{"id":331,"date":"2010-11-01T14:05:35","date_gmt":"2010-11-01T19:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/?p=331"},"modified":"2010-11-01T14:05:35","modified_gmt":"2010-11-01T19:05:35","slug":"neighborhood-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/?p=331","title":{"rendered":"Neighborhood Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Janet Reilly’s Woman Voters Problem<\/strong><\/h2>\n

By Warren Hinckle<\/h4>\n

Focus on: District 2:<\/strong> Farrell v. Reilly<\/em><\/h3>\n

I met Janet Reilly in Tom Donoghue\u2019s Marina Lounge, on Chestnut Street. This is one of the oldest and therefore the greatest of San Francisco neighborhood joints, places like Gino and Carlo in North Beach and The Philosopher\u2019s Club in West Portal, bars that are the neighborhood living room where locals gather to read the paper and watch sports on TV and talk about life in the village. She is a spectacularly good-looking candidate, strong professional presence yet feminine and friendly; the leader of the pack in a stage presentation of \u201cLittle Women.\u201d\u00a0 She came with a handler in tow. He sat to her left. They were both nursing something to drink. There was no money on the bar.<\/p>\n

I thought it would interesting, like one of those 60 Minutes interviews, to talk to a powerful professional woman about how they keep their life apart from their love partners. Janet said that didn\u2019t happen with her, her campaign was really professional.\u00a0 Clint was not involved in it. Not? What about joint meetings pushing for endorsements and money and Clint always on the phone, saying give to Janet or else, that sort of stuff.\u00a0 I mean it\u2019s the talk of the money guys downtown. Clint beating them up on her behalf<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t do that, never had a joint meeting with Clint about my campaign, we are excellent professionals, she said.\u00a0 Never a meeting?? What about the one with Annmarie Conroy and her Husband Bart Lally?– two friends of mine. \u201cOh, that did happen.\u201d she said, almost as an afterthought, \u201cI wanted her endorsement and she gave it to me.\u201d Well, that was not the way my friend Annmarie told it. She said that she wouldn\u2019t endorse Janet unless she renounced the rascal Peskin and she wasn\u2019t willing to commit. A couple of days later, as the heat of Reilly-Peskin, Reilly-Daly came on, it became known that the Reilly family is one of the biggest contributors to public power (a no-no in D.6.)\u00a0 Janet sent out a press release saying she wouldn\u2019t back her friend Peskin for interim Mayor, god forbid, if she wins and Gavin wins for Lieutenant Governor. Conroy is taking the credit for that late blooming backstab to Reilly\u2019s friend Peskin.<\/p>\n

I asked her how difficult it was, being a strong professional politician and accomplished woman in her own right, to be married to a speckled egg of a husband like Clint Reilly, the political power broker and used-to-be political campaign manager who is famously known in Democratic Party higher political circles for publicly firing his then- client Dianne Feinstein–who was at that time running for Governor of California–for not having, I believe his phrase was, \u2018fire in her belly\u2019 when she took a few days off the campaign trail for a gynecological procedure. Clint has done other controversial things within the state Democratic Party such as making gazillions publishing state-wide and local phony\u00a0 \u201cDemocratic Party\u201d slate cards and sometimes, to make a buck, sticking one of his candidates –who happened to be one of the Republicans in elective office in San Francisco, then San Francisco Supervisor Annmarie Conroy — without her knowledge on one of his money-making ersatz Democratic Slate Cards. Conroy lost a close when her Democratic opponents yelled \u201chypocrisy\u201d for appearing on an \u201cofficial\u201d Democratic \u201cparty\u201d piece of mail.<\/p>\n

Then there was left unsaid Clint\u2019s horrific campaign for Kathleen Brown for Governor which she might have won if he hadn\u2019t screwed it up – by say spending all her money early on on highly commissionable state-wide TV ads- and then famously not returning Kathleen\u2019s calls during the final week of the campaign.\u00a0 She sued him and the result was a sealed settlement in which she apparently got some money back but all was lost with the election.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s two San Francisco women in politics–Republican Conroy and Democrat Brown–that Clint managed and who lost. The stable, family voter, Marina\/Pacific Heights savvy Democrat families with long political memories remember that Clint as campaign manager had a bad relationship and bad result with at least two strong women, basically taking their money and screwing them over. People talk about that, other women who had gone down under bad circumstances, in the perspective that Clint his now running his wife for elective office. San Franciscans think she will find it difficult to free herself of her husband\u2019s past… and present.<\/p>\n

Janet\u2019s political handler brought Dianne Feinstein and her husband\u2019s business deal into the conversation–\u201cThis is unfair questioning, no one has asked things like that about Feinstein,\u201d he said.\u00a0 Say what??? I mentioned a few Los Angeles Times<\/em> front-page articles about the Shanghai airport deal and the Orange County paper coverage about that land swap.<\/p>\n

Janet said she was at the bus stops every day talking to voters and no one had asked her about this stuff. But they are talking about it in the parishes, I said. San Franciscans have memories like elephants.\u00a0 She said nothing like that had ever been brought up about Dianne Feinstein and her husband, that she had no knowledge of anything of the kind.<\/p>\n

I said that many voters I had talked to in the district in which she is running for Supervisor, the Marina, said almost in a sort of mantra, that they like<\/em> her but they were concerned about Clint hanging over her shoulder and whispering into her ear, politically. They genuinely liked her-and she is a most likeable person, even if she is a politician-but had questions about the overbearing Clint– and the money that he, and her, had given to people like Daly and Peskin and issues like public power, which, finally, is not a winning issue in the Marina.<\/p>\n

She and her handler left the bar. There remained no money on the plank, I asked Gary Ferrari if any money had exchanged hands.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d he said, \u201cThey stuck you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Janet Reilly’s Woman Voters Problem By Warren Hinckle Focus on: District 2: Farrell v. Reilly I met Janet Reilly in Tom Donoghue\u2019s Marina Lounge, on Chestnut Street. This is one of the oldest and therefore the greatest of San Francisco neighborhood joints, places like Gino and Carlo in North Beach and The Philosopher\u2019s Club in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}