Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

David Chiu at a campaign rally in San Francisco's Chinatown on Aug. 29, 2011

When David Chiu was a child, his mother made him share his Halloween candy with his classmates.

Each week, she took him to the library to get a stack of books. While other kids went off to summer camp, Chiu’s mother home-schooled him between swimming, soccer and violin lessons.

Doris Chiu “is a little bit of a tiger mom,” said Chiu, now 41. “She had extremely high expectations of her kids.”

Chiu and his brothers all attended Harvard. In 2009, he became president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. And now Chiu is a candidate for mayor.

But Chiu’s mother could not have prepared him for his current predicament. His bid for mayor has turned into a brutal political education that has left him shunned by his former progressive allies, abandoned by the business-friendly groups who backed his candidacy and relegated to the margins of a crowded field.

A Bay Citizen/USF Poll released this week showed Chiu receiving just 3 percent of first-place votes.

“This thing is like a Shakespearean tragedy,” said former board president Aaron Peskin, who counts himself as one of Chiu’s former allies. “He played his friends. He made new friends. And they played him.”

Chiu says he made hard political choices based on his beliefs.

Just nine months ago, Chiu seemed to be on an endless upward trajectory. Mayor Gavin Newsom offered him a job as district attorney. As Chiu considered a run for mayor, Rose Pak, the Chinatown powerbroker, told him she would look favorably on his candidacy.

Now, former police Chief George Gascón, whom Newsom picked as district attorney and who is running for re-election, is in a strong position to win, the Bay Citizen/USF poll shows. And interim Mayor Ed Lee, who promised Chiu that he would not run, holds a commanding lead after reversing himself at Pak’s urging.

During his brief political career, Chiu over-studied each piece of legislation, voted his conscience on major issues, listened to his constituents and backers — all while attempting to chart a political path.

In a surprise Oct. 11 endorsement from the San Francisco Chronicle, editorial page editor John Diaz wrote that Chiu “pledged to cut through ideological and personality divisions at City Hall to find common ground and reasonable solutions.”

“For better or worse, regardless of what happens to my political future, I stand up for what I believe is right,” Chiu said in an interview with The Bay Citizen.

That future, for the moment, seems very lonely.

*     *     *

Last January, after weeks of backroom wrangling, Newsom, on his way out to become lieutenant governor, tapped Sheriff Michael Hennessey as the apparent consensus choice for interim mayor. Lee, a relatively obscure bureaucrat who had never been in the public eye, had stated he wasn’t interested in the job.

“We didn’t even know Ed Lee was a consideration,” said Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, a key Hennessey backer.

When Supervisor Bevan Dufty, and then Chiu, revealed that they were backing Lee as a stealth candidate pushed by Pak and former Mayor Willie Brown, progressives saw Chiu as a betrayer.

Jon Golinger, who had managed Chiu’s race for supervisor, said he walked up to his former employer in the marbled hallway and told him: “I can’t say how disappointed and betrayed I feel.”

But Chiu and observers familiar with his decision say he had good reasons for picking Lee over Hennessey. Lee, after two decades as a city bureaucrat, knew the ins and outs of transit, land use and infrastructure issues. Chiu had been a civil rights attorney, and he saw the historic importance of appointing the city’s first Asian-American mayor.

Lee, meanwhile, had sworn repeatedly that he had no interest in running in November.

That promise was especially important to Chiu. Although he was criticized for helping install Lee as interim mayor, he knew his own candidacy would be considerably weakened if Lee entered the race.