San Francisco's surprising radical

With Gavin Newsom, the city expects the unexpected. Now the nation watches.

SAN FRANCISCO - Inside the cool marble cavern of City Hall, bursts of applause flutter into the uppermost reaches of the rotunda. Flashbulbs pop faintly in the bright morning light. It is not quite 9 a.m. and already two couples have wed.

Tricia took Cindy. Luis kissed Scott. And behind them, lined up nervously between two velvet ropes, were another half-dozen couples waiting for someone to speak the words, "I pronounce you spouses for life."

Things have calmed down since the heady days after Mayor Gavin Newsom performed the first ceremony Feb. 12. Nearly 3,500 couples have received licenses, but the lines no longer stretch around the block. Now people make appointments online and everything's booked solid for two months.

As love and bureaucracy found an equilibrium, Newsom tended to the mundanities of modern governance and struggled for a similar balance. Before him were the department budgets he will likely have to cut to stave off a whopping budget deficit. Hanging over his head was an interview with Diane Sawyer.

This is the dual existence of a young mayor who has been in office not quite three months, but who seems already to have defined his entire political career.

To the outside world Newsom is a liberal ideologue who inserted himself in a national debate over one of the most emotional issues of the day. But his constituents in San Francisco, thrilled as they are about his stand against President Bush, are scratching their heads.

Newsom, 36, certainly doesn't look the part of the radical. With his gleaming smile and gray suits he looks like he stepped out of a Brooks Brothers catalog, more bond trader than bomb thrower.

But Newsom has defied expectations at every turn, naming women and minorities to prominent positions, demanding the city provide better service to poor neighborhoods and, of course, by setting the standard on gay marriage that municipalities around the country are racing to emulate.

Newsom's high profile has only stoked speculation that he might one day run for national office. But that assumes his adoring, but notoriously fickle, constituents don't rip him to shreds first.

Newsom grew up in the Marina district, one of the wealthier neighborhoods in a wealthy city that distrusts wealth.

Newsom's father, William, an appellate judge, was close friends with Gordon Getty, heir to the Getty fortune. His mother worked as a secretary. His parents divorced when he was young.

Gavin, who suffered from dyslexia, couldn't get into a private prep school because of his grades. But he was a standout athlete on the basketball and baseball teams of public Redwood High School. "He was a hustler, always dove for the loose ball," said state Sen. John Burton, a self-described "old drinking buddy" of William Newsom. After college, Newsom and his childhood friend Billy Getty opened the PlumpJack Wine Shop. The shop's success led to a string of restaurants and bars in the Marina. The partners acquired a winery in the Napa Valley and opened another PlumpJack restaurant in Lake Tahoe.

When Newsom expressed an interest in politics, Burton introduced him to Mayor Willie Brown, who appointed Newsom, then 30, to a spot on the city's parking and traffic commission. Before the year was out, Brown had appointed Newsom to the Board of Supervisors. The headline in the San Francisco Examiner said a great deal about the city's liberal politics: "Board gets a straight white male."

Straight, yes. (He's married to former prosecutor and lingerie model Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom, who is now a TV legal affairs analyst.) But in truth, he was more green than white.

But Newsom found his feet quickly. He tackled the city's dysfunctional public transportation system and took on the powerful transportation union.

"Never underestimate the power of being green," said Mike Farrah, the first person Newsom hired when he became supervisor. "He didn't know what he couldn't do."

In the end, candidate Newsom managed to preserve a decent enough relationship with the union to earn its endorsement.

"This guy's been breaking the mold since the day he was appointed by Willie Brown," said Eric Jaye, a political consultant who advised Newsom on his campaign.

Effecting substantial change is not easy in San Francisco, where virtually every issue is handled by ballot initiative. No issue is too small: Residents once voted on whether a patrolman could bring his ventriloquist dummy with him in his patrol car.

But some issues are definitely too big.

Thousands of men and women wander the streets of downtown and the Tenderloin. Some are mentally ill, addicted to drugs and alcohol. They cycle in and out of jail and the emergency room. In one recent year, 169 people died on the street.

But trying to fix the problem has predictable and unintended results.

Two mayors have been kicked out of office in large part for their efforts to solve the problem - one for being too indulgent, the other for being too harsh. Mayor Willie Brown chose not to touch it at all.

The root of the problem, many say, is a monthly cash payment of about $400 that San Francisco gives to the homeless people. It's a magnet, critics say, for homeless from outside the city.

A couple of years ago, supervisor Newsom gambled that he could solve the problem no one wanted to touch.

"Anyone who knows me knows I don't shy away from controversy," Newsom said. "What we were doing was not working."

Newsom called his plan "Care Not Cash." The premise was to deduct money for rent, food and utilities from the welfare payments and provide housing that offered services such as drug treatment and mental health counseling.

The plan sounded good, but the backlash was fierce.

"It don't take a lot of guts to come out against homeless people," said John Burton, his mentor.

Among other things, his opponents said this was just a wedge issue upon which to build a mayoral campaign.

"This is a town that sees itself as the sparkling jewel and poor people aren't sparkling. They're not a good tourist attraction," said Paul Boden, director of the Coalition on Homelessness for the past 16 years and a former homeless person.

Care Not Cash passed overwhelmingly in November 2002. Throughout 2003 it was debated by the Board of Supervisors, which amended a provision that would have used emergency shelters as permanent housing. The measure ended up in the courts. It fueled the class warfare theme of the mayor's race.

No one mentioned gay marriage.

One Monday morning shortly after his inauguration, Newsom piled his department heads into a couple of city vans and drove them a few minutes south to a neighborhood that few of them ever visit.

The vans stopped at an intersection in the center of the West Point public housing complex. West Point sits high on a hill in the Bayview section. As the name suggests, it has a sweeping view of the bay and downtown in the distance. Up close, the scenery is not so nice. The night before, a young man had been shot to death at the corner.

Newsom directed his staff's attention to the bullet holes (unrelated to the previous night's shooting) in the backboard of the nearby basketball court. He pointed to the overflowing Dumpster in the middle of the street. He pointed at potholes that "had been there so long they're institutions."

"If this were in my neighborhood, someone would be fired," he said. "Explain this to me."

The media did not come along, but Newsom's communications director Peter Ragone made sure the press heard about the morning in detail. Added to his appointments of a female fire chief and another woman as interim police chief, Newsom's fiery support for overlooked neighborhoods got him favorable press.

Somebody paying attention to Newsom's career might have foreseen some of those headlines. But even they probably wouldn't have predicted his response to a brief passage in the president's State of the Union speech.

"If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process. Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage," Bush said in late January.

Newsom saw Bush's remarks as an attack on his constituents that could not go unchallenged.

It became clear that issuing a statement protesting discrimination wouldn't accomplish much. Besides, the city wasn't entirely blameless. Its marriage licenses still specified bride and groom.

He decided the state's constitution, which grants equal protection to all, trumped any other state law. He asked party leaders whether he should rewrite the city's marriage license. They all told him not to. The timing isn't right, they said. It's handing the Republicans ammunition. Newsom did it anyway.

The effect on San Franciscans was electric. It was as if Newsom had reasserted the city's claim to the progressive vanguard. His approval rating - notably among the gay community that had previously been ambivalent toward him - climbed to nearly 70 percent.

Wednesday morning last week, a crew of workmen began to lay fresh asphalt on a basketball court at the West Point housing project. They had already replaced the backboards. Another handful of workers were putting in handicapped accessible curbs. Two days before, every apartment had received a brand new black plastic trash can.

Clearly, somebody had taken notes during the field trip.

Some residents said they were surprised. "You don't expect anyone to give a damn about us," said Sam Faataui, 20.

Others seemed underwhelmed by the cosmetic changes.

"He's trying to fix the problems," said Charles Ryan, 52, "but he don't know what the real problem is. He should be trying to put these kids to work somewhere. There's a hell of a gang problem.

"And what'd they do with the Dumpsters? They were a lot better than these cans."

No mayor is ever going to please everyone, but sometimes going toe-to-toe with the president seems the least controversial thing you can do in this city. Courage is taking on the city's entrenched patronage system, telling everyone, no matter how powerful to "take a number." Courage is finding cuts necessary to plug a $300-million deficit.

"He's in an impossible situation," said Joe O'Donoghue, head of the Residential Builders Association, which has tangled with Newsom over construction in the downtown area. "He might get strikes (by the unions). He could face a recall. He could be a very short-term mayor."

Newsom said he is determined to find solutions to problems that his critics say he can't handle. He wants to put a $10-million bond initiative on the November ballot to pay for 2,000 units of housing for the homeless.

"We would obviously support that," Boden, the advocate for the homeless said. "I'm going to encourage it, but I'm too cynical to get dewy-eyed about it."

- Bill Duryea can be reached at 727 893-8457 or duryea@sptimes.com

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