The Newsom Endorsement – No Surprise.

Randy Shaw terms Gavin Newsom’s endorsement of Mark Leno for State Senate “unexpected.” I beg to differ. Leno and Newsom go way back. The only two Willie Brown appointees on the Board of Supervisors to survive the progressive tsunami of 2000, Leno and Newsom have always had a mutually respectful and supportive relationship, contributing and raising money for each other’s campaigns and reliably endorsing each other. Newsom and Carole Migden have simply never had that kind of relationship.

In 2003, as the national Democratic Party worked itself into a collective lather over the prospect of Matt Gonzalez beating Newsom to become the first Green mayor of a major American city, Carole basically yawned. While Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi and of course Mark Leno went to the mat for the boy who gave us Care Not Cash and Proposition M, Migden stayed out.

During the summer of 2007, Migden attended and spoke at Chris Daly’s progressive convention, and even after it became clear that Newsom would face only nominal opposition, she still never endorsed his re-election campaign. Leno, by contrast, had endorsed Newsom’s re-election months before the filing deadline.

Add to this the fact that Newsom’s political brain, Eric Jaye, despises Migden, and the surprise is not that Newsom is backing Leno, but rather that it took him so long to get around to it.

So Why Should Progressives Care?

Should progressives reject Leno simply because of Newsom’s endorsement? Of course not. But Leno’s history with Newsom, and the fact that Newsom’s endorsement was so totally predictable in light of that history, should give pause to those on the Left thinking of tossing Migden under the bus.

Migden’s reticence toward Newsom and her unwillingness to lend her support to his campaigns is particularly remarkable when contrasted with her vigorous engagement in other local contests. In 2000 she and Tom Ammiano were the only two prominent elected officials to support Aaron Peskin’s race for supervisor. In 2002, she was a driving force behind progressive hero Harry Britt’s race for the Assembly, a race for which Leno clearly never forgave her. She has strongly backed Dennis Herrera, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval. And of course her support was very important to Chris Daly in beating back the Newsom-endorsed Rob Black challenge in 2006.

Both Mark Leno and Carole Migden are good legislators with progressive records in Sacramento. And, in that regard, Leno has frankly benefited by the very low expectations progressives had for him based on his years on the Board of Supervisors. But at the end of the day, only one of these candidates has been a champion for progressives locally. While Leno has made friends with folks like Gavin Newsom, Carole Migden has shown a willingness to defy conventional political calculation and to embrace and support candidates who challenge the status quo. And that should matter greatly to progressives.

Newsom and the Queers

Gavin Newsom gets a lot of mileage out of his role in promoting queer marriage, as does Mark Leno, and Shaw suggests that their work on this issue is the tie that binds them together. No one can deny that both men deserve credit for their role in this historic struggle. Nonetheless, gay marriage is only one issue of importance to the LGBT community. In February 2004, when Newsom gave the order to start issuing the marriage licenses, the move was a political masterstroke for a politician viewed with considerable skepticism by the Left and by many within the LGBT community. He had after all won election largely based on a campaign against the homeless, and in doing so, he had vanquished two candidates – Tom Ammiano and Susan Leal – who argued that the time had come for San Francisco to elect a queer mayor.

Recently, with his administration’s heavy-handed tactics directed against Susan Leal at the Public Utilities Commission, Roma Guy at the Health Commission, Debra Walker at the Building Inspection Commission, and Christina Olague at the Planning Commission, Mayor Newsom has all but declared war on the queer (or at least the lesbian) community. Gay marriage should not earn Newsom a pass on these outrages any more than marching with Local 2 should earn him a pass on his latest round of proposed budget cuts that all too predictably target the poor and the sick. Newsom’s endorsement of Leno thus fits neatly into a more general pattern of opposing strong queer women. Migden by the way showed up for SEIU’s February 19 protest of the Newsom budget cuts; Leno did not.