After a Tough Fight, An Early Night for Brown
By Janet Dang

After more than a year of a hard-fought campaign that culminated in Tuesday’s surprise runoff with Board of Supervisors President Tom Ammiano, Mayor Willie Brown called it a relatively early night.

Less than two hours after polls closed, more than 60,000 absentee votes showed Brown leading 2 to 1. By 10 p.m., he had declared himself the winner, and at about midnight, Ammiano conceded.

Chinatown’s factions, usually stubbornly disparate, united in their support of Brown. Commissioners Julie Lee and Benny Yee were among about 400 diverse partygoers at Longshoreman’s Hall who chanted “four more years!”; so were Chinatown Community Development Corp. leader Gordon Chin and Chinese Chamber of Commerce lobbyist Rose Pak. And so were some of California’s biggest Democratic powerbrokers: Assembly speaker Anthony Villaraigosa, State Sen. Jackie Speier and U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, to name a few.

As of 10 a.m. yesterday, Brown had amassed 126,673 votes -- about 60 percent of the total. Ammiano had 85,036 -- or about 40 percent. Just under half of the city’s registered voters voted, either by mail or at the polls, according to election officials.

A jubilant Brown addressed the crowd, savoring his victory aloud for more than 20 minutes.

“This is truly a night and what appears to be a victory,” he said. “There are just too many souls that contributed to this occasion. I am deeply honored, deeply honored. It’s now a year and a month that I started this campaign. You just have no idea how relieved I am. It’s been a very long and tough journey.

“The cult of the personality of Willie Brown was no longer an issue. It was whether or not we, together, wish to make this the most magnificent city in all the world for all of us to live in.”

Over at Ammiano’s gathering at the Mission’s Roccapulco Club, the band was loud and the mood was upbeat. But the victorious exuberance that electrified the write-in celebration at Josie’s Cabaret and Juice Joint last month was clearly absent this time around. Election results weren’t announced to supporters, as was the case last time, though there was a lot of dancing and singing. Ammiano emerged occasionally -- first to briefly greet his supporters and finally to give a short concession speech, ending a maverick campaign “to make history again.”

When Ammiano began speaking at about 12:30 a.m., Brown was leading by 20 percentage points.

“I am not conceding the war,” Ammiano said of his bid, which garnered 49,000 write-in votes last month and turned out 4,000 volunteers, mostly unpaid, this month.

“I am conceding the battle. I concede but I do not surrender. To Mayor Brown, congratulations. But don’t forget -- we’re not going away. ...We made a difference when difference was not supposed to happen.”

Since his successful write-in candidacy last month, Ammiano has campaigned heavily for Asian Americans’ votes, despite indications that he was in for an uphill battle. A CAVEC/David Binder Research exit poll done last month indicated that 2 of 3 Asian Americans voted for Brown on Nov. 2. Only 2.6 percent voted for Ammiano.

Though Ammiano received endorsements from conservative/ moderate factions -- including the Chinese American Democratic Club and San Francisco Neighbors Association Co-chair Rose Tsai -- and though he mobilized a coalition of mostly young and progressive Asian Americans, Brown secured most of the rest of the Chinese American power structure, including 6 of 8 elected API officials in the city as well as endorsements from both the San Francisco Independent and AsianWeek. (Both are owned by Pan Asia Venture Capital Corp.)

Eric Mar, a leader of the pro-Ammiano group API Force, nonetheless questioned the widespread assumption that Chinese Americans universally favored Brown. “There are too many working families, low-wage workers,” he said. “[They] should be supporting Ammiano’s interests.”

Referring to the fact that Brown’s campaign raised well over $3.1 million for the fight while Ammiano’s raised under $300,000, Mar said: “It’s hard to get your message out when you’re outspent 10 to 1. If the message got out more, people would make better decisions.”

On top of that, Ammiano had proposed changes that made business interests extremely nervous, even though he recently disavowed poorly received proposals like imposing a special tax on commuters, those who make more than $150,000 per year and investors who trade through the Pacific Stock Exchange.

Business interests lined up behind Brown. Since his first victory in 1995, new construction has been seemingly unending, from the South of Market’s Metreon to the facelift of City Hall to the creation of thousands of commercially zoned live-work lofts. In this election cycle, San Franciscans for Sensible Government, a business lobbying group, spent more than $418,000 in so-called soft money to support Brown’s re-election bid.

In an informal meeting last week, Brown went over his accomplishments in an interview with AsianWeek.

“My four year history as mayor of this city has moved this city to a place where nobody wanted to invest or work or live into a place where unemployment is down to 2.7 percent,” he said. “This city was really unsafe by everybody’s evaluations. It is now become a city with the highest reduction in violent crime in the nation and a 20 percent reduction in crime overall. We’ve moved this city to a point where everybody wants to live here and wishes to invest. It has been done so with quality leadership and good vision and great and unusual contacts with both the federal and the state’s assistance to the city.”

Rich DeLeon, chair and professor of political science at San Francisco State University, said that in almost any other big American city, “Brown would be the radical, definitely the big-time liberal mayor. But in San Francisco, he comes off more of a moderate, centrist, more pro-growth, business, definitely not anywhere near the left.”

When a Chronicle poll this month asked which candidate “would do a better job in dealing with the issue of business and the economy,” Brown was chosen by 63 percent. Only 19 percent named Ammiano.

Ammiano’s record as a strong backer of tenant rights and rent control may also have hurt him with the city’s small landlords, a fifth of whom are Asian American.

While Brown hinted at the possibility of weakening rent control during his successful bid for the San Francisco Republican Central Committee’s endorsement, he backed away from saying he would support weakened rent control. He said last week that he supports only a study looking at the system.

“I don’t think one should try to focus on what the study should do,” Brown said. “You may poison the objectivity of the study.”

He said recommendations should be reviewed and ultimately decided on by voters. “Rent control laws, like any laws, ought to be fair to the tenants as well as to the owners,” he said in the Dec. 7 interview.

Though DeLeon said an endorsement by Supervisor Leland Yee might have persuaded some API landowners to consider Ammiano, Yee officially remained neutral. Former Mayor Frank Jordan, also seen as a moderate, did not endorse either candidate, either.

But Brown, in his interview last week, maintained that his record spoke for himself.

“I believe that when you have that kind of history and that kind of a record, you’re entitled to more than a second look for the continuation of your job,” he said. “It would be like becoming the head of AsianWeek. If circulation increased by 50 percent and ad revenues increased by 75 percent... if on-time performance has increased while errors in content had gone down dramatically, that person would not be terminated but rewarded with a bonus for quality performance.

“That’s essentially where I am in this mayor’s race.”