Left Wing Shudders as Its Presumed Leader Endures a String of Setbacks
Peskin, recently on the cusp of power, seems to be losing his grip on city politics
Three months ago, Aaron Peskin seemed poised to be the boss of this one-party town, following in the footsteps of former Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr., the strong-armed patronage king who was his political nemesis.
But in the run-up to a November election with enormous repercussions, Peskin, the chairman of San Francisco’s Democratic Party and a man with well-known mayoral ambitions, may be losing his grip on city politics. His preferred progressive candidates for the Board of Supervisors have lagged in their district races, and some of his key political allies have publicly deserted him.
As the campaigns of Peskin’s candidates have faded, so have his hopes of being appointed interim mayor in the event that Mayor Gavin Newsom wins his election for lieutenant governor and departs for Sacramento. That Peskin has stumbled on the cusp of power is frustrating San Francisco’s clamorous left wing, which had hoped that, after 18 years under the moderate mayors Frank Jordan, Brown, and Newsom, the city might finally have an unquestionably progressive and politically savvy mayor.
“Of course there are those of us who would like to have somebody who could snap their fingers and dictate policy,” said Tim Redmond, the executive editor of The San Francisco Bay Guardian, a weekly newspaper that for four decades has given voice to the city’s far left. “But Peskin can’t put that together. He’s now become this boogeyman.”
Peskin’s recent setbacks reflect in part the effects of district elections, which in the past 10 years have both radicalized city politics, but have also diffused once-great concentrations of power. While supervisors were once elected citywide, and therefore needed the financing and other support that only the party could provide, the by-district races are, individually, much more modest affairs, and enable upstart candidates with limited means to mount meaningful campaigns.
So while Peskin’s left-leaning allies have increasingly occupied elected office, they are splintered and much less likely to coalesce under him into an old-style urban political machine, political experts said.
“There is diversity in San Francisco’s neighborhoods and their interests, and a diversity in the many ‘lefts’ of this city,” said Corey Cook, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco. “The notion that Peskin could do what Willie Brown did was over-optimistic.”
After the June primaries, it appeared the pieces were falling into place for Peskin: He had ushered a slate of progressive candidates onto the Democratic County Central Committee, which decides the party’s highly influential endorsements. With that, he had hoped to secure the four contested seats on the 11-member Board of Supervisors, who would help anoint him interim mayor and set him up as the front-runner for the November 2011 mayoral election. (There continues to be some controversy over whether the interim mayor would be appointed by the existing Board of Supervisors or the incoming one, but most legal experts expect it would be the latter.)
Scott Wiener, the centrist D.C.C.C. chairman who was ousted in 2008 by Peskin after a brutal intra-party struggle, warned in news reports at the time that Peskin was assembling “a machine that would make Willie Brown blush.”
And yet, just three months later, Peskin’s reach seems to have been overstated.
Last week, Janet Reilly, Peskin’s ally and the clear front-runner in District 2, which includes the Pacific Heights and Marina neighborhoods, issued a vague statement effectively promising she would not back him for interim mayor. The announcement came shortly after she was booed during a forum at the Golden Gate Yacht Club for refusing to denounce Peskin, who is considered too left-wing by many residents of the city’s wealthiest, most conservative enclave.
In District 6, which includes the fast-changing South of Market district as well as the Tenderloin, Debra Walker, the candidate Peskin endorsed, is locked in a tight race against Jane Kim, a progressive who claimed to be running a successful grass-roots campaign. In a rare move, Brownreportedly gave thousands of dollars to a third-party expenditure committee in September on Kim’s behalf.
In District 8, the Castro, Wiener has emerged as the front-runner even as Peskin has steered the party’s endorsement and financial resources toward Rafael Mandelman. And in District 10, the last contested seat, Peskin could not even muster a party endorsement for Tony Kelly, his candidate.
In an interview this week, Peskin acknowledged that he was concerned for his candidates, and said he “never took for granted” their chances.
“There’s only two ways to run: scared or unopposed,” he said.
In fact, since comparisons to Brown’s “machine” began to trail him over the summer, Peskin had deftly acknowledged his limitations — and his faction’s disunity — as a positive contrast to Brown’s time in office.
“I think that it’s a sign of maturity of a community when we can have open differences,” Peskin said. “It’s an open expression of the will of the people. That’s progressive values. We’ve got to get away from the politics of rewarding our friends.”
He added that he has not yet sought support among the board to be interim mayor.
In recent weeks the city has also been roiled by divisions over Proposition B, the public pension reform measure that has absorbed much of the political firepower of labor unions that form the left’s backbone.
“Peskin has a certain amount of juice as the party chair, but he’s fighting a lot of fires,” said Jim Lazarus, the senior vice president for public policy at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.
Among the current board of supervisors, support for Peskin, who was once president of the board, has not gelled, either. He has a complex relationship with David Chiu, the board president and his protégé-turned-rival. And David Campos, the rising progressive standard-bearer, said he would prefer to see Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, his mentor, return from Sacramento.
“If there’s one person among the progressives who could unify the progressives, that would be Tom Ammiano,” Campos said in an interview. “He should’ve been mayor years ago.”
Peskin has not been alone in his inability to exert his authority. Since Brown was obliged by term limits to step down in 2004, his hand-picked successor, Newsom, has struggled to impose his will on city politics.
His battles with progressive supervisors are a far cry from the days of Brown, whose control over the board was so complete that in a 1996 magazine profile he compared the supervisors with “mistresses you have to service.”
Brown’s foes — who in addition to resenting his political tactics considered him far too cozy with downtown business interests — believed they could erode his power by making supervisor elections district rather than citywide. In 2000, district elections returned for the first time since the 1970s and Peskin, shortly after taking control of the party in 2008, called it “a remarkably profound moment in the history of San Francisco.” He did not realize at the time that he would have to deal with its consequences two years later.
This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.
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