December 8, 2003
BLUE PLUS YELLOW YIELDS GREEN:
Greens to revive flower power in San Francisco: The west coast city, long a refuge for fringe politics, is likely to reclaim its hippy heritage (Oliver Poole, 08/12/2003, Daily Telegraph)
The latest independent polls show that the Green candidate, Matt Gonzalez, 38, a former bassist in a punk rock band who does not own a watch or car, is leading his millionaire rival by 52 to 45 per cent, though the Democrats claim their internal research shows the gap is far closer. [...]The Democrat candidate, Gavin Newsom, 36, has been cast by his opponents as a socialite "Republocrat", one who names the billionaire Gordon Getty among his friends. He made his own fortune in a chain of restaurants, lives in a mansion in exclusive Pacific Heights, and married a former lingerie model. [...]
Among his policies are vast investment in cheap housing and the raising of the minimum wage to the highest in the country. If he wins he has promised to make the city a "laboratory" for the party's policies.
It is a platform which has resonated with the 2003 incarnation of San Francisco, despite only three per cent of the electorate describing itself as Green.
With so many hi-tech businesses folding or leaving the city, office rents have halved since the late 1990s boom and at one time in 2000 there were more removal vans leaving the city than any other in the United States.
Those who remained reclaimed its counter-culture heritage. The election of President George W Bush and then the war on terror further radicalised the city.
It became the centre of protest against the war in Iraq and started to draw activists from across the country.
This would seem to be the danger for Democrats in not returning to their roots on the Left, leaving the door open for a truly Left-wing party to replace them as they try to shade their differences with the GOP in pursuit of the presidency. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 8, 2003 12:36 AM
I don't know how much the democrats will really have to worry. A few years as rats in a Green "laboratory" and San Fransiscans will be running back to the Dems--never the Republicans.
Posted by: Timothy at December 8, 2003 1:28 AMI would imagine Gonzalez can do for San Francisco what Dennis Kucinich did for Cleveland after Carl Stokes left office, though they were both Democrats, so the party coudln't avoid taking the blame for the 1970s meltdown. I'm sure a year from now if Gonzalez is in office and things are even worse than they are today, the Democratic Party in California will be acting as if they had never governed San Francisco in its enitre history, and that the problems are due to the Gonzalez-Schwartenegger-Bush axis.
Posted by: John at December 8, 2003 7:19 AMIs tough to see anybody screwing (or like Senator Kerry would say, f....ng) things up worse than the Democrats have...But who cares about the long-term. In the short-term, this could give enough of a boost to the Greens to solidify any intention to run a (of course, futile but spoiler) national Pesidential slate in uber-liberal Blue states. In facts, Reps should do all we can to help this fellow.
Posted by: MG at December 8, 2003 7:43 AMIf Hilary was drafted in 2004 would Dean consider a 3rd party run? Is Dean mean enough! Would the Greens be naive enough to back him? I think Hilary has postioned herself this Thanksgiving and this will be an interesting primary whoever runs for the Democrats.
There's a lot hanging on Iraq in the next six months and that will be Hilary's decision point.
Safire may have the scenario right in todays column, but somehow I doubt it.
If a substantial split in the left occured and
the 10 to 15% left wackos go green, I can't
say I'm sure how the other two parties would
realign? Would the Dem's pull further left
to try and regain the wackos or would they
lurch right and try and splinter the
current right?
So we go from 40-10-50 to 10-30-10-50, what do the Dems do next?
If they abandon the 10 to their left, they need to pick up not just all the moderate 10 in the middle, but make a significant bite into the GOP's 50. That risks ending up as 15-35-5-45. They are almost as bad off, and now fighting a two front war to keep that 15 from getting bigger while not driving the middle 5 (and more) back to the GOP. They'll probably never win a house or the presidency or a substantial number of governors even by accident. Even if successful, they wind up 10-40-10-40, which is break even with no room to maneuver.
Better to try to return to something like 35-15-50 and settle in for a spell as the opposition and pickup a few wins when the GOP stumbles and alienates a chunk of their 50 so that it stays home while pushing the middle 15 the Dems way (think 1992).
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at December 8, 2003 11:48 AM