In San Francisco, Liberal vs. Ultraliberal

Tom Ammiano moved into uncharted territory the day this city’s registrar of voters declared that the county supervisor had forced incumbent Mayor Willie Brown into a runoff election.

Never had a write-in candidate scored such an upset in any major American city. Never had San Franciscans faced a choice between a liberal candidate and an even more liberal candidate for mayor. Never had a gay man been a serious candidate here for the top job.

Now Ammiano has three weeks to convince San Franciscans that a former schoolteacher and stand-up comedian, an impassioned advocate for the city’s disenfranchised, can be a mayor for all San Franciscans.

Ammiano hopes to do that with a crusade to “take back the city” from developers and business interests that he says are squeezing out the working class.

“This should be a city for families, for children, for seniors, with a City Hall built on integrity,” Ammiano said in a recent debate with Brown, in which he flayed the mayor for cronyism and for allegedly kowtowing to business.

The populist message holds appeal in a city where studio apartments rent for $1,000 a month, a downtown building boom has created traffic gridlock and financial district workers must pick their way among homeless people sleeping on sidewalks.

When he entered the race three weeks before the Nov. 2 general election, Ammiano said he was doing so largely to ensure that the ultraliberal voters who are his core supporters would come out to vote for ballot measures he wanted to see passed. Now he says that he is running to inspire young people, restore power to the city’s neighborhoods and clean up city government.

Faced with a need to broaden his base and appeal to more conservative voters, Ammiano has positioned himself as a reform candidate; one newspaper dubbed him Jesse Ventura in heels. He says that Brown has paid too much attention to downtown business interests, too little attention to the neighborhoods, the homeless and renters.

But in an extraordinary 10-day registration drive, his campaign turned to--among others--the homeless in signing up about 10,000 voters for the Dec. 14 runoff election.

The matchup between the sharp-tongued Ammiano and the debonair Brown has excited San Franciscans and attracted attention from the national media. A recent poll showed Brown ahead of Ammiano by 10 points, but enough voters remain undecided that the winner is still far from certain.

Friends Urged Him Into Campaign

What started almost as a lark, a quest Ammiano said he was pushed into by friends who mounted a “Run, Tom, Run” campaign on the Internet and in local alternative weekly newspapers, has taken on the aura of a crusade for far-left activists and voters who have felt left out of San Francisco’s economic boom.

“People come into this office crying, saying they love this city and want to help save it,” said Mary Wings, an author who staffs the reception desk at Ammiano’s Castro neighborhood campaign office.

In the days after the Nov. 2 election, Ammiano’s staff, having just turned a last-minute write-in candidate with a budget of less than $20,000 into the man with a chance to take down one of the state’s most powerful politicians, found itself besieged.

Lines of prospective volunteers formed outside the funky Castro neighborhood restaurant that served as Ammiano’s makeshift headquarters. Hundreds of volunteers helped register voters.

Inside, where there still was only a single phone line for incoming calls several days after the election, reporters from around the globe jammed it with requests for interviews.

At the center of the hubbub stood Ammiano, a slight man with a nasal voice who started his political career as a gay activist here in the 1970s. An immigrant from a blue-collar New Jersey suburb, Ammiano had long been dismissed by the city’s political power structure--straight and gay--as too radical even by San Francisco standards to ever be a serious contender for mayor.

Some still complain that Ammiano has not defined himself well enough beyond not being Willie Brown to appeal to more conservative homeowners and others.

“What Tom’s race does is very exciting for the democratic process,” said Robert Oakes, a law professor and former legislative liaison for Mayor Frank Jordan. “But other than not being Willie Brown, he has not yet articulated a reason why voters should select him. He has to show a willingness to address issues beyond his core constituency.”

As a school board member, Ammiano advocated building a school just for gay students. As a supervisor, he outraged the Catholic Church by allowing the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a drag group whose members sometimes dress as nuns, to hold their parade on Easter Sunday in the Castro district. He frightened business interests by proposing a tax on every exchange at the Pacific Stock Exchange and proposing a municipal income tax for the well-off. He angered developers by opposing the construction of live-work lofts, which Ammiano said were anti-family.

City Treasurer Susan Leal, a lesbian who served on the Board of Supervisors with Ammiano, said she believes that he does not have the experience or the temperament to serve as mayor so she will vote for Brown

“Tom is not the person who brings two or three people into his office and tries to work things out,” said Leal. “That is definitely one of Brown’s great attributes. He can bring people together. Tom never talked to downtown.”

Supported by Renters, Labor

Ammiano surrounds himself with the activists he has worked with since the 1970s, when he joined what was then the fledgling gay liberation movement and came out as a gay teacher while working for the San Francisco Unified School District. A strong rent control advocate, he is the darling of the city’s powerful tenants organizations and has also enjoyed union support in his two races for the Board of Supervisors.

But he insists that he will listen to everyone--”except lobbyists”--if he is elected mayor.

“Mayor Brown is trying to say I am just a rabble-rouser, that I’m not productive,” Ammiano said during an interview at his campaign office in the city’s largely Latino Mission neighborhood. “If anything, I’m consistent. If you don’t have that voice of protest, things are going to remain static.”

Ammiano’s advocacy for society’s outsiders comes from his own experience as an outsider, he said. Born to a working-class Italian family, Ammiano routinely joked his way out of tight spots with the bullies who chased him home from the Catholic parochial schools he attended.

In the 1960s, he found his way to San Francisco, where he became a teacher of mentally disabled students and a Vietnam War protester, then a gay street activist in the 1970s.

Ammiano helped form a gay teachers organization to push for the rights of gay students and faculty, and became an early advocate for distributing condoms in the schools. But he remembers arguing with Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to the city’s Board of Supervisors, that there was no point in running for elected office.

“I said: ‘Harvey, why would you want to do that? It’s a cesspool,’ ” Ammiano said, shaking his head at the memory. The assassination of Milk by a former supervisor in 1978 was a turning point, Ammiano said, a tragedy that convinced him and other gay activists it was important to keep fighting--within the system--for their rights.

A few years later Ammiano ran for school board and was elected in 1990 on his third try. Eventually he served as its president. But he soon learned that some of the issues confronting the board could only be dealt with on a citywide basis, Ammiano said. He won election twice to the Board of Supervisors, and is now serving as its president.

A Modest Lifestyle

In sharp contrast to the high-living Brown, Ammiano has retained his lifestyle as a man of the people. He survives on his supervisor’s salary of under $30,000 in one of the nation’s most expensive cities. He lives in a modest, 850-square-foot home in Bernal Heights, a middle-class neighborhood, and takes the bus to work every day.

Still mourning the death of his longtime lover from AIDs five years ago, Ammiano can often be found walking alone around the Castro, heart of the city’s gay community, where constituents buttonhole him to register complaints. He has no press secretary and returns reporters’ telephone calls himself.

Despite his years as activist and politician, even Ammiano seems amazed that what started as a protest candidacy propelled him into the runoff against Brown, who has the backing of both the city’s business community and its labor unions.

“The first two debates were a baptism for me,” he said in an interview. “For me, half the battle is just showing up with a person of Willie Brown’s experience.”

He finds the fervency of some of his supporters deeply moving and somewhat unsettling, Ammiano said. He feels uneasy with the role of icon that is being fashioned for him by people who see Ammiano as a savior who can preserve San Francisco for the poor and working-class.

“I still have a lot of old friends surrounding me, and a lot of family to help keep me in check,” he said. “All this is going on around me, but then I talk to one of my sisters in New Jersey and she says: ‘That’s nice, Tom and you’re going to be here for Christmas, right?’ It’s a reminder that life goes on.”

His supporters don’t seem to mind that Ammiano is sketchy on details of exactly how he intends to save the city. He has promised to build more affordable housing units, has advocated a moratorium on the construction of live-work lofts that cater to upscale professionals, and has promised to help neighborhoods fight gentrification.

But in a city that already has one of the state’s tougher rent control laws, Ammiano has said nothing about how or if he can bring down rents. Neither has he explained how he will end downtown traffic gridlock or fix the city’s troubled municipal transportation system.

Asked what is his vision for the city, Ammiano speaks of wanting to “pay back San Francisco because it has allowed me to be just about everything I want to be.”

He also speaks of wanting to redress “the imbalance I’ve seen from the corporate takeover of the political process,” and of wanting to “restore the checks and balances,” between the powers of the city’s distinctive neighborhoods and the power of downtown corporate interests that Ammiano says have been given too great a say under the Brown administration.

After spending their first two debates carefully avoiding criticizing each other, Brown and Ammiano spent their most recent debate sharply attacking each other’s records. Ammiano accused Brown of presiding over a corrupt City Hall. Brown attacked Ammiano for allegedly being willing to raise taxes to pay for social services.

The day after the debate, Ammiano said the two will continue to “define their differences” in more than half a dozen upcoming debates. But both candidates, he said, are determined to do all that they can to prevent their rivalry from splitting the city’s gay and black communities--which worked together four years ago to elect Brown over then-Mayor Frank Jordan.

“I said before that it is a tribute to San Francisco that you have an African American male and an openly gay male running against each other and we are focused on the issues,” said Ammiano, who just opened a small campaign office in the largely black Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood, a Brown stronghold.

“Willie has gay support and I have African American support and that is as it should be,” Ammiano said.

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Tom Ammiano

Tom Ammiano, president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, has forced Mayor Willie Brown into a Dec. 14 runoff in the city’s mayoral race. As a write-in candidate, Ammiano scored a political upset in the Nov. 2 general election when he beat Brown’s two major competitors and blocked Brown from gaining a majority. A former schoolteacher and stand-up comic, the longtime gay activist is calling for construction of more affordable housing, keeping chain stores out of neighborhoods and putting checks on development.

* Age: 56

* Residence: San Francisco, Bernal Heights neighborhood

* Education: Bachelor’s degree in communications from Seton Hall University. Master’s degree in special education from San Francisco State.

* Career highlights: Taught school for 23 years, specializing in helping students with learning difficulties. Helped form gay teachers organization in San Francisco Unified School District in 1975. Ran for school board and was elected in 1980, on his third try. Elected to San Francisco City and County Board of Supervisors in 1994. In 1998, was top vote-getter for board in reelection bid and was named board president.

* Interests: Performing as a stand-up comedian

* Family: Grown daughter, Annie, born to a lesbian couple to whom Ammiano donated sperm.