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Bay Guardian In Denial<\/em><\/p>\n As Its Slate Card Flops<\/em><\/p>\n ________<\/p>\n \n Peskin Also Loses Ballot<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Propositions, Judicial Race<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n ________<\/p>\n \n In an historic and politically histrionic defeat for the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee controlled by Aaron Peskin, moderates have been elected to the Board of Supervisors \u2013all of Peskin\u2019s \u2018progressive\u2019 candidates lost \u2013 and the majority of his ballot propositions were also rejected by the voters in the November 2 election.<\/p>\n Many media have been hesitant to call the contested Supervisorial races, but \u00a0The Argonaut\u2019s<\/em> election analysts declared early that Marina native son Mark Farrell would defeat Janet Reilly in District 2 and Melia Cohen has prevailed in a wide field of candidates in Bayview District 10.<\/p>\n The Argonaut<\/em> first called the District 2 race for Farrell on Sunday night. Reilly after an\u00a0expensive and flashy campaign overseen by her political guru husband Clint was in first\u00a0place by some 400 votes in early returns, but her lead diminished after 2nd<\/sup> choice vote transfers under the city\u2019s Ranked Choice Voting system. Votes from the other two\u00a0D. 2 candidates, assistant US Attorney Abraham Simmons and Clinton family friend Kat\u00a0Anderson \u2013 both ran to the relative right of Reilly in the conservative Marina\/Pacific Heights district \u2013 transferred heavily to Farrell as the preferred 2nd<\/sup> choice when it became clear the other candidates could not win first place. Attorney and longtime DCCC member Arlo Hale Smith Jr.,\u00a0 a ranked choice voting expert, estimated that when transfers are completed Farrell would win by approximately 200 votes.<\/p>\n A similarly pronounced vote transfer occurred in District 10 where Peskin\u2019s candidate\u00a0Tony Kelly lead in early voting returns but political newcomer Malia Cohen began the move\u00a0 toward first place after vote transfers from the multiplicity of candidates running. (A complete district-by-district analysis by ranked choice voting expert Smith is posted <\/em>on this site.)<\/em><\/p>\n The election results show a remarkable resurgence in moderate San Francisco politics,\u00a0belying the city\u2019s Berkeley-esque national image. Peskin also failed in an attempt to extend his political reach to the Bench when he ran a gay Latino attorney against sitting Superior Court judge Richard Ulmer. The entire San Francisco Bench including its gay and lesbian judges backed Ulmer against Peskin\u2019s candidate, who lost.<\/p>\n When it isn\u2019t busy trying to scratch up lunch money by repossessing the delivery trucks of the rival SF Weekly<\/em>, The Bay Guardian<\/em> prides itself on the political clout of its election Endorsements which fill the entire front page\u00a0 — and seemed weirdly in denial after all its first choice candidates for Supervisor lost. It ran a long article extolling the virtues for progressives of its beloved ranked choice voting system in Oakland – ignoring the progressive loses in San Francisco under ranked choice voting – and executive editor Tim Redmond posted a column denying that there was a political machine in San Francisco, when the Guardian<\/em> is the lungs and spleen of Peskin\u2019s machine. One can sympathize with the Guardian\u2019<\/em>s discomfort. \u201cThis election, his preferred system of ranked choice voting came around and bit Peskin in the ass in San Francisco,\u201d said John Shanley, Mayor Gavin Newsom\u2019s delegate to the Democratic Central Committee.<\/p>\n Shanley called the November election \u201ca disaster for the progressives.\u201d Ballot issues favored by Peskin\u2019s DCCC and the Guardian, including invitation-to-voter-fraud\u00a0initiatives to allow non-citizens to vote and same-day voter registration on the day of\u00a0 next year\u2019s mayor\u2019s election, were defeated, along with an attempt to increase the hotel tax to a max that would send budget-minded tourists to Daly City to drink, and the voters passed the \u201cSit-Lie\u201d Proposition L, that the DCCC opposed Guardian<\/em> hyperventilatedly attacked.<\/p>\n The disaster for the Peskin Machine was extensive. Scott Wiener who was elected\u00a0Supervisor in the Castro’s District 8 has been Peskin\u2019s nemesis on the DCCC \u2013 Peskin took control of the party structure in 2008 after defeating Wiener for chair in a charge organized by his aide de camp Supervisor Chris Daly who threatened moderate DCCC member Hale Smith, the son of the longstanding District Attorney Arlo Hale Smith in a e-mail that \u201cany members voting for Scott will never receive the endorsement of the Guardian<\/em>, Tenants union, Sierra Club and Milk Club in subsequent races.\u201d Those are the legs of the chair of the Peskin machine, which the Guardian<\/em> says does not exist.<\/p>\n The victory of Asian candidate Jane Kim in Daly\u2019s former District 6 which includes the Tenderloin and South of Market\u00a0 also does not bode well for Peskin, who blocked a 2nd<\/sup> choice recommendation for the popular Kim, who had many moderate supporters on the DCCC, to make sure his super-favorite white lefty Deborah Walker got the solo Democratic Party endorsement. That means Kim, a former Green turned Democrat, comes to the Board owing Peskin nothing but sore feelings for the nasty, losing campaign Walker ran against her.<\/p>\n The Guardian\u2019<\/em>s denial process twisted so far as to take Mayor Gavin Newsom\u2019s victory for Lt. Governor as a progressive victory suggesting that\u00a0 San Francisco voters had voted for the popular mayor to get him out of town a year early. It has not been a good political year for the self-annointed voice of liberalism in San Francisco — this summer it put three white libs and no person of color on its June election cover pushing for DCCC candidates, prompting none less than Chris\u00a0 Daly to crack wise on his blog that it was a Guardian \u201cWhite-out.\u201d\u00a0 Randy Shaw of the Beyond Chron<\/em> website then piled on to discuss the ultra-lib Guardian\u2019s<\/em> uneasy relationships with non-white candidates.<\/p>\n The question remaining in this election is how far the famously rug-chewing Clint Reilly who does not go quietly into the night will go to deal with his wife\u2019s second electoral defeat \u2013\u00a0 he previously over-ambitiously ran Janet for Assembly in 2006 in a race where Fiona Ma beat her \u2013 by way of challenges, recounts and lawsuits, the arrows in the arsenal of sore losers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In an historic and politically histrionic defeat for the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee controlled by Aaron Peskin, moderates have been elected to the Board of Supervisors \u2013all of Peskin\u2019s \u2018progressive\u2019 candidates lost \u2013 and the majority of his ballot propositions were also rejected by the voters in the November 2 election.<\/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\/410"}],"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=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}By Warren Hinckle<\/h3>\n