After 'Brown-out?'

"It's going to be a heckuva race when Willie's gone," San Francisco entrepreneur and political activist Peter Taylor told me on the ferry to Sausalito. "Everyone's positioning to succeed him."

Although most of the talk at the RNC meeting and among California pundits and pols centers on the race between Bill Simon' and Gov. Gray Davis, San Franciscans are different. The statewide races this fall seem to be discussed far less than the battle to succeed termed-out, two-term Mayor Willie Brown next year.

For a long time, it was assumed that State Senate President John Burton, who will be termed-out of Sacramento in 2004, would run to succeed close ally and fellow leftist Democrat Brown in '03. Then, the scenario went, onetime state Assembly. Speaker Brown would go back to Sacramento by winning Burton's open senate seat.

But it doesn't seem to be working out that way. Brown and Burton both suffered a tremendous loss of political capital in the March primary when Kim Burton, daughter of the senate president and Brown-appointed city public defender, was badly beaten by fellow Democrat Jeff Adachi (whom she had previously fired as No. 2 official in the public defender's office). Now there is less and less talk of the 70-year-old Burton's pursuing the demanding job of mayor. For his part, Brown has yet to begin raising funds for a state senate race or any other contest.

At this time, the man.most talked about for mayor is City Board of Supervisors President Tom Ammiano, whom San Francisco magazine recently characterized as "The Great Left Hope" and the only supervisor "friendly to the interest groups that make up the city's left-renters, environmentalists, homeless activists, artists, gays and lesbians, and public power advocates." The 60-year-old former high school teacher and nightclub comic-who would be the first openly homosexual big-city mayor in America if elected next year-actually managed to make it into a run-off with Brown in 1999 and Brown eventually won re-election only in the second go-round.

But the momentum and grass-roots enthusiasm sparked by Ammiano's candidacy helped carry seven anti-establishment left-wingers onto the Board of Supervisors the following year, giving the left control of the board and making Ammiano one of the most powerful politicians in San Francisco. His election next year, concludes Dashka Slater in San Francisco, "would complete the left's takeover at City Hall."

There are. other fresh faces mentioned for the mayoral race-notably City Treasurer Susan Leal and Supervisor Gavin Newsom, whose wife, Assistant District Attorney Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom, was part of the prosecution team in the recent celebrated dog-mauling trial. And, as always seems to be the case in San Francisco, several names from the past are being dusted off and talked of for comeback bids: former Mayors Art Agnos (1987-91) and Frank Jordan (1991-95) and former Supervisor Angela Alioto, daughter of Mayor (1967-75) Joseph Alioto.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Jul 29, 2002
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