San Francisco (and California) Politics
Posted: September 15, 2024 Filed under: California, San Francisco, the California Condition Leave a comment
When former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa lost a campaign to become mayor of Los Angeles in June, then-Speaker Robert Hertzberg named him to the California Medical Assistance Commission, where he could earn $99,000 a year, plus benefits, working a few hours each month.
Former Assemblyman Richard Alatorre, D-Los Angeles, who served in the legislature with Senate President Pro Tem John Burton in the 1970s, was out of public office and the target of a federal corruption probe two years ago when Burton placed him on the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. His salary: $114,180 a year plus benefits.
from SF Gate, 2002.
Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, continuing his rush to hand out patronage jobs while he retains his powerful post, has given high-paying appointments to his former law associate and a former Alameda County prosecutor who is Brown’s frequent companion.
Brown, exercising his power even as his speakership seems near an end, named attorney Kamala Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that pays $72,000 a year.
Harris, a former deputy district attorney in Alameda County, was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s girlfriend. In March, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called her “the Speaker’s new steady.” Harris declined to be interviewed Monday and Brown’s spokeswoman did not return phone calls.
Harris accepted the appointment last week after serving six months as Brown’s appointee to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which pays $97,088 a year. After Harris resigned from the unemployment board last week, Brown replaced her with Philip S. Ryan, a lawyer and longtime friend and business associate.
Last week, Brown also appointed Janet Gotch, wife of retiring Assemblyman Mike Gotch of San Diego, to the $95,000-a-year Integrated Waste Management Board, which oversees garbage disposal in California.
from Los Angeles Times, 1994. In fairness sitting through those hearings is probably very boring!
The story goes that in 2015 Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, maybe encouraged by various Democratic fundraisers and power brokers, cut a deal where she would run for Senate and he would run for Governor in 2018:
The early-2015 understanding between the two San Francisco Democrats, both with campaigns managed by the same San Francisco political consulting firm, was this: To avoid a brutal fight over the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Barbara Boxer, Newsom would stay out of the 2016 Senate race and concentrate on running for governor two years later.
A LA Times article about the story that Gavin Newsom might be unhappy with subsequent developments (it’s not over yet Gavin!) led me to this 2015 article about why San Francisco has produced so many prominent state leaders. It’s a question we’ve pondered before:
There is nothing mysterious about San Francisco’s export of high-profile politicians, nothing like the alchemy of air and water that produces the distinctive tang of its signature sourdough bread.
Simply put, it’s fierce competition, at virtually every level, starting with the leadership of its political clubs and spreading to the lowliest contests for elected office on up to races for the Legislature and Congress.
Where San Diego and Los Angeles lie back, most of their residents scarcely interested in politics, San Francisco leans in: chin out, elbows wide and sharp.
“There is a culture here of fighting over just about everything in the public space,” said Eric Jaye, another of the city’s veteran political strategists, from global issues like the Middle East to protecting the neighborhood coffee shop from an onslaught of franchised beans….
from earlier in the same piece (by Mark Z. Barabak):
San Francisco is the closest thing to an East Coast enclave set along the Pacific, a place, like New York or Boston, where politics is a passion, a sport, something everyday people fuss and fight and scheme over.
As blue (politically) as San Francisco Bay, the city has 27 officially chartered Democratic Party chapters, among them the Raoul Wallenberg Jewish Democratic Club, the Filipino American Democratic Club, the Black Young Democrats of San Francisco and the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club. That works out to roughly one party franchise every few blocks.
There are countless more neighborhood councils, civic associations, interest groups — branches of the Sierra Club, the NAACP and the like — all clamoring for their particular agendas.
“It’s a city where people have always been able to be loud and proud about who they are, not just as individuals but as a group or a community,” said Ace Smith, a Democratic strategist who has decades of experience running San Francisco campaigns.
The result is a kind of hyper-democracy and political forge that has fashioned some of California’s most powerful and enduring elected leaders, in numbers far out of proportion to the city’s relative pint size.
A very short history of California’s politics might go something like this: California wanted to get into the union without going through the territorial stage, so they sorta rushed through a constitutional convention (John Sutter himself was there). In the compromise of 1850, one of the deals involving slave and free states, California got brought in. The US wanted a lock on that gold. During the Civil War California stayed in the Union (barely). After the Civil War, the major power in the state was the railroad barons, the Big Four, who were so powerful that they provoked a progressive, democratic backlash, personified by Hiram Johnson.
(He looks like Dwight Shrute, no?)
Here’s Reagan’s guy Stuart Spencer talking about Hiram:
They didn’t do a lot of candidate work, but they did a lot of what we call proposition work in California. Under the reforms of Hiram Johnson, we were a unique state at that time. We were for years. You could put practically anything on the ballot and have it decided there instead of the legislature.
You can also read Leon Panetta, who began as a Republican but became a prominent Democrat, talking about Hiram:
I was raised in a progressive Republicanism that used to be the case in California. It began with Hiram Johnson. It was a tradition that was carried on by people like Earl Warren and Tom Kuchel, whom I worked for, and Goodwin Knight and others. Because of cross filing, because of the traditions of California.
As a result of all this balloting California politics gets pretty complicated. Our state constitution is 76,930 words long. Novel length. (Although it’s not even close to the length of the longest, which is…. can you guess it?….
Alabama, at over 402,000 words. Gotta look into how that came to be. Seems to be because it makes a lot of specific rules for specific municipalities.)
At the moment we’re a one party state, probably because the second to last Republican governor, Pete Wilson, made his big issue immigration (anti). He actually won big on that, with Proposition 187 in 1994. The voters went for that in a big way, but it then got tied up in the courts, and the next Democratic governor, Grey Davis, stopped pursuing the implementation.
Noting a rapid increase in the number of Latinos voting in California elections, some analysts cite Wilson and the Republican Party’s embrace of Proposition 187 as a cause of the subsequent failure of the party to win statewide elections.
California today is maybe 26% immigrants. The most recent Republican governor was an immigrant. He won after Grey Davis was recalled (a Hiram Johnson reform). We might be tempted to treat that election as a special circumstance, as he was famous movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, but then again another famous movie star, Ronald Reagan, had been elected governor before. And George Murphy had been elected senator. Do you need a certain glam quality to succeed in California politics?
Two Californians have become president, although only one, Nixon, was born in California. A third Californian and second native born Californian has a real good shot right now. We’re rooting for her!
Helytimes 