The wait for Board President to declare for mayor is over
San Francisco’s well-kept secrets remain well-kept.
But, for many months, there were few more loosely veiled secrets in this city than Board President Aaron Peskin’s eventual declaration for mayor. When political strategists noted in February that the preponderance of center-right mayoral candidates “all but sends an engraved invitation” for a centrist or center-left candidate to join the fray, no one needed to actually engrave an invitation and send it to Peskin’s North Beach abode.
So, yes, that was Peskin jaunting about town earlier this week for professional photographs against the backdrop of San Francisco’s most scenic scenery. People notice stuff like that, too. Peskin couldn’t call up associates and ask for money or endorsements — or wrangle a goodly portion of his 42 former Board of Supervisors colleagues as well as former mayors, state officials, Chinatown leaders, union figures and others to a 10 a.m. Saturday mayoral kickoff rally at Portsmouth Square with speechifying at 11 — and not have the news get out.
It’s out. Will there be a lion dancer? “No,” Peskin says. Another poorly kept secret revealed.
Mayor London Breed and former mayor Mark Farrell paused yesterday afternoon from a session of moderate-on-moderate violence to excoriate their new, more left-leaning competitor as a toxic bully and an anti-housing NIMBY warlord. Breed’s campaign spokesman made dad-joke-like references to Peskin-as-Terminator: “Peskin occupying the Mayor’s Office would mean ‘hasta la vista, baby’ for our local economy, our housing, and our city’s future.”
It warrants mentioning that in “T2,” the film featuring the dialog “Hasta la vista, baby,” the Terminator is actually the good guy. You know, the guy fighting against the tech-fueled apocalypse.
So, perhaps the more fitting analogy would’ve been Peskin-as-Keyser Söze — an elusive and infinitely powerful figure whose dark and unseen influence lurks behind every malign turn. That’s certainly playing to the crowd for Breed and Farrell’s stalwarts (in much the way that, a generation ago, Willie Brown served as the catch-all bogeyman for lefty stalwarts).
But moderates linking arms and dumping invective on Peskin does come with some risks: As the only unalloyed progressive in the race, torrents of abuse from figures progressives don’t like can actually help him. If you don’t care for Farrell or Breed or Garry Tan or any of the others making Churchillian statements about fighting off a Peskin mayoralty at any cost, then their forthcoming torrent of negative material — which really will come at any cost — could solidify Peskin’s place as the last progressive standing, and drive up his name ID.
Or it could overwhelm him. In any event, the shitstorm is coming.
The book on running against Peskin now is pretty much the same as it was back in 2015, when Mayor Ed Lee goaded him back into public life by appointing Julie Christensen as District 3 supervisor:
In an internal memo … a pollster hired by the Christensen campaign highlights voters’ impressions … “Especially damning was [Peskin’s] past behavior towards colleagues, agency heads, and constituents. No one likes a bully.” … “Peskin also took large hits for his obstructionism on popular neighborhood projects and past ethics concerns.”
As Peskin told me back then, “Every single fucking stupid thing I’ve done — and I’ve done a few of them — is going to be all over the place.”
Well, that happened. And it’ll happen again. And, of course, there have been more fucking stupid things, leading up to Peskin’s June 2021 admission that he had a longstanding drinking problem and was entering recovery.
So, that’s new. But this will, counter-intuitively, play a large role in Peskin’s public messaging. “Recovery has been life-changing for me,” he says. “It’s no secret that the city you and I love has been struggling in ways that are real and perceived. And, I don’t mean this to sound corny, but I have a notion that we are a city in need of recovery. Recovery is something I have come to know well. It’s hard work.”
There are allusions at play here. Unsubtle allusions — a man in recovery to lead a city in need of one. Prior to Peskin’s announcement, polling was floating around querying voters about their views on Peskin, recovery and Peskin in recovery. Do voters buy it? Do voters like allusions? Vamos a ver.
San Francisco government’s municipal addiction is, in Peskin’s allusive telling, the intoxicating buzz of extreme negativity and ripping one’s own city for short-term political gain. “It’s the locally generated doom loop,” he says. “Not the external one. It’s not leadership to keep blaming other people … Our leadership keeps finding other people to blame. Blame compassion, blame nonprofits, blame progressives, blame judges. It’s time to stop the blame game. It’s time to take responsibility and say the buck stops with the mayor.”
“Political leaders have fed into a concerted campaign from the inside that has been very divisive and negative,” he continues. “This gets back to the recovery thing. People are beating themselves up. We can reverse that. For most of my life, this has been a place of some amount of joy and discovery and I don’t want to beat up on San Francisco for political gain.”
As to Peskin’s own addictions, former Rep. John Burton was candid with voters about his cocaine problem — and they re-elected him and re-re-elected him, and he is now an elder statesman of the local political scene. Supervisor Matt Dorsey turned the rather awkward position of being a meth addict while serving as the strategic communications director of the police department into one of the keystones of his political resume — and a glowing New York Times profile.
So this is not new ground. It’s also smart — and necessary — politics. While Peskin’s opponents will line up to call him an angry, vengeful drunk, Peskin is rushing to preemptively define himself as, instead, a man in recovery who no longer wants to engage in bellicosity for the sake of bellicosity.
Besides, many of San Francisco’s voters weren’t here during Peskin’s earlier, boozier, not-kinder and gentler years; they haven’t heard this tale. Peskin would prefer to be the one to tell it.
What kind of policy debates have we gotten in the mayor’s race thus far? Longtime consultant Jim Ross jokes that it’s been a contest between “send armed National Guardsmen into the Tenderloin” vs. “Send in Seal Team Six!”
Peskin provides “The mayor’s race San Francisco deserves,” Ross says. He’ll bring a broader spectrum of views and policies into play: “It’ll be a real debate on issues, not just a race to see who can come up with the furthest right-wing idea that’s going to appeal to a specific slice of San Francisco.”
Peskin is quick to point out “at least one billionaire” is backing Breed, Farrell and Lurie — one more than he’s got. But San Francisco voters have repeatedly demonstrated that pointing out that the opposition is funded by shadowy networks of wealthy individuals is not, in and of itself, a winning strategy. Peskin will need to give voters something to vote for, not against.
So, it’s on him to propose solutions for the city’s rampant homelessness and drug-addiction crisis that go beyond sending the troops into the TL. It’s on him to explain how, despite his reputation as the NIMBYs’ chief vampire, that it would be Mayor Aaron Peskin who gets the most housing built via his ability to put people together and get to yes. It’s on him to explain how to revitalize downtown and replenish the police department and clean the streets and keep drivers from blowing stop signs and all the other gripes enumerated by San Francisco voters.
San Francisco voters, it seems, are a frustrated bunch. Whether Peskin’s “message of hope and resilience” is the pitch the people were waiting for — and, even if they are, he’s the preferred messenger — remains to be seen.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever gone through a period where you’re depressed and something happens and you realize that nothing really changed — you’re just seeing the world in a different way. And you’re not depressed,” he says. “We have to change the leadership of San Francisco in order to snap out of it.”
JOE ESKENAZI
Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.
“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.
He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.
The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.More by Joe Eskenazi
