I volunteered on Chris Daly's campaign in 2006. Daly's always made me a little uncomfortable, but he's fairly consistently (pretty much. most of the time. we're all human, right?) stood up for poor & otherwise vulnerable people's interests, while his opponent was a lapdog for a mayor whose interests were tied to those of the well-to-do in this city.
I have been immensely disappointed the past couple months. Not for a moment would I wish for the clueless, evil-sponsored Rob Black in Daly's place, but since the beginning of the budget process, Daly's personality has got in the way of the interests that he wants to—& his constituency wants him to—fight for. The Mayor set a trap with his budget: It was the kind of document you don't give to a responsible Board of Supervisors unless you're looking for a fight (& boy howdy is Mayor Newsom looking for a fight this election year). I don't know if there was a way to really win this one, but certainly taking the moral high ground would've been a good start. Being an asshole can help you win votes, but it don't win hearts & minds… not in the long run.
But maybe Daly feels—& reasonably so—that he can't win for losing. Last Tuesday, Daly had a particularly humiliating session with the Board. He's right that the other Supervisors ought to've had spine enough to push for the budget this city needs, but he could've done a little better at not making it so easy for them to turn their backs on his point of view. After the meeting, Daly approached Bevan Dufty's desk. Heated words were exchanged, culminating in Dufty's saying 'Why don't you just do what you want to do? Why don't you just punch me in the face?' This is undisputed. No one claims that Daly ever placed a hand on Dufty, or vice-versa.
What headline did the Chronicle run? 'Daly and Dufty nearly come to blows' Had Daly (or Dufty) said 'I'm a punch you in the face.', that might've warranted such a headline. Had they bumped chests, or flashed gang signs, then surely that headline would've been reasonable. But all we've really got is some mild histrionics.
But beyond mountaining that molehill, the Chronicle ran a bizarrely hypercritical editorial, in which not only was his temper equated with violence, not only were hyperbolic-to-the-point-of-fabrication claims made ('San Francisco['s] patience has run out with Chris Daly.' Hello? He still has tremendous vociferous support in this city, even if many of his allies are a little peeved with him, right now. Who authorised the Chron's editorial staff to speak on behalf of the entire city?), but Daly was even blamed for the corruption of Supervisor Jew & Mayor Newsom! I shit you not, San Francisco:
There's a context here. Supervisor Ed Jew is facing investigations over bribery, lying and false residency. Other supervisors have faced recalls with varying levels of seriousness. Mayor Newsom, whose record is far from flawless, is sailing toward re-election in November.
City Hall needs serious debate and legislative thought, not government by chaos and bluster. Yet this downside is what Daly has created.
Oh. Daly has a temper, so Newsom started to battle addiction issues & pork his staff's wife, & Jew… moved out of the city, ran for office, &… y'know… did corruption? Sorry. The chain of causality, here, is patently untenable on temporal grounds.
So why does a paper that can't be bothered to cover local news, that has no interest in political policy, opt for bizarre coverge like this?
The charitable answer is that the Chronicle is finally fiscally, as well as otherwise broke, & that it needs to resort to sensationalism to sell its otherwise worthless content. Daly, with his temper, tends to provide good fodder.
But I don't think that's it. For conservatives in San Francisco, Daly represents everything that's wrong with the progressive left (sometimes lumped together with the usually-easier-to-ignore radical left). Why is Daly more present in the Chronicle than any other supervisor? Why is more than a third of his coverage in the Chronicle in tsk-ful editorials? Because Daly's San Francisco progressivism's barn door—not the most important piece of our architecture, when it comes to structural integrity, but certainly the easiest to hit.
