Mayor Lee, and the Company He Keeps

Now that the SF politician is in office, supporters like Willie Brown and Rose Pak are scrutinized
By: Gerry Shih

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.

Herrera declined to comment. His spokesman, Matt Dorsey, said: “The city attorney and mayor are professionals and dedicated public servants. They’ll work to gether just fine.”

Chiu declined to address Pak’s post-election threats, saying it would be beneath him.

“I’ve worked very hard in my first three years to deliver results,” Chiu said. “I think my constituents appreciate that I’m my own man and have always put first the needs of my district and San Francisco.”

As Lee now prepares to roll out the agenda for his first full term, observers are waiting to see whether Brown and Pak will influence the administration’s policy making.

Pak has been pushing supervisors to support a luxury condominium project at 8 Washington Street, on the Embarcadero waterfront. The project developer is a close friend of Brown’s, and several of Brown’s political associates are working as lobbyists for the project.

There is also the issue of business tax reform, a top priority for Ron Conway, a prominent tech investor and Lee supporter who has argued that the city’s existing tax code stifles innovation and growth, as well as for other tech industry leaders and the local Chamber of Commerce. And to achieve cost savings in the coming budget process, Lee may have to reopen difficult contract negotiations with the Police and Fire Departments, two unions that supported his election.

Lee must also make an appointment soon to replace Ross Mirkarimi, the sheriff-elect, as District 5 Supervisor. Current top contenders include a planning commissioner and a staff member in Lee’s office of housing. Brown, who writes a weekly column in The San Francisco Chronicle, wrote recently that “so far the leading candidate appears to be ‘none of the above.’”

Supervisor John Avalos, who finished second in the mayor’s race and is running for re-election in his district next year, said he believed that Lee was being pressured by Brown and Pak to pick a candidate to unseat him as well. “But I don’t think that’s his style,” Avalos said. “I’m very Zen about it all.”

“There are people who have expectations of him,” Avalos added. “He has to decide how much he’ll fulfill their agenda rather than one that comes from his roots being a civil rights lawyer.”

Lee’s representatives did not return calls seeking comment.

The mayor, who worked as a tenants’ rights activist before entering city government, has received a lot of assistance from his benefactors. During the election, Brown helped assemble an array of interest groups — from the Police and Fire Department unions to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce to some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley’s technology industry — into independent political action committees that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Lee’s candidacy. And Pak got dozens of Chinese business owners to donate to these PACs as well as to Lee’s campaign.

As the votes were tallied on Nov. 8, Brown and Conway gave the lavish party for Lee at the Palace Hotel, a gathering that outshone the mayor’s official campaign event, a relatively modest affair at a South Beach restaurant.

By 10 p.m., most of Lee’s campaign, including the candidate, had decamped for the Palace, where the party was in full swing. Brown and Pak greeted guests at the entrance of the Garden Court. Conway worked the room and occasionally bounded onstage to confer with the entertainer M.C. Hammer, the D.J. for the night, about the music.

After making a brief victory speech, Lee was whisked out of the building. But Brown was quickly surrounded by television cameras and women who asked him to pose for pictures. He reveled in the political effort that culminated in Lee’s victory. “Everybody who participated in the Ed Lee campaign was invaluable,” Brown said with a smile.

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.