporters tied to Pak had subverted campaign contribution limits and helped voters in Chinatown fill out their ballots. The district attorney is investigating.

By sounding boastful or vindictive, Brown and Pak “sound like they’re the ones who won, when they spent the entire campaign fending off charges that Ed Lee was a puppet for them,” said Jason McDaniel, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University.

McDaniel said that Lee collected fewer than half of the first-place votes in this first competitive mayoral election in San Francisco under ranked-choice voting, and that if he could not build a coalition, the public might feel that he had not achieved a mandate. “If he’s going to govern like he did before, as the consensus-building, coalition-building mayor, he’s going to have to corral Willie Brown and Rose Pak a bit,” McDaniel said.