{"id":611,"date":"2011-06-20T12:17:43","date_gmt":"2011-06-20T20:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/?p=611"},"modified":"2013-05-12T14:40:35","modified_gmt":"2013-05-12T22:40:35","slug":"wide-open-field-for-mayor%e2%80%99s-race-nixed-by-peskin-machine-democratic-party-boss-asserts-force-majeure-will-play-favorites-newsom-bitterly-attacked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/?p=611","title":{"rendered":"Wide-Open Field for Mayor\u2019s Race Nixed by Peskin Machine; Democratic Party Boss Asserts Force Majeure, Will Play Favorites; Newsom Bitterly Attacked"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peskin Challenges Feinstein Reform Moves, Slurs Against Brown and Burton Family Included in Torrent of Invective \u2013 He\u00a0 Defends Machine After Party\u2019s Candidates Lost 4 Out of 4 Races in 2010 — \u201cIf It Ain\u2019t Broke, Don\u2019t Fix It\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

From Our Political Correspondent<\/p>\n

The San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee (DCCC) is made up of members elected from each of the city\u2019s present two assembly districts and San Francisco Democrats elected to state and federal offices. Its meetings this spring have been flavored by the slurp of political wounds being licked and the balm of bravado to ease the pain of the devastating electoral defeat last year when the party\u2019s top picks for supervisor unprecedently lost all four of the seats in play.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0 D-Triple C\u2019s\u00a0 monthly gatherings in the Milton Marks Auditorium in the cavernous basement of the State Building on Golden Gate Avenue have been distinguished by a palpable tension between Aaron Peskin\u2019s occasional flirtations with resigning his position as party chair and his combative resistance to reforms pushed by senior party officials who wanted to stop Peskin from spending Democratic party funds to defeat fellow Democrats\u00a0 running against his hand-picked candidates.<\/p>\n

Peskin has peppered the meetings with increasingly strident public attacks on former San Francisco mayor, now California Lt. Governor, Gavin Newsom. The party boss\u2019s unvarnished enmity toward Newsom is expected to surface again Wednesday night at the regularly scheduled meeting after Peskin last week questioned Newsom\u2019s right to a vote on the DCCC because he is living outside the city with his family in Marin County for the summer.<\/p>\n

Peskin\u2019s move was read by some observers as a slam at the late Phil Burton who lived most of the year in Washington but was registered to vote in San Francisco at his mother\u2019s house on Sloat Boulevard. Newsom plans to be out of town only during the summer and remains a registered voter in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

Reform\u00a0 motions from Newsom\u2019s proxies on the DCCC have especially nettled the Chair and last month\u2019s meeting degenerated into outbursts of political Tourette\u2019s.\u00a0 Peskin and his acolytes challenged the rectitude of Democrats such as Senator Dianne Feinstein to make motions affecting the way his committee conducts its dirty business.\u00a0 Peskin led the charge by stating that \u201cin the last quarter century, no ex-officio on this committee has ever made\u00a0 a motion.\u201d Democratic elected officials like Feinstein automatically become DCCC voting members. They rarely attend meetings in person and appoint official proxies to vote for them and are called in DCCC-talk as \u201cex-officio\u201d members.<\/p>\n

This upset visibly emotional Peskin loyalist Gabriel Holland\u00a0 who said that because he had been \u201con the ballot\u201d to be elected to the DCCC\u00a0 his voting rights were superior to someone like\u00a0 Dianne Feinstein who was only a United States Senator \u201cNo ex-officio members has a right to make a motion from the floor,\u201d Holland said.<\/p>\n

This brought a spirited rejoinder from George Broder, Feinstein\u2019s proxy on the Committee. \u201cI represent a person who was also on the ballot and was dully elected and as far as I know is a member in good standing who has the right to vote here ,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Broder, the son of George Broder, the late dean of Washington political, said that Peskin\u2019s\u00a0 DCCC allies appeared to be attempting to establish second-class citizenship for the voting rights of elected officials. \u201cWhat is this, Upstairs, Downstairs?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

Peskin was particularly incensed by a Newson motion to amend the DCCC bylaws to conform to the state Democratic party standard requiring a 60% vote for an endorsement; the present San Francisco\u00a0 rule of 50% plus one.<\/p>\n

The local party has used this procedure for decades but it was never a matter of contention until then- Supervisor Chris Daly manipulated the more easily obtainable 50% plus one rule to electing Peskin the party chair in 2008.\u00a0 Daly threatened DCCC members with never eating a Democratic lunch in this town again if they didn\u2019t vote for Peskin, asserting in an e-mail that a DCCC member \u201cwould never receive the endorsement of the Bay Guardian or the Harvey Milk Club\u201d if he didn\u2019t vote for Peskin. This extortion-as-politics method was the subject of articles in The Argonaut raising public awareness of the Peskin machine\u2019s methods. In the 2010 supervisorial elections, all of the Peskin machine\u2019s main candidates were defeated.<\/p>\n

Peskin nonetheless insisted that the party should not change its endorsement methods \u2013 \u201cDon\u2019t fix what ain\u2019t broken,\u201d\u00a0 he said.<\/p>\n

Peskin belittled Newsom\u2019s suggested reform saying that he had nothing better to do, rather indelicately stating \u2013 \u201cAll the Lt. Governor has to do is get up in the morning and check to see if the governor is still alive.\u201d\u00a0 This remark was taken by many in the audience as insulting to Governor Brown.\u00a0 A 60% endorsement standard in the upcoming mayoral election would have meant a No endorsement policy by the party and left a wide open field in an election without an incumbent where a confusing ranked choice system of voting was being effectively employed for the first time in mayoral race. Mayor Gavin Newsom had no significant opposition for re-election four years ago.<\/p>\n

A no endorsement policy by the Committee would not have been without precedent. In 2000 the party decided to make no endorsements in the district elections for Supervisor where many qualified candidates \u2013 many of them DCCC members \u2013 were running.<\/p>\n

John Shanley, Newsom\u2019s proxy on the Committee, said the Lt. Governor favored official party neutrality in a mayoral race with more than a half dozen qualified Democrats running. He said that Peskin\u2019s intra-party partisanship last year had diminished the coin of the party\u2019s official endorsement, and a repeat this year could be disastrous for the party\u2019s reputation.<\/p>\n

Peskin\u2019s reaction to Newsom\u2019s plea for even-handedness was to turn on\u00a0 the machine and go all-in attempting to make the next mayor,\u00a0 ending the wide-open field in the mayor\u2019s race by insisting that the party will officially pick favorites among equals.<\/p>\n

The likely result will be two for the three candidates for mayor now leading in citywide polling \u2013 City Attorney Dennis Herrera snd Board of Supervisors president David Chiu \u2013 are unlikely to gain the Peskin machine\u2019s endorsement and will campaign for mayor either ignoring, or attacking, their party\u2019s official endorsement.<\/p>\n

At this point, the likely beneficiaries of the Peskin power play are expected to be Supervisor John Avalos and State Senator Leland Yee, but more candidates could file before the August deadline.<\/p>\n

During increasingly harsh debate Peskin was rebuked by former party chairs Scott Weiner and Matthew Rothschild for violating party rules and voting procedures and repeatedly making personal distasteful personal attacks on fellow Democrat Newsom.<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, Aaron Peskin never misses an opportunity to bite the hand that isn\u2019t feeding him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peskin Challenges Feinstein Reform Moves, Slurs Against Brown and Burton Family Included in Torrent of Invective \u2013 He\u00a0 Defends Machine After Party\u2019s Candidates Lost 4 Out of 4 Races in 2010 — \u201cIf It Ain\u2019t Broke, Don\u2019t Fix It\u201d From Our Political Correspondent The San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee (DCCC) is made up of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611"}],"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=611"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":651,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611\/revisions\/651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}