Newsom “Discovers” that the Personal is Political

by Randy Shaw, 2008-02-12

“It’s all personal. That’s all it is.”
--Mayor Newsom, referring to a Harvey Rose report on city departments paying for mayoral staff

With San Franciscans preoccupied by the Obama-Clinton race, the widening battle between San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board of Supervisors has struggled for attention. The latest salvo is the report prepared by Harvey Rose, the Board’s longtime budget analyst, which revealed that the mayor has redirected over $1 million annually from such city departments as MUNI and the Human Services Agency to his personal staff. Newsom leaked the report to the media last Friday, and claimed that his practice of funding staff through other agency budgets is a longstanding tradition. He argued that Rose’s report, while “technically accurate,” was driven by “personal” rather than policy concerns. Is the mayor really suggesting that politicians are often driven by personal agendas? Next we’ll learn that campaign donations influence votes. The Rose report is obviously an outgrowth of Newsom’s often very personal criticisms of Board President Aaron Peskin and other Supervisors. But the mayor erred by dragging Harvey Rose into the fray, and has now opened himself up to questions over his own pursuit of personal agendas -- such as his attacks on Peskin, and strong opposition to any measures sponsored by Supervisor Chris Daly.

Thank goodness that Mayor Newsom and Board President Peskin are giving those focused on local issues something to write about. Even better (from a readership standpoint) is how their dispute has gotten personal, a shift that Newsom appears quite angry about.

Newsom is correct that mayors have long funded personal staff through city agency budgets, but appears to have forgotten that both Art Agnos and Willie Brown were criticized for doing so. Agnos’ appointment of “deputy mayors” triggered a ballot initiative to abolish such positions, a campaign that was led by longtime Agnos rival, Quentin Kopp.

Was Kopp’s attack on the deputy mayors “personal”? Absolutely.

The media had a field day with Willie Brown’s staff appointments. When Brown had a political ally he wanted to reward, he was never deterred by the fact that their salary had to be paid out of a city agency’s budget.

Gavin Newsom pledged during his 2003 mayoral campaign to end the Brown patronage machine. It’s a bit late for him to now justify funding staffers from other departments by saying that it is a “long tradition.”

But Newsom is right on his larger point -- that the Supervisors are only making a fuss about staff salaries due to personal issues with the mayor. But why has this surprised the mayor, and what led him to challenge the integrity of Harvey Rose, the Board’s budget analyst?

Rose can get his numbers or his analysis wrong, but nobody has ever accused him of allowing personal issues to shape his conclusions. The Mayor needs to backtrack on this one fast -- as Rose’s reputation crosses political lines and attacks on his integrity are not credible.

As for Newsom’s attempt to disparage criticism of his staffing funding on the grounds it is motivated by “personal” factors: welcome to the world of politics.

It is not only common for personal agendas to dominate policymaking, but many assume that such motivations are typically the driving force. This is true not only for elected officials -- as Newsom’s preoccupation with defeating Supervisor Chris Daly’s relatively harmless “question time” proposal showed -- but also for activists and others impacted by city laws and policies.

I felt this firsthand in 1990, when the Tenderloin Housing Clinic (which I head) won passage of a stronger Residential Hotel Ordinance that for the first time gave nonprofit groups the right to sue to prevent illegal tourist conversions. We soon filed nearly twenty lawsuits, often against hotels that had been violating the law for years.

Many of these lawsuits prompted calls from defendants questioning our motivation. They argued that the city had never cared about illegal tourist rentals, so they wondered what they had done to get us so mad at them that we sued. I would explain that the lawsuit wasn’t personal, but was part of our mission to preserve residential hotel units, but most remained convinced that a personal agenda was involved.

Many believe a personal motive is involved because so often this is the case.

When Newsom charged Peskin with unethical conduct in obtaining Prop A campaign contributions, attacked the Board President for allegedly wrongfully interfering with city departments, and then fired the popular Susan Leal, the mayor had to know that the response would be “personal.” He knows how the game is played, and the question now is whether his dispute with the Board will escalate.