Brown Launches Bid for Mayor of San Francisco : Politics: Speaker acknowledges race will be tough. Foes hope to make campaign a referendum on his Assembly career.

After serving more than 30 years in the state Assembly--half that time as Speaker--the flamboyant and charismatic Willie Brown announced Saturday that he is ready to try out for a new career: mayor of San Francisco.

Willing to shed his lucrative private law practice and sell off a couple of his luxury cars for a shot at leading his hometown, Brown drew 1,000 supporters to a rally in the Japantown district where he declared that he will challenge incumbent Mayor Frank Jordan in the November election.

“This city absolutely needs strong, new, vibrant, creative, risk-taking leadership,” Brown shouted to the cheers of the crowd. “I want to be your mayor. . . . I am running for mayor.”

With his star quality and proven fund-raising appeal, Brown, 61, has the potential to steal the show from the blander Jordan, a balding former police chief who has disappointed even some of his supporters, and a roster of lesser known candidates.

For Brown, soon to be forced from the speakership by Republicans and pushed out of the Assembly by term limits, winning the mayoralty of one of America’s most liberal cities could quickly make him one of the country’s best-known city officials.

But even he acknowledges that victory will not be easy. Long blessed with a safe Assembly district, the Speaker will face his first tough race since he won his seat in the Legislature in 1964. His foes promise a bruising campaign they hope will become a referendum on Brown’s speakership--and the millions of dollars he has received in personal income in the past 15 years from developers and others with business at City Hall.

“How am I going to beat Willie Brown?” asked Jordan, 60, in an interview before Brown’s rally. “No. 1, by not getting involved in any conflicts of interests. . . . I look forward to the campaign and I don’t intend to give one inch of ground.”

Brown, who insists he has never violated conflict-of-interest laws, acknowledged he will be vulnerable in the campaign because he spent so many years as Speaker raising huge amounts of money to maintain Democrats in power. Last week, a UC San Francisco report revealed that Brown accepted more campaign money from the tobacco industry in the past 15 years than any elected official in California or in Congress.

But he asserted the fund raising was necessary to stem the tide of “right wingism” and keep legislators in power who would support abortion rights, back affirmative action and protect the environment.

“I have done the job and it has been costly personally,” Brown said. “When you take $65 to $70 million, some people will question whether or not you still have a soul. I still have a soul.”

For San Francisco voters, the contest will offer distinct personalities and clear ideological choices.

Also running is Roberta Achtenberg, 45, a former San Francisco supervisor and civil rights lawyer who recently resigned as the highest ranking gay or lesbian official in the Clinton Administration. She has considerable support in the city’s large gay community and, if elected, would be San Francisco’s first openly homosexual mayor.

A fourth candidate is Supervisor Angela Alioto, 45, a loose cannon in local politics whose words often get her in hot water, but who bears the famous San Francisco name of her father, Joseph Alioto, a popular mayor in the 1970s.

Jordan, a conservative by San Francisco standards, commands support from at least a third of the city’s voters and is likely to win a spot in a December runoff. That leaves Brown seeking to re-establish his progressive credentials and competing with Achtenberg and Alioto for a large enough share of the liberal vote to win.

Achtenberg poses enough of a threat to Brown in the primary that the Speaker complained loudly to the White House staff that President Clinton should not have allowed her to leave her Washington post to run, said sources familiar with Brown’s protests.

Jordan, who won election in 1991 as a “citizen mayor,” is widely viewed as a well-intentioned but bumbling mayor--even by some of his original supporters.

Jordan’s backers like to cast him as a sort of Jimmy Stewart gone to City Hall; his detractors see him more as a Gomer Pyle. Jack Davis, Jordan’s 1991 campaign manager, has defected and is now managing Brown’s campaign.

Jordan acknowledges that City Hall has been in turmoil during much of his mayoralty.

“There were some growing pains,” Jordan allows, but he insists that his Administration is succeeding in cutting crime, reducing homelessness and wisely managing the city’s fiscal affairs.

To run his campaign, Jordan has hired the controversial Clint Reilly, who helped make Richard Riordan mayor of Los Angeles but took a beating in Kathleen Brown’s race for governor last year. Her campaign has accused Reilly of fiscal mismanagement, a charge he denies. A victory over Willie Brown--a longtime political foe--could help revive Reilly’s career.

Unlike laws governing the Legislature, the City Charter here bans outside income for the mayor. Brown told reporters last month he wanted to run but would have a hard time supporting family members on a salary of $139,000.

“I’m just not interested in forcing my close relatives to make sacrifices for what basically is my hobby,” he said. But if he ran, he said, he would abandon his private law practice and sell a few of his expensive cars to tide him over.

Jordan took umbrage at the Speaker’s remarks, saying being mayor is far more than a “hobby.”

As Speaker, Brown has spent relatively little time in the city and in recent weeks has begun visiting neighborhoods, riding the bus, and talking with people on the streets.

“You would not believe how much San Francisco has changed!” Brown exclaimed recently to the San Francisco Chronicle after touring a popular commercial street in the Sunset District. Another thing Brown has learned is the meaning of exact change: to his embarrassment, he had to get off a city bus recently when the driver wouldn’t accept his $5 bill--and none of the other passengers would give him change.

Brown said he has found a groundswell of support for his candidacy but warned his backers that they need to work hard: “A Willie Brown candidacy is going to require you to join me at the bus stops, on the bus--with the right change.”