Political Link May Have Been Liability

Jeff Adachi’s trouncing of Kimiko Burton, the heir to a family political dynasty, in a bitter race for San Francisco public defender was seen Wednesday as the triumph of an independent over the machine.

Although the influence of state Senate leader John Burton (D-San Francisco) over the race was exercised out of fatherly love, it appeared to have backfired, possibly costing his daughter the contest.

Adachi, the former chief attorney in the public defender’s office who cast himself as the underdog fighting the Burton clan, says the voters’ message was clear:

“It says that money, power and political influence won’t always carry the day,” said Adachi, 42, who spoke Tuesday night from his campaign headquarters, where he celebrated with hundreds of supporters and a mambo band.

“There is room for an independent person who’s got experience to be elected to office.”

Whether or not the incumbent Burton would be--is already--a better public defender than Adachi may have been overshadowed by voters’ perception that her father’s influence got her appointed to the office and brought her thousands of dollars. Mayor Willie Brown appointed Burton last year to fill the term of the public defender who left the post.

Kimiko Burton raised direct contributions of more than half a million dollars--more than twice that of her opponent and largely from outside the city. It’s been estimated that another half-million was raised in so-called soft money.

“I think voters initially looked at this race as the type of politics they wanted to reject,” said David Binder, a San Francisco political pollster. “I think the race never really was about who could do a better job of running the office. The race was about sending a statement to Willie Brown and John Burton, saying: ‘We don’t like politics as usual.’”

Both Adachi and Burton raised sums of money unprecedented for this generally low-key race, then said they didn’t intend to spend it all. But voters may have found the amount of money raised by Burton, in particular, to be distasteful, saidBinder: “There’s a bit of a backlash against big-money campaigns.”

Just being John Burton’s daughter may have worked against Kimiko, Binder said. “I think Kim Burton had a lot of supporters and fans,” he said. It was her father they didn’t like, he suggested.

Binder even speculated that there was an odd coalition of progressives and Republicans who voted for Adachi, allied in their dislike of the senior Burton.

And the demographics of the city are changing, said UC Berkeley political scientist Bruce Cain. More recent arrivals to the city feel no loyalty to the name. “You’ve got people coming in with new expectations who don’t know Burton and Brown from a hole in the wall,” Cain said.

In general, Cain said, he thinks the city’s residents are beginning to nurture a “resentment of Sacramento politics brought to the local levels.”

Kimiko Burton said the election had less to do with her qualifications for the job than with her opponent’s negative campaign. Adachi emphasized that Burton’s father had cajoled hundreds of people into giving her thousands of dollars and objected to Brown’s appointment of her, which Adachi characterized as a favor to her father.

(Brown denies the appointment was a favor to John Burton, whom he has known since college.)

“I think we ran a good campaign,” said Kimiko Burton, 37, who was at work in her public defender’s office Wednesday morning. “But people chose to buy into the negative campaigning and focus on the fact that [John Burton] is my father and I was a mayoral appointee. There are mayoral appointees all the time.”

But in the end, John Burton was angry Wednesday at how Adachi had criticized his support of his daughter and how the media had focused on this instead of her record in city government.

“Did they use the fact that I raised money for my daughter? Yeah. Did they write about the fact that the mayor appointed my daughter? Yeah.

“Nobody wanted to hear anything besides Willie Brown appointed her and she was my daughter,” he said.

Burton scoffed at the idea that he strong-armed people into supporting his daughter with contributions that could not, by law, top $500.

“You think $500 is going to mean anything?” he said. “I got $500 [for Kimiko Burton] from [entertainment magnate] Haim Saban. Haim Saban gives millions to everybody. You think he’s going to ingratiate himself with me with $500? Give me a break.”