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Do We Really Want to Oust the Mayor?

MAKING AMMIANO MAYOR: If the mayor was to be unexpectedly recalled, who would succeed him by a legal democratic coup d’état? How about Supervisor Tom Ammiano, the man whom Mayor Willie Brown trounced with 60 percent of the vote and 80 percent of the Asian American vote in last year’s mayoral contest?

If the mayor is successfully recalled by June 5, 2001 according to San Francisco charter, next year’s board of supervisor president becomes acting mayor until a special election is called. That person may well be Ammiano, who is likely to continue as board president with many of his allies set to take their places on the board.

We may see a scenario like that if a campaign by former mayoral candidate Jim Reid and neighborhood activist Doug Comstock succeeds in recalling Brown for “abuse of power” and failure to address a “housing emergency.”

In response, the mayor has pointed out his appointment of the “most diverse” administration, including three Asian American major department heads (Police Chief Fred Lau, Port Director Douglas Wong, and Public Works Director Ed Lee) and claimed “significant progress” on the housing front with the construction of 11,000 units and passage of a $100 million affordable housing bond.

Reid and Comstock’s petition requires 46,600 valid voter signatures, which means in actuality they need to harvest about 60,000 signatures to account for duplicates and non-voters.

So far, their grassroots campaign appears to be failing. After nearly three months of pounding the pavements, Reid and Comstock have generated an anemic 6,000 signatures, an especially low number considering their campaign began during this fall’s prime election season.

However, if former mayoral candidate Clint Reilly handed a fat check to his former campaign operative Comstock, it could provide for a professional signature operation and revive the campaign. Reilly has the means, since he underwrote the downtown no-growth Proposition L campaign, which, had it passed, would have benefited his downtown properties enormously and constrained an already short supply of office space.

But, as Reilly himself knows, a recall is a double-edged sword of democracy: The effort can backfire.

In 1983 then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein underwent a recall effort. Some gay activists were ticked off by Feinstein’s veto of a pioneering piece of domestic partnership legislation, while NRA proponents were peeved at her gun control legislation in the wake of the Moscone-Milk assassinations.

Well, the recall backfired. Feinstein’s biggest argument against the recall was that it should be reserved for malfeasance and not for narrow issues.

And she argued that a $400,000 recall was very costly (today, most of the Department of Elections $10 million budget is for administering two elections). Feinstein received an overwhelming vote of confidence as 82 percent of voters rejected her recall. Not only that, the recall inadvertently cleared the field of her challengers (like then-Supervisor Quentin Kopp) during that year’s regularly scheduled mayor’s race.

If Brown could duplicate Feinstein’s landslide and beat back any recall, he would delay his political arthritis as a lame duck in his final two years as mayor.

GAY BAITING OR PRANK?: Someone during the November campaign had faxed to the S.F. Independent, Sing Tao Daily and strangely, supervisor candidate Lawrence Wong’s campaign, his ad from the Oct. 26 Bay Area Reporter, a gay community weekly. The ad’s banner reads: “The only gay candidate for Supervisor, District 3.” But someone had scribbled over it with: “Who’s Not Gay? Look! Lawrence at his best said he was not gay.”

What could have been easily dismissed as a random prank, instead came from the Rose Chung for Supervisor headquarters. No stranger to gay rights issues before he became a college board member, Wong himself was fired as a human rights commissioner by then-Mayor Frank Jordan for being too outspoken against fellow commissioner Eugene Lumpkin, a reverend who made some biblical references that were seen as “homophobic.”

The tactic could be a form of “gay baiting,” which may resonate with conservative sectors of the Chinese American community where Wong traditionally has received good support as a college board member in the 1994 and 1998 elections.

However, Wong noted that he ran into difficulty when running for supervisor this fall, especially against Chinese American Chung. She ended up dragging Wong into a second place finish with 15 percent of the vote, while she received 11 percent of the vote — most of it from Chinese American voters.

Wong’s fears about homophobia in the Chinese American community might have been born from a Chinese American Voters Education Committee poll during the March election, which found that Chinese American voters, two-thirds over age 45, supported Proposition 22 (the Knight Initiative) by a 52 to 48 percent margin. The city, meanwhile, overwhelmingly went against the statewide measure banning same sex marriages.

IF I FRY, YOU’LL CRY: Send your comments to me by e-mail at samson@sfindependent.com or potsticker@prodigy.net. Calls accepted at 415-826-1100, ext. 23.