"Ammiano's candidacy
gives [San Francisco's voters] a real choice they did not have
or even contemplate three weeks ago. It was a choice they actively
demanded by discarding the establishment's multiple choice and
by writing a political essay that began: 'Mayor: Tom Ammiano.'"
-- Rich
DeLeon, political scientist and author of Left Coast City,
writing in the San
Francisco Chronicle, 5 November 1999.
On 2 November 1999 forty-seven
thousand San Francisco voters wrote in the words "Mayor: Tom
Ammiano" on their ballot papers, taking over a quarter of the
total vote and sending their candidate through to the 14 December
run-off election against the incumbent, Mayor Willie Brown. In finishing
in a strong second place, Ammiano overtook both former Mayor Frank
Jordan, who was running to avenge his narrow defeat at Brown's hands
four years earlier, and political consultant Clint Reilly, who spent
three and a half million dollars of his own money on the race and
ended up netting 23,866 votes -- which works out at about $147 a head.
Tom Ammiano had only been in the race for three weeks, formally entering
the contest just in time to allow his write-in votes to count. The
first-round result was a magnificent achievement, pitting the democratic
energies of grassroots activists against the official structures of
power in the City's politics, and the Turtle is proud to salute the
people who made it happen.
Tom Ammiano grew up in
New Jersey and moved to the Bay Area during the 1960s. He trained
as a teacher, and taught in a Vietnamese village during the 1968 Tet
Offensive as part of a Quaker project. In San Francisco, Ammiano's
political involvement dates from the 1970s, when he began to organise
the City's gay teachers. He concentrated on education issues for many
years, running for the School Board in 1980 and 1988, before winning
a seat on his third attempt in 1990. He became President of the School
Board, and then ran for the City's Board of Supervisors in 1994, winning
his election, and capturing the Board's Presidency in 1998 when he
ran again, garnering more votes than any other victorious candidate.
But despite this record of electoral success, Ammiano has never quite
transformed himself into a conventional American politico: he still
refuses meet paid lobbyists on principle, and he continues to ride
on San Francisco's MUNI public transit system every day. And in the
later 1990s, Ammiano became the centre of opposition to the City's
administration, defending the City's embattled tenants and neighbourhood
activists and pushing his proposal for an $11/hour minimum wage for
workers on City contracts. As the electoral calendar clocked around
to another quadrennial race for mayor, Ammiano seemed an obvious candidate
to run to the left of Mayor Brown -- for while Brown had championed
urban minorities during his legendary thirty-year stint in the California
Assembly, he had moved steadily to the right as the City's Mayor,
and he often seemed determined to sell out the people of San Francisco
to the highest bidding corporate interest.
An energetic "Run, Tom, Run!"
campaign was launched by supporters in the Spring, with tenants' rights
activist Robert Haaland hawking his petitions around the City, collecting
the names of supporters for an Ammiano bid for mayor. But in August,
as the deadline for candidates to get their names on the November
ballot paper loomed, Ammiano considered his options, consulted with
his allies, and decided not to run. Perhaps he didn't want to. Perhaps
he thought he would lose; perhaps he worried that the City didn't
need another failed progressive bid for mayor. It's hard to tell.
He said he was declining to run in order to put more effort into a
couple of ballot measures, including his campaign to ban "double-dipping"
by banks and their ATMs. In choosing to stand aside, a three-way race
began to unfold, with a strong Mayor Brown facing two well-funded
challengers, fomer mayor Frank Jordan and millionnaire political consultant
Clint Reilly.
But it was also in August
that the scale of the dissatisfaction with the Brown regime among
San Francisco progressives began to become apparent. Brown had sewn
up dozens of endorsements -- from the President of the United States
on down -- and was mopping up pledges of support from the City's Democratic
Clubs without much opposition. But the Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual
and Transgendered Democratic Club -- named for the first openly-gay
City Supervisor who had been shot dead in San Francisco's City Hall
in 1978 by Dan White, a fellow Supervisor -- withheld its endorsement,
the Mayor only managing to round up about a third of the vote. Another
grassroots effort campaign to draft Ammiano began to take shape, orchestrated
by Hank Wilson, who continued to promote the phantom candidacy during
September and early October as Brown seemed to be coasting towards
an easy re-election. And this time -- somehow -- it worked. On 13
October Ammiano filed his candidacy papers with the City. The write-in
campaign was launched, the election was thrown upside-down overnight,
and thousands of volunteers turned up at campaign HQ to find out what
they could do to help.
The improbable campaign
HQ was Josie's Cabaret and Juice Joint, a small gay comedy club in
San Francisco's Castro District and home to two very elderly dogs,
a place where Ammiano -- an occasional stand-up comic -- had often
performed. Josie's was closing down at the end of the year to make
way for a yet another noodle bar , and the club's owner Ron Lanza
was happy to turn his space over to the activists. The campaign quickly
raised $20,000 
-- a pittance in what had become the most
expensive race in the City's history -- and this paid for one billboard
and for a lot of pens, which the campaign's volunteers handed out
to voters at the polling booths, along with instructions as to how
to cast a valid ballot. Although San Francisco's two daily newspapers
were clearly lining up behind Mayor Brown, they couldn't ignore the
story, and fuelled by volunteer energy and excited media coverage
the campaign's momentum grew and grew, until it peaked with the remarkable
vote on 2 November, when home-manufactured "I'm A Tom Boy"
stickers began to appear everywhere.
Mayor Brown won the run-off,
of course, by 59% to 41% in a high-turnout vote. If it wasn't quite
the landslide win trumpeted by the media, it wasn't close, either.
The six week run-off was an intense slog, and inevitably the Ammiano
campaign became more of a recognisably professional operation, losing
its anarchic grassroots feel as it churned out its policy papers and
acres of glossy multilingual propaganda. Brown's campaign was flooded
with soft-money contributions from business interests, and he was
able to flood the City's airwaves with TV spots which the Ammiano
people could never afford. Brown had been the hated opponent of California's
Republicans throughout his California Assembly Speakership, yet now
he snapped up the San Francisco GOP's endorsement. Modest proposals
to raise taxes from Ammiano's past returned to haunt him, scaring
away more affluent home-owning voters. The Ammiano campaign registered
ten thousand new voters, and the volunteer army remained enormous
and committed, but it wasn't enough, and in the end the Mayor's formidable
get-out-the-vote operation carried the day.
And yet... And yet... This
was not just another failed progressive's bid for mayor. The campaign
to take back San Francisco that coalesced around Ammiano's candidacy
lives on, in diverse forms, and the networks of activism that were
drawn into the fight were both broadened and strengthened as a result.
San Francisco's progressives have their hands full with measures on
the March Ballot -- for when voters go to the polls for the Presidential
Primary election they will also be confronted with the bigoted California-wide
Knight initiative against
gay marriage and the City-wide Proposition E, which aims to cut off
much welfare support from the City's large homeless population, and
it is important that both be defeated. And the big prizes come in
November, when the Supervisorial District Elections are held, the
best chance for the Mayor's opponents to unseat some of his lackeys
and elect genuine progressives to the Board of Supervisors. The struggles
carry on, as ever, but this time with renewed hope, and much better
organisation...
The Turtle Salutes the
Campaign to Elect 
Tom Ammiano Mayor of San Francisco!
For more on the campaign,
try these links:
Rage
Against the Machine, from the SF Weekly
An election post-mortem
from Salon.com
The original Run,
Tom, Run! editorial, April 1999, from the San Francisco Bay
Guardian.
Another Run, Tom,
Run! piece, from the San Francisco Bay Guardian in June.
Taking
Back San Francisco
