Oddball Group No Real Challenge to Popular Incumbent Newsom
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 5 -- Less than a year after admitting to an affair with his appointments secretary, a woman married to the campaign manager who was also his close friend, Gavin Newsom stands before the electorate of San Francisco on Tuesday, all but certain of winning a second term as mayor.
Handsome, Democratic and routinely described as "hot," Newsom, 40, handled his indiscretion with Ruby Rippey-Tourk with savvy professionalism and impressive gloss -- qualities increasingly used to describe the city itself.
The question is how to describe the other candidates on the ballot.
There is a homeless taxi driver named Grasshopper who sleeps in his cab. There is an elderly advocate for nudism whose candidacy prompted the League of Women Voters to write a bylaw requiring clothes at their debates.
The man in the fuzzy purple top hat would be Michael Powers, proprietor of the Power Exchange sex club.
And, here, on the roof of the building he was fortunate enough to buy before real estate prices drove almost everyone he knows out of Baghdad by the Bay, stands Chicken John Rinaldi, in full rant.
"I'm running for mayor for the idea of San Francisco," Rinaldi said.
And as an idea, San Francisco is as irrepressible as Tuesday's ballot.
Grasshopper Alec Kaplan lived five years in a ladies' room at 16th and Mission. "Both toilets were broken. I put a half fridge on top of one of them," said Kaplan, who chose to stand for election after being run off by new neighbors with a pit bull.
"I'm very agitated, and that is a prime quality for a candidate," said H. Brown, another candidate, who blogs about politics from a single-room-occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin, a section of downtown where wide-eyed tourists can encounter junkies with needles actually dangling from their arms.
"I know what it takes to run this city, but I can't do it," Brown said. "I'm way too abrasive."
George Davis, 61, often ventures buck naked from his home on lower Nob Hill to spread the word that clothes should be optional in Golden Gate Park, "like the great urban parks of Europe." He signs correspondence "Naturally" and is frequently detained by police.
Powers, 42, got into the race to show that even the owner of a sex club could be a viable candidate in a city where ordinary people felt politics was moving beyond them.
"Everybody says we're bozos," Powers said. "And the forums did get a little squirrelly. You had Grasshopper smoking pot, and Kenny the Clown [a write-in] juggling fire. To try to tolerate that became a little difficult."
But tolerance long has been a core appeal of San Francisco, the American city where the alternative first joined the mainstream.
"The city of art and innovation," said Rinaldi, who carried the nickname "Chicken" from childhood into an adult career as an artist and impresario. He dove into politics to point out that the bohemian heart of the city was being pushed into the sea by luxury condos.
"There is an endless supply of millionaires and billionaires willing to pay endless amounts to have a pied-a-terre -- however it's pronounced -- here because this is where all the art and the cool stuff is happening," Rinaldi said. "Except that the artists and people who make the cool stuff can't afford to live here any more."
He said the incumbent is "not a bad mayor -- just not a great mayor for San Francisco." Last week, for example, Newsom delivered the annual State of the City address as a PowerPoint presentation. It was an aptly corporate choice for an incumbent who has welcomed massive real estate and commercial development, which rivals blame for crowding out everything else.
"I'm totally embarrassed to admit I moved back in with my parents," said Pearl Song, a budding biographer who gave her age only as over 40. "I do some light housekeeping for him, but it really doesn't justify my retired father taking care of me instead of me taking care of him."
The election comes 40 years after the intersection of Haight and Ashbury became a mecca for hippies in the Summer of Love. Its anniversary was marked by an outdoor concert the San Francisco Chronicle's Web site captioned "Summer of Love Handles." But the sensibility still suffuses the city's culture.
"San Francisco pushes an agenda that the rest of the country has to respond to, like gay marriage and the minimum wage," said Quintin Mecke, who runs an advocacy group focused on public safety and is running for mayor.
"After seven years of Republican rule, we want to be as far left as possible, because we have tilted so far to the right that moderation is not going to get us anywhere near balance."
Indeed, blogger Josh Wolf was compelled to run for mayor after President Bush commuted the sentence of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff. Not exactly a local issue.
But Wolf, who spent 226 days in federal prison for refusing to show authorities footage of violent street protests in the city's Mission District, noted that Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys finished fourth in the 1979 race on the slogan "There's always room for Jello." "There's a tradition here," Wolf said.
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