When interim Mayor Ed Lee announced that he was going to run for a full term, politicos cried foul. Lee was appointed mayor because he promised not to run!

Handfuls of loud, angry voters heckled Lee at a recent mayoral debate. Opponents have been pounding him on the issue. Some have taken that to represent a broad backlash, as expressed in the recent Huffington Post headline: “San Francisco greets new candidate with cold reception.”

Really? San Francisco? Everybody?

Here’s a news flash: plenty of San Franciscans don’t seem to care about Lee’s reversal. 

Based on our highly informal poll, it appears that the man on the street is anything but naive and doe-eyed about politicians and their tactics.

“To have a politician lie is pretty shocking, isn’t it. This is the first time it’s happened, isn’t it?” 60-year-old Paul Hessinger asked sarcastically. The Bernal Heights resident echoed the cynicism voiced by multiple respondents.

The real question, Hessinger said, is: “Who’s going to run the city so that it actually makes sense for us, the average people?”

The Bay Citizen previously reported that the apparently folksy movement to get Lee to run was really a part of a “well-orchestrated campaign” by the city’s power brokers. Nobody we surveyed actually believes Lee is an everyman à la “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Hessinger, for example, knows that Lee has made his career in city government and is backed by a political machine. 

Hunters Point resident Charles Jackson assumes that Lee changed his mind because special interest groups offered to fund his bid for mayor. And that makes Lee the same as every other politician, Jackson said.

It’s not that the people we polled backed Lee. Only one of the eight people we interviewed said they’d vote for Lee if the polls opened tomorrow. All of the respondents said they needed to learn more about the candidates and that it was too early to make a final decision.

But they believed Ed Lee had a right to enter the race, despite his promise not to do so. Only one respondent said Lee’s decision could be viewed as a sign of weakness. The rest of the respondents said that if circumstances change, politicians should be allowed to change too.

“I think conditions change, right?” asked Beatriz Herrera, a Mission district resident. “He may have different information than he had before he was appointed interim mayor, and that is making it so that he’s changing his position.”

Videos by Erik Verduzco and Stephanie Chong. Text and interactive by Queena Kim.