The city is on the verge of electing current President of the Board of Supervisors and Stanford Law graduate Matt Gonzalez. Gonzalez will become the city's youngest mayor in over 100 years, and he just happens to be a member of the Green Party.
The Democratic Party sent Al Gore to the city last week to stump for their candidate, Gavin Newsom. Bill Clinton will be arriving today, but at this point it doesn't matter if the Democrats send in the ghost of John F. Kennedy.
This race is about progressive politics, not partisanship. John Nichols writes in The Nation.
Unfortunately for Newsom, San Francisco is not merely a bastion of Democratic politics. It is a bastion of progressive politics -- particularly the sort of anti-war, anti-corporate politics that is most likely to appeal to disenfranchised young people. And Gonzalez, who quotes Sartre and Camus, helped start a small press that publishes poetry, rents a room in an apartment, does not drive a car, hangs out in the city's music clubs and the Beat Generation's City Lights bookstore, and regularly opens his City Hall office for art installations, is the cool candidate in this year's race. Beneath the bohemian image, of course, beats the heart of a sound politician; indeed, Newsom backers suggest that Gonzalez, who is backed by some of the developers he has criticized, is a more of a typical political than he lets on.Nichols is right, although Joan Ryan and others at the San Francisco Chronicle seem to think otherwise. For more on Matt Gonzalez and the future of progressive politics in America, go to Matt Gonzalez for San Francisco.
[Note: It was a close election, but Gavin Newsom was the eventual winner.]
