![\"A](\"https:\/\/newspack-missionlocal.s3.amazonaws.com\/mission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/cropped-MMG_Headshots-2-2-scaled-1.jpg\")
by\u00a0Joe Eskenazi<\/a><\/strong> July 22, 2026 (MissionLocal.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/newspack-missionlocal.s3.amazonaws.com\/mission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Clint-Reilly.png?fit=780%2C585&ssl=1\")
Clinton Thomas Reilly was, in many ways, a quintessential San Franciscan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was a wholly self-made man who ascended from poverty and despair to the heights of city society, but never lost the trappings of the milkman\u2019s son he was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He put heaps of his own money into political races and charitable causes and raised even more. Many a local and national politician beat a path to the basement of Reilly\u2019s restaurant, Credo, to swap stories with the man himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No longer: Reilly, the self-made mega-millionaire, groundbreaking political consultant, real estate baron, art collector, philanthropist and media tycoon, died over the weekend at age 79, of what sources describe as chronic lung disease. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
His story reads more like something out of San Francisco\u2019s rough-hewn past than its anodyne present. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Born in Oakland and raised in San Leandro, Reilly was the oldest of 10 children; his father was a milkman and his mother sold hot dogs<\/a> at the ballpark. His beloved sister Jill died in adolescence and, barely a teenager, Reilly left home to join the seminary and study for the priesthood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n He instead dropped out as a young man and slept<\/a> in church rectories for years as he worked on programs for the poor. He volunteered for the United Farm Workers and traveled<\/a> to Florida\u2019s Dade County to combat bigoted anti-LGBTQ politicians as a straight ally when that was a truly dangerous thing to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He operated a junk shop and ran political campaigns on the side. He became the state\u2019s foremost political consultant, working to elect Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer and many others \u2014 and parlayed his financial success into a real-estate empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He ran for San Francisco mayor. He lost<\/a>. He sued the Hearsts. He didn\u2019t lose<\/a>. He bought the former Hearst flagship, the San Francisco Examiner. <\/em>He became, as friends and prot\u00e9g\u00e9s echoed, consequential. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Prior to events at the sumptuous Julia Morgan Ballroom, on the 15th floor of the Merchants Exchange Building, Reilly would drop in, unannounced, in a suit and sneakers and scare the bejesus out of the waitstaff with his mere presence. He skulked around like he owned the place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n He did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reilly got his start in politics in his mid-20s, managing Dick Hongisto\u2019s<\/a> campaign for sheriff in 1971. He did this as something of a side gig while running a junk shop, where, in a truly 1970s detail, Reilly repurposed old milk cans into kitschy decor, and bought and sold used school desks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When Supervisor Quentin Kopp recruited Reilly to run his 1979 mayoral campaign against incumbent Dianne Feinstein<\/a>, he did so at the insistence that Reilly get out of the used-milk-can business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI hired him on the condition that he devote all his time to my campaign,\u201d says Kopp, 97. \u201cWhich he agreed.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reilly was busted for drunk driving while running Kopp\u2019s campaign. Despite calls to fire Reilly, Kopp stuck with him. Reilly, by his own account, quit drinking<\/a> in 1981 \u2014 and, adds Kopp, \u201conce he stopped, you never had to worry about his advice.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Kopp, of course, lost to Feinstein, but it was closer than it could have been. For Reilly, the campaign punched his political ticket. And Feinstein definitely noticed: Four years later, in 1983, she hired Reilly to run her defense against a recall attempt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reilly overperformed here<\/a>: While Feinstein was a relatively popular mayor, a full 81 percent<\/em> of city voters inveighed against the recall. The recall ended up making her stronger, and the same went for Reilly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n He became a wealthy consultant, then a fabulously wealthy businessman and philanthropist and his consulting prot\u00e9g\u00e9s are seeded throughout the political landscape; it harks to the Bill Walsh<\/a> NFL Coaching Tree. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI answered a help-wanted ad in the Chronicle <\/em>in 1982. Clint hired me,\u201d says Eric Jaye, one of the city\u2019s most veteran political consultants. \u201cThere were three of us in that flat on Bush Street. When I left six or seven years later, there were 75 people working there. It was one of the largest political consulting firms in America.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reilly ran bigger and bigger races and made more and more money. He raised eyebrows<\/a> by courting incumbent Republican governor Pete Wilson and seeking to run his 1994 campaign before signing onto the campaign of Wilson\u2019s opponent, Kathleen Brown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reilly earned millions of dollars during the \u201cinsurance wars,<\/a>\u201d running ultimately losing campaigns on behalf of auto insurance companies in an electoral death match vs. trial lawyers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The fortune he walked away with seeded his foray into real estate. Employing the same skills he earlier demonstrated in buying and selling milk cans, Reilly gradually amassed a high-end real-estate portfolio.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n While Reilly left consulting in the 1990s, he was never far from politics. In 1999, he decided that, rather than run candidates for election, he\u2019d do it himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He challenged incumbent mayor Willie Brown, whom he condemned as the acme of corruption and cronyism. Despite spending a huge outlay of his personal fortune, Reilly received<\/a> only 12.5 percent of the vote, and was personally tarnished by allegations of abysmal behavior during his drinking days. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reilly, always the master campaigner, had no answer<\/a> here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reilly was a complicated man. He did not amass his great wealth and career success with anything resembling grace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was a notably aggressive, political hard-charger in an era marked<\/a> by them. He was a legendarily difficult boss<\/a>. Even former employees with some fond recollections of Reilly say they wake up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, after nightmares that they were still working under him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The litany of alleged Reilly workplace misbehaviors former employees recounted<\/a> to newspaper reporters resemble outtakes from the Kevin Spacey<\/a> character in \u201cSwimming with Sharks.\u201d Reilly held his employees to high standards \u2014 often unfair and impossibly high standards. He did the same for himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe worked people very hard and he, himself, would be working until 2, 3, 4 in the morning,\u201d said political consultant Jim Stearns, who worked with Reilly and ran his 1999 San Francisco mayoral campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was quite a common occurrence to schedule a meeting for 5 p.m., be delayed until 10 p.m., finally sit down at 11 p.m. and then the meeting would go on for three or four hours. That was his style.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reilly acknowledged his temper was a problem, and expressed remorse for it in print. \u201cThere\u2019s no excuse for\u201d the anger so many colleagues recount, he told the Los Angeles Times<\/em><\/a> <\/em>in 1994. \u201cI feel badly about it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But anger, in Reilly\u2019s profession, was something he couldn\u2019t afford to do without. Candidates, he continued in the Times<\/em>, \u201care not hiring me because they want me to get along with everybody. They\u2019re hiring me because they want to win. The campaign is a war, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And Reilly won plenty of his wars. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe was beyond innovative. He was a pioneer,\u201d says consultant Ace Smith, the go-to man for Gov. Gavin Newsom and Vice President Kamala Harris, who first met Reilly in 1979. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll these fancy national consultants used to meet with him and they were stunned about the way he was doing polling. Their idea of targeting was getting crude demographics from ZIP codes. Clint literally introduced the entire industry to what has become targeting and micro-targeting. He was the pioneer of that, full-stop.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n To do this, Smith continued, Reilly \u201cbought and owned one of the first VAX computers<\/a>,\u201d a closet-sized, 1970s mainframe. He amassed voter databases and rendered them searchable and sortable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With this sort of information \u2014 parsing constituencies on a granular level down to the \u201cleft-handed Lithuanians<\/a>\u201d \u2014 Reilly\u2019s campaigns could communicate with voters far more efficiently. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou could be five or 10 times more efficient,\u201d Smith continued. \u201cIf you use your budget like that, you can talk to the right voters five or 10 times when, previously, probably two times would be the best case.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n This was, to adopt Joe Biden\u2019s later phrasing, a big fucking deal. <\/em>\u201cA lot of people took Clint\u2019s ideas,\u201d says Smith, \u201cand claimed them as their own.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Two years after losing the 1999 mayoral race, Reilly sought to rehabilitate his image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He provided unfettered access<\/a> to the SF Weekly <\/em>for an in-depth profile. The resultant article was an exceedingly deep dive but, insofar as people remember it, they recall Reilly\u2019s own mother, Bess, telling the SF Weekly <\/em>of her eldest child: \u201cPeople do not really like him. He\u2019s not lovable.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Oof. If Reilly hoped to once more take a crack at elected office, this was a devastating setback. In context, Bess Reilly\u2019s statement made more sense: \u201cClint can\u2019t tolerate petty people. He\u2019s not into small talk. He\u2019s not beholding. He pushes people; you know you have to.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n But that quote provided a potential coup de gr\u00e2ce for any opposing political consultant with even a scintilla of Reilly\u2019s talent; taking things out of context is a hallmark of political messaging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reilly also told the SF Weekly <\/em>that modern political campaigns are intended to hook into people\u2019s fears and prejudices, not their hopes. This, too, was deployed against him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So that was that. But voters and spinmeisters, in this case, didn\u2019t have the only say. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI did <\/em>love him,\u201d said Washington, D.C.-based consultant and strategist Anthony Garrett, a former San Francisco politico. \u201cHe embraced me and was always extremely supportive. He saw talent in me. He was sort of like an older brother to me.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI swam in the same waters as Clint. But we always knew he was special.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What made Clinton Thomas Reilly tick? Both critics and allies alike point to a primary motivator: Respect. No matter how successful Reilly was, career-wise and materially, he seemed to always desire affirmation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cClint has this Rodney Dangerfield<\/a> problem, where he thinks somehow people don\u2019t respect him,\u201d consultant Bill Carrick told the Chronicle <\/em>in 1999.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen Clint was an active political consultant, there was always this need to get an affirmation that he was good, talented, smart, on an equal plane not only with his peers in his [consulting] profession, but also with the candidates themselves.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n His friend and former employee Jaye says that, \u201cClint, from day one to his last day, always felt like he had something to prove.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was, with a moment\u2019s thought, a bit bizarre: Reilly seemed to desire the approval of people who hadn\u2019t accomplished a fraction of what he had, and certainly hadn\u2019t bootstrapped it with no help at all, as Reilly did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe was keenly aware of class,\u201d said Garrett. \u201cHe was keenly aware of what it means to not be treated the way someone wants to be treated and to want to be seen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Very few political thinkers may have been better than Reilly at sizing up the psychological pressure points of an opponent. It is not clear if he ever fully turned this skill inward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1993, Reilly sued the Hearsts and then-Examiner <\/em>executive editor Phil Bronstein following an altercation at the paper\u2019s office. Just what the hell happened has never been definitively established, but Reilly left the building in an ambulance and required nine screws and a metal plate to repair his broken ankle<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the terms of the settlement have never been made public, Reilly told the SF Weekly <\/em>that he bagged $600,000.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2000, he sued the Hearsts again, attempting to block the Examiner<\/em>\u2019s purchase of the Chronicle<\/em>. That plan ultimately came to pass, but Reilly\u2019s suit revealed that Hearst executives and Mayor Willie Brown discussed favorable coverage of the mayor in return for Brown\u2019s support of the newspaper merger (the Hearst Examiner<\/em>, surprise, surprise, surprise, endorsed Brown for mayor in 1999). That was a salient detail for the public to know \u2014 and the $2 million federal Judge Vaughn Walker awarded to Reilly didn\u2019t hurt a bit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2020, Reilly bought the Examiner<\/em>. Considering his history with the Hearsts, it was mind-boggling that he\u2019d end up owning the paper. His purchase likely saved the erstwhile \u201cMonarch of the Dailies<\/a>\u201d from oblivion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But Reilly had the bad fortune that the San Francisco Standard<\/em>, funded by an even wealthier San Francisco politico, Michael Moritz<\/a>, emerged not long thereafter<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It soon filled the niche the Examiner <\/em>could have if it was willing to pay top dollar for journalism, as the Standard <\/em>does, and take on establishment figures Reilly considered friends, as the Standard <\/em>does. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The SF Weekly <\/em>was a sister paper of the Examiner<\/em>, and Reilly made the decision in 2021 to shutter the Weekly <\/em>to devote more resources to the Ex.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite promises<\/a> to preserve SF Weekly\u2019<\/em>s archive, the exact opposite transpired. You cannot find the 2001 SF Weekly <\/em>profile of Reilly on the SF Weekly <\/em>site (author Peter Byrne put it on his own site<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n You cannot easily find any<\/em> of the articles, from any of the publications he owned, recounting the era when Clint Reilly was a primary mover and shaker in this town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But he was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe was equal parts tenacious, terrifying and inspiring,\u201d says one former employee. \u201cHe was a civic force.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe believed politics could change people\u2019s lives,\u201d said Jaye. \u201cHe took it seriously. Politics, to many people who practice it, is a game or a grift; it\u2019s what you do until it\u2019s socially acceptable to hit the bars. Not Clint.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n When a San Francisco neighborhood has a Mission Local<\/em> reporter, it means someone is there<\/strong>. We’re following new housing projects proposed on your block, keeping tabs on what your district supervisor is up to at City Hall, and letting you know when longtime businesses close (and new ones open). When big news breaks, we already know the context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most neighborhoods don’t have that. Yours could. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s what Mission Local<\/em> is building. <\/strong>Our reporters don’t parachute in — they write consistently on San Francisco, so you’re never reading about your neighborhood from someone who just looked it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So far we are in five of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. But we know all San Franciscans deserve our kind of coverage. Will you join us?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Put a reporter on your block!<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n getbackjoejoe@gmail.com<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Joe is a columnist and the managing editor of Mission Local. He was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYour humble narrator\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.More by Joe Eskenazi<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reilly, who died over weekend at 79, was a political consultant, real estate baron, media tycoon and a legendarily difficult boss. But he may have been most difficult on himself. by\u00a0Joe Eskenazi July 22, 2026 (MissionLocal.org) Clinton Thomas Reilly was, in many ways, a quintessential San Franciscan. He was a… Continue reading ![\"LivingProof_JM300x250x2.jpg\"\/](\"https:\/\/cdn.broadstreetads.com\/assets\/b41ba7bd-5bf0-4b3e-ba32-e414e5c2c488.jpg\")
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWe won’t ignore your neighborhood<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Latest News<\/mark><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Lisenia](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/newspack-missionlocal.s3.amazonaws.com\/mission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/072026_LaMejorBakery-16-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nLisenia Rivera has been serving conchas and coffee at La Mejor for nearly 20 years <\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Mission](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/newspack-missionlocal.s3.amazonaws.com\/mission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/IMG_5587.jpeg?resize=1200%2C900&ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nMission Buzz: The Mission is losing a plant store and a panaderia is on the move<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nAfter years of debate, S.F. agency settles on spot for future Bayview Caltrain station<\/a><\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Joe Eskenazi Managing Editor\/Columnist<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n