A Political Bad Boy’s Lament

SAN FRANCISCO — The Sunday after winning a bitter electoral battle to build the San Francisco 49ers a new stadium, bad boy political consultant Jack Davis did the last thing his many enemies would expect: He went to church.

And as the powerful waves of gospel music washed over him, Davis says, the most feared man in San Francisco politics thought about quitting the bare-knuckles profession he has reveled in for two decades.

“It was a tough weekend for me, a time for reevaluation,” Davis said during a tense interview in his San Francisco offices the day after he attended the Glide Memorial Church service. It was the first time since the election that he had talked publicly about his disenchantment with his longtime profession.

“The time has come to do something different,” said Davis, his voice at times breaking with emotion.

Sitting through his first church service in 25 years, Davis said, he pondered the irony that he had just helped the 49ers spend a fortune securing a razor-thin victory in their battle to build a $525-million mall-and-stadium complex.

“That we had just spent more than $2 million for a stadium campaign, when Glide can’t even raise a lousy million to build housing for people. There’s something wrong with that.”

Jack Davis, master of the high-cost, no-holds-barred campaign, born again? It is a transformation his many enemies, and even his friends, have trouble accepting.

He is, after all, the man whose 50th birthday party, thrown in the midst of the stadium campaign, featured a sadomasochistic sex act performed before the city’s political elite. He is a man so feared by that same elite that not one politician publicly criticized him for the party’s excesses, even after it made national headlines and threatened to sink the campaign he was managing.

“This is a man who talks about wanting to . . . get that person, kill that person off politically,” said one consultant, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I know, because I’ve heard him say it.”

For nearly a decade, Davis has been the consultant San Francisco candidates consider hiring just to make sure he won’t run their opponent’s campaign. They have seen him take out one mayor, get an obscure former police chief elected in his place, defeat a baseball stadium ballot measure in one election, then switch sides and get the stadium approved in a later election.

As he has shifted allegiances and acted on personal grudges through the electoral process, he has had more influence on San Francisco politics than any one man.

For many, he embodies both the worst excesses of his profession and the worst excesses of the city he says he passionately loves.

His talk of departure from politics comes at a time when revulsion at Davis’ brash style has led to talk of reform in San Francisco. One county supervisor is proposing to limit the access that political consultants have to the politicians they help elect, noting that Davis and other consultants first help elect officials, then lobby them on behalf of corporate clients seeking city contracts and building permits.

Others complain that Davis has warped San Francisco politics in substance and in style by promoting high-cost campaigning and pursuing vendettas through campaigns.

Davis acknowledges that “anger has been a constant companion in my life,” ever since he was a friendless child growing up in a small Pennsylvania town. There, his father ran a funeral home, and the family lived in an apartment upstairs.

“Nobody would ever come over to play,” Davis recalled. “There were people moaning and crying downstairs. I developed a sense of anger about my condition.”

From Activist to Campaigner

Davis took the anger he calls his “Siamese twin” and moved to San Francisco in 1972, where he came out as a gay man.

In the ‘70s, he was active in the antiwar protest movement and supported himself by teaching and working in a bookstore.

In 1977, Davis worked as a volunteer organizer in Miami, battling against Anita Bryant’s anti-gay crusade. His main job was to drive California Assemblyman Willie Brown to campaign appearances. The two men have been friends and political allies ever since.

On that way back from Miami, Davis made a connection that changed his life. He sat next to political consultant Clint Reilly, and struck up a friendship. Reilly later hired Davis and the men ran several San Francisco campaigns together before Davis began running his own campaigns in 1979. Years later they had a falling-out that turned them from partners to bitter rivals.

Through it all, Davis developed a reputation as a wild man, even by San Francisco standards. He was legendary for his hard drinking, his food fights, his profanity, his hair-trigger temper and for throwing outrageous parties featuring acts nearly as raunchy as those performed at his 50th birthday.

“I have lived a rather outrageous life in San Francisco,” Davis said.

As a consultant who has observed him for years puts it--using the sort of language Davis himself employs, “Jack has always been a big, boisterous, screaming queen of an Irishman, and he loves that.

“It worked because in San Francisco, we love eccentrics, oddballs and all things out of the norm,” he added.

Sitting in an office cluttered with campaign photos and memorabilia, his back to the stunning view of Coit Tower and the San Francisco Bay, Davis mused about why the biggest win of his career, the 49ers’ come-from-behind victory, has sent him into a tailspin about his life.

“Maybe it is because I turned 50. Maybe because I have known I was HIV-positive for six years. Maybe because I have been doing this for too long,” Davis said.

“There was a certain side of me that always had to prove something,” he said. “I don’t feel I have to prove anything to myself or anyone else now.”

Reviewing his successes, Davis sounded like a war-weary soldier, tired of the battle.

“I’ve elected two mayors and won two campaigns for stadiums. There is nothing out there that interests me now,” he said.

Devastated when he learned that he was HIV-positive, Davis said he hit an emotional low a year ago when his T-cell count sank precipitously.

“I was borderline for having full-blown AIDS,” he said. “I did not want to die a public death.” He resolved then to quit the business, and bought a home in a New Age community in Sedona, Ariz., Davis said.

“I wanted to move to Sedona and die a private death,” he said. With its dramatic red rocks and ever-changing light, Sedona became his spiritual retreat, although he also became the first member of the community to have four phone lines run into his home, to keep in constant touch with his San Francisco office and his web of contacts.

And shortly after he moved to Sedona, his old friend Brown summoned him back to run the 49ers’ stadium campaign.

About the same time, Davis said, he began taking protease inhibitors. His health dramatically improved.

For the past five months, he said, his body has been free of any trace of the HIV virus. He says it is his new lease on life that has strengthened his resolve to get out of the campaign business and do something more meaningful.

“I now am thinking about living, thinking about the long-term again, and I’m thinking about what I want to do with my life.”

‘He’s Sick and Tired’

Cecil Williams, charismatic pastor of Glide Memorial, said he believes Davis’ claim that he wants to change his life.

“Jack called me the day after he came to our service,” Williams said. “He said: ‘I want to try to turn things around, in regards to what I have been doing. You know I’m not into religion, but what you are doing is spiritual and I need that. I want to help the poor, and the homeless, and the people in greatest need.’ ”

Davis has offered to help raise money for a nine-story, low-cost housing and treatment center for drug addicts, homeless people and battered women. The church hopes to break ground in October, Williams said.

“He’s sick and tired,” Williams said. “He’s seen too much. But he is going to come back as a critic of some of the things wrong in this city,” Williams said. “And this man has immeasurable power in this city.”

But it is that very power, and Davis’s obvious enjoyment of it, that makes it hard for his critics to believe he can walk away from the political scene he so dominates.

After a successful 1996 campaign to win approval for a new baseball stadium for the San Francisco Giants, Supervisor Tom Ammiano recalled, “Jack told me there’s nothing left to do.”

Ammiano is trying--unsuccessfully, so far--to win backing from his fellow supervisors and Brown for a city law that would limit the ability of consultants like Davis to serve as corporate lobbyists to officials they helped elect.

“He won’t quit. It’s in his blood,” Ammiano said of Davis.

Even if he does quit running campaigns, Davis-watchers say, he will leave the city’s politics forever changed by the work--some say the damage--he has done here, both in substance and in style.

Davis has perfected the simple but highly effective tactic of targeting occasional voters sympathetic to the candidate or issue he is championing, bombarding them with direct mail and telephone reminders that they must register and vote, then getting them to the polls on election day.

It is a tactic that requires a huge amount of money. The 49ers ran the most expensive campaign in the city’s history, and outspent their opponents by about 10 to 1. Critics say such heavy spending distorts the electoral process.

The race also illustrated the nastiness of San Francisco politics, something critics say Davis is heavily responsible for.

Davis’ onetime mentor, Reilly, bankrolled opposition to the stadium. Many believe Reilly put up nearly $100,000 of his own funds just to block Davis from another victory. Reilly did not return phone calls for this story, but such personal, bitter clashes are commonplace in Jack Davis’ San Francisco.

“I really do think that there’s a rougher image of the political consulting industry due to Jack,” said David Binder, a San Francisco political pollster who has known Davis for years. “He has a vicious streak, a mean streak. People are so afraid of him, mostly because of his successes. People think that he will defeat them if they cross him.”

“The degree of vitriol and personal animosity [that the city’s politicians and consultants display] is very repellent,” said Richard DeLeon, chairman of San Francisco State’s political science department. “A lot of San Franciscans are getting fed up with it.”

Fed up? Maybe. But certainly not turned off.

The city enjoys one of the highest voter registration rates in the state. And although it is overwhelmingly Democratic, it boasts a plethora of intensely active political clubs and neighborhood groups.

“In San Francisco, we don’t have just one gay and lesbian political club,” said political consultant Scott Shafer. “We have five.”

Because politics is on such a grass-roots level, political analysts say, consultants have become indispensable to candidates. They are the hired guns who will “deliver” political clubs and mobilize support among the city’s fragmented body politic.

It is the sort of highly charged atmosphere that could turn a Jack Davis into a kingmaker and spoiler par excellence.

“Jack Davis has proved that he can take out an incumbent politician; that he can bring somebody in from nowhere; that he can come from behind and win,” Binder said. “No other political consultant in this town has been as successful in really big elections.”

Davis established his reputation as a ruthless, vengeful campaigner by publicly vowing in 1990 to drive from office then-Mayor Art Agnos, a well-connected Democratic politico with a statewide reputation. Davis made good on the threat by managing the campaign of a former police chief, Frank Jordan, who successfully upset Agnos in 1991.

Within months, Davis fell out with Jordan, abandoned him and ran Willie Brown’s successful campaign against him.

“I ran Frank Jordan’s campaign to get back at Art Agnos,” said Davis, who has always believed that Agnos played a role in his 1989 indictment for alleged campaign fraud, an indictment that was later dismissed.

“Then I realized that my anger had put the city into the hands of someone not capable of running the city. I just came to my senses,” Davis said. “I sought Willie Brown out as a man who could bring energy and life back to San Francisco.”

Davis refers to Brown as “a brother.” The mayor has said publicly that he will never run a campaign in San Francisco without Jack Davis.

The two see each other socially, and Brown was at Davis’ controversial birthday party. The mayor left before the highlight: a leather-clad dominatrix carving a pentagram into a satanic priest’s back, then urinating on him. Brown is said to have personally intervened with the owners of the 49ers to keep them from firing Davis after the party hit the front pages.

“Jack’s my buddy,” Brown said in an interview. “He may be a little crazy, but he is a genius. He’s funny. He’s opinionated. He’s like a tactician in war [when running a campaign]. He is the best.”

Making San Francisco Work

The two men share a passionate belief that they can make San Francisco, a city considered ungovernable, work.

And they share a sense of satisfaction that the well-heeled, liberal elite of the city failed to block the stadium-mall project for the economically depressed Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood, on which Brown had staked his political reputation.

“Why anybody would want to do business in this town is beyond me,” Davis said. “There is definitely an anti-business bias in the eastern half of the city,” the bastion of the city’s wealthy, politically left-leaning movers and shakers. “There is a romanticism that leads to knee-jerk anti-business decisions.”

“It was a Starbucks kind of election,” Davis said. “If you sip latte and read the New York Times on Sunday, you saw a risk and voted against it. The people who came from areas of the city that need jobs and economic opportunity overwhelmingly supported it.”

But neither knowing that he confounded those who wrote him off after his birthday party, nor knowing that he is at the top of his game in this town, is enough to dissuade him from his plan to quit, Davis said.

The stress of the campaign and the humiliation of seeing his private life picked apart in the public domain after the birthday party took too heavy a toll on his newly restored health.

“The last few weeks of the campaign, I vomited every day,” he said. “I mean, there were times when I had to pull over to the curb and vomit.”

Now, he said, he is headed for Sedona.