[guest post by JVW]

Lost in the shock of last Tuesday’s results was a California-centric race which ended up being very similar to the big national race. In both cases a black woman who got her political start in Willie Brown’s San Francisco machine lost to a businessman seeking his very first elective office. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, hoping for a second full term at city hall, was defeated by Levi and Hass Family heir Daniel Lurie, who had previously run a philanthropic company. Kamala Harris, who as Vice-President to an enfeebled chief executive can be considered somewhat of an incumbent, lost her Presidential bid to Donald Trump, the deposed Chief Executive returning to the Oval Office having never held any other elective position. Writing at City Journal, Erica Sandberg explains what happened:

It’s tough to oust an incumbent but even harder when that person is part of an insular, highly protective city “family.” Breed was one of Willie Brown’s protégés. The powerful, dapper former mayor was instrumental in her success. A San Francisco native, raised in the Western Addition housing projects, Breed went into local government after college. In 2012, she won election as district supervisor, eventually rising to become president of the city’s board of supervisors. In 2019, San Franciscans elected her as the city’s 45th mayor.

Since then, the City by the Bay has taken a nosedive. Instead of recovering after the pandemic, it became emptier and sadder. Neighborhoods such as the Tenderloin and South of Market have been gritty for decades, but as the drug crisis worsened, the blight and chaos spread elsewhere.

With an approximate $16 billion annual budget and only about 810,000 residents (down from a peak of about 890,000 in 2019), shouldn’t San Francisco have plenty of money on hand to ensure a safe and vibrant environment?

The piece goes on to explain all of the many ways in which Mayor Breed courted controversy during her nearly seven years in office. Like her fellow San Franciscan hack who managed to make it within a heartbeat of the Presidency, Mayor Breed was quite adept at shifting along with the political winds, and never let herself be encumbered by anything as annoying as consistency or ethics. She went from the trendy leftism of “Defund the Police” to pushing city council to hire more officers, install more cameras, and make use of drones to combat the increases in murder, assault, larceny, and drug use that she had so recklessly enabled years earlier. When homelessness went from being a national disgrace which good people must band together and combat with lots and lots of tax dollars and plentiful public bureaucracy to being a civic disgrace where dangerous permissiveness towards teenage runaways, drug usage, and prostitution had turned sections of the city into an utter hellscape, Mayor Breed was right there to shift her positions accordingly. As Ms. Sandberg puts it in her article: “No one in city government seemed willing or able to do the hard work that residents and business owners expected. And no one in government seemed to pay a price for these failures. In the end, if you’re employed by the city, you’re family. You’re protected. Accountability is just a pretty word.”

Now that London Breed has been dismissed, there is growing optimism that San Francisco might be able to more rapidly reverse its recent misfortunes:

Lurie thus became the outsider candidate. Other mayoral hopefuls criticized his lack of direct experience in government, but this became one of his primary selling points for voters. In his first appearance as mayor-elect, Lurie promised to clean house and populate his administration with an entirely new team. This is welcome news to many, including Marie Hurabiell, founder of the community action group ConnectedSF.

“I wanted to see the corrupt city family broken apart and smashed to smithereens,” says Hurabiell. “They didn’t look out for constituents, only for themselves. They created a cabal and weren’t focused on what is best for the city. Daniel Lurie is their nightmare. He’s not controllable by insiders.”

Not everyone is so scathing in assessing the city government, but the welcoming tone for Lurie is encouraging. Marisa Rodriguez, executive director of the Union Square Alliance, appreciates the outgoing administration’s support but contends that Lurie campaigned on a strong message about helping the downtown finally recover. “I am feeling very optimistic for our future,” she says.

There’s a fella headed back to Washington DC who learned the hard way that it isn’t easy to smash the machine. Some of it certainly was because he was undisciplined and failed to prepare for how strongly they would fight his efforts, but much of it was the tenacity and ruthlessness with which deeply embedded bureaucrats fight for their fiefdoms. Hopefully both Mr. Trump and Mr. Lurie have their eyes wide open to the daunting task ahead of them and will approach this crusade with strategic planning, Stoic discipline, and grim determination. San Francisco is a beautiful city with a rich history and so many amazing natural advantages that it has been painful to me to see it decline so rapidly over the nearly 30 years I have lived in this state. Maybe this is the moment that a new Breed (sorry, couldn’t help myself) of civic leaders starts repairing the damage.

– JVW