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 | | From: | sordo ™ | | Subject: | San Francisco's emerging right | | Date: | Sun, 23 Jan 2005 21:54:17 GMT |
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 | San Francisco's emerging right
Once considered an endangered species in America's most liberal city,
conservatives show new signs of life
Tim Cavanaugh
Sunday, January 23, 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2005/01/23/INGO0AS4D41.DTL
On Nov. 2, 54,079 San Franciscans voted for President Bush, and it may
be only a slight exaggeration to say that Mike DeNunzio knows most of
them by name.
The chairman of the San Francisco Republican Central Committee has a
job so lonely the Maytag repairman would blanch at it: leading
political conservatives in a city where politics is dominated by the
left wing, where the same--marriage supporting,
picket-line-walking, tax-increase-happy Mayor Gavin Newsom may be the
most conservative elected official in town, where most politicians'
only complaint with the city's enormous, intrusive bureaucracy is that
it seems to be modeled on Castro's Cuba.
San Francisco Republicans put on a brave face by calling themselves
"The few, the proud," but in politics, "few" is one adjective nobody
wants to hear. For conservatives, San Francisco is hostile ground --
and getting worse.
That's the official story. But visits with conservatives around the
city -- from Republican Party stalwarts to think-tank intellectuals to
techno- libertarians to old-fashioned values-based social
conservatives -- tells a more complicated tale. Conservative San
Franciscans can't be called triumphant (many hesitate to admit how
they vote), but they have been energized by state and national
election results, and even point to developments in the city itself as
evidence that San Francisco may be more Right than it thinks.
"Prior to the elections of George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger,"
says DeNunzio, "being chairman of the Republican Party here was like
being chairman of a bridge club. The difference now is in the way
people look at us and we look at ourselves. The numbers haven't
changed, but there is a perception of a Republican ascendancy."
Of the city's 480,000 registered voters, about 12 percent are
Republicans, while an additional 28 percent decline to give a party
preference. "I'm inclined to think about 25 percent of those
decline-to-states are willing to consider voting Republican, to read
our slate cards, and to consider what we have to say," DeNunzio says.
It wasn't always thus.
Between 1912 and 1964, Republicans held the mayor's office for all but
eight years. As recently as the early '90s, the occasional Republican
could be found on the Board of Supervisors. But through the city's
long leftward shift (the 1977 board election, which brought in not
only the late Harvey Milk but his Republican assassin, Dan White, is
seen as the Democrats' watershed), the GOP lost virtually all its
electoral clout in San Francisco.
But although Republicans remain in the wilderness, the voting on last
year's ballot measures supports DeNunzio's thesis that the city still
has a conservative side. The tax measures Propositions J and K, both
supported by Newsom, failed handily, as did Proposition D, which would
have given more leeway and staffing to the Board of Supervisors, and
several other traditionally liberal/progressive measures.
"The last election was instructive," says Michael Antonini, a Marina-
based dentist who serves as a Republican member of the Planning
Commission. "The voters went with the Republican Central Committee
more than the Democratic Central Committee by 60 to 40. People voted
against noncitizen voting, against Proposition A, against J and K ...
we could go right down the list. There were some we didn't win on. But
even in the presidential race we brought in close to 60,000 votes for
George Bush. More instructive was that the voters favored our
positions more than the Democrats."
San Francisco conservatism comes in a variety of colors, but the
dominant hue is fiscal. Although a small bloc of socially conservative
voters remains in the city, taxes, regulation, bureaucratic bloat and
other constraints on entrepreneurship are the issues that unite young
dot-commers with old money conservatives, Stanford economists with the
Republican Party.
"We think a lot of the social problems will solve themselves as the
economic problems get sorted out," says Sally Pipes, president of
Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank on Sansome
Street. Although she acknowledges that her organization focuses mainly
on state and federal issues and has had a hard time getting Silicon
Valley types interested in social policy, Pipes has reason to be
bullish on the city. At a recent Pacific Research dinner in a 600-seat
room at the Four Seasons Hotel, columnist George Will opened his
keynote address by saying, "Until tonight, I'd have thought you could
fit all the conservatives in the Bay Area into Lefty O'Doul's."
Among the more techno-libertarian element of conservative San
Francisco, you might even run into some questions about what
"conservative" really means.
"San Francisco is the most conservative city in America, by far," says
Auren Hoffman, chairman of the 527 (nonparty political fund raising)
group Lead21. "It is the most closed to change, the most closed to
innovation, the most closed to new ideas. Not only is the city not a
good innovator, it's not even a good copier. Ideas that have worked
well in New York, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, and in many other cities
get rejected out of hand in San Francisco. "
Hoffman, founder of a consultancy called Stonebrick and a technology
consultant for Newsom's 2003 campaign, barely fits into a traditional
pattern of conservatism. "The city of San Francisco does very little
to help street people get on their feet," he says. "The city will
spend millions of dollars doing job training to get somebody an
entry-level job at PG&E, which is the closest thing to jail you can
find in the job market. Why not issue get-out-of- regulation-free
cards to encourage people to start their own businesses, even if it's
something as simple as selling their artwork on the sidewalk or
selling sodas in the financial district?"
This is the essence of younger conservatism in San Francisco --
dynamic, technocratic, and notably dismissive of the family-values
material that got such attention in November's national elections.
Hoffman notes, for example, that even Bush is amenable to the idea of
civil unions for s and lesbians. "Gay marriage has moved further
and faster than any political issue of the past 10 years," he says.
"It's at the point where the conservative position is to be in favor
of civil unions. Ten years ago, nobody could have predicted that."
And some are not too happy about it.
The Rev. John Malloy, pastor of the legendary Sts. Peter & Paul church
in North Beach, represents a strain of San Francisco conservatism you
rarely hear about. In his weekly letters in the parish bulletin, he
condemns same- marriage and stem cell research, and during the
campaign excoriated John Kerry as a "a champion for abortion, calling
himself a Catholic."
If San Francisco's Catholic right wing has a capital, it is probably
the Ignatius Institute, which has famously feuded with the University
of San Francisco over what it sees as the college's leftward drift.
But Malloy's parish is enough of a tourist magnet to give him an
important forum.
"I was a registered Democrat all my life," says Malloy. "But I've
changed to an independent, and after this marriage business, I
sent the mayor a letter saying I regretted voting for him. As for
Kerry, he was a Catholic, which made me so sick. If he hadn't been a
Catholic, I probably wouldn't have been so hard on him. But I just
hated the hypocrisy."
Although he harbors few illusions about the political climate in San
Francisco, Malloy sees himself as emblematic of broader changes in
Catholic voting. "The Catholic vote now mirrors the national vote," he
says, "but it used to be overwhelmingly, lopsidedly Democratic. I
believe moral issues have driven Catholics nationally out of the
Democratic Party."
Even at the local level, fiscal conservatives don't dismiss the
importance of the socially conservative vote. "George Bush got the
highest number of votes in San Francisco of any presidential candidate
in a long time, " says Jim Fuller, vice-chairman of the Republican
Central Committee. "I have a hunch a lot of those votes came from
old-school values voters."
With so many strains of ideology, conservative San Francisco is often
as dysfunctional as, well, the rest of San Francisco. DeNunzio split
with the Log Cabin Republicans (which represents GOP members) over
that group's refusal to endorse Bush. Republicans bemoan their
inability to put forward an effective team of candidates for local
office, and split every election on the question of how much aid and
comfort to give the Democratic machine. "We had people in the last
election who argued that we should let (Green Party mayoral candidate)
Matt Gonzalez win," says DeNunzio, "and let him turn the city into
such a disaster that people here would be as disgusted as people in
New York were when they replaced (David) Dinkins with (Rudolph)
Giuliani. But our position is that we always support the moderate."
That support, which DeNunzio credits with having made the difference
for Newsom in 2003, has so far survived the mayor's leftward turn on
taxes and his support for union members during the hotel lockout.
"We're living in the most liberal city in the country, and the mayor
played to that in the beginning of his administration, to neutralize
the left," says Arthur Bruzzone, who coordinated Bay Area media for
the Bush/Cheney campaign. "But the left is eventually going to abandon
the mayor despite their fondness for him on the issue of same
marriages. He can't continue to ignore his moderate base, because in
time the left will come around to attack him the way they always do. "
A thornier question for local conservatives is how public their
profile should be. Among GOP leaders, it's a frequent lament: In San
Francisco, the only people in the closet are Republicans.
One Republican who is out and proud is Harry Aleo, owner of Twin Peaks
Properties in Noe Valley. Aleo's storefront is festooned with pro-Bush
memorabilia, posters objecting to the renaming of Army Street to Cesar
Chavez Street, and doggerel addressed to "liberal loonies" and
taunting the left over its mounting electoral losses. His signs have
made the store a sort of controversy magnet on 24th Street.
"I get both kinds of reactions," Aleo says. "Every few days I get one
or two people walking in -- I call them closet conservatives -- to say
'Keep it up. We're with you.' "
On the other hand, he says, passers-by frequently spit on or tape
angry notes to his windows -- an improvement from the 1980s, when he
says his windows were repeatedly smashed and his store was once shot
at. "I think they're quieter these days because they're demoralized,"
Aleo says. "I see them walking around with their long faces since the
election."
Still, if the left is demoralized, why can't the right get elected in
this town? For years, local conservatives have touted the coming
rightward turn in the Asian and Latino votes, but so far this has not
happened.
Many Republicans look to increasing home ownership as the key to the
conservative future. "When people buy their homes, they tend to vote
more conservatively than renters," says Antonini.
Whether demographic changes translate into a more Republican future,
remember that San Francisco is famous around the world not only as the
birthplace of marriage and Dan White's (mostly apocryphal)
"Twinkie defense," but as the home of America's greatest right-wing
reactionary, Dirty Harry Callahan.
Of the Bay Area figures who have gained national prominence in the
past decade, most have not been people of the left: Wired magazine
founder Louis Rossetto, Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers (an
important voice against regulation and in favor of liberal immigration
policy), many technology executives, even the fire-breathing radio
host Michael Savage.
You might say Savage, whose clannish, blood-and-soil rightism is
outside even the mainstream of American conservatism, is a
counterforce who could only flourish where the political climate is as
hermetic as it is here. San Francisco's liberal loonies think they can
banish the conservative specter from their feast, but they may only be
making it mightier.
Tim Cavanaugh is Web editor for Reason magazine.
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