Who Is Clint Reilly, Really?

Inside the mass media barrage of the present-day election, however, people are "deluded" into believing that they -- the voters -- possess significant knowledge about reality and governance (when they do not). Therefore, Reilly says, they vote for the candidate who they think agrees most with them. Modern campaigns are intended to hook into people's fears, insecurities, and prejudices, not their hopes.

"Media bombards you," remarks Reilly. "You do not comprehend it as it changes the way you think; voters are empowered in their own minds to believe they are in control of the issues. The political consultant does not put out anything new; rather, he strives to resonate with people's previously held ideological convictions, such as about the death penalty, abortion, taxes, crime, education.

"Quality-of-life issues."

In 1995, Reilly moved to improve the quality of his own life. He married his girlfriend, Janet Koewler, a public relations professional who worked for a former Reilly client, Richard Riordan, the mayor of Los Angeles. And he bought the 16-story Merchants Exchange Building from Shorenstein for $18 million. It turned out to be a brilliant investment; the building may now be worth as much as $70 million. Reilly also owns an office building in Sacramento. He says steady income from his commercial office rental holdings gives him the freedom to serve the public.

"Citizen" Reilly replaced Satan.

"When I started out in 1970," Reilly says, "I thought I could elect good people who could do more than me by myself. I thought I could multiply myself and my convictions. In the Christian community, the priest is not really a leader, but a facilitator of leadership. My idea of a political consultant in the absolutely best sense was as a facilitator of leadership. I left the profession because people think of political consultants as Machiavellian, as necessary evils. I decided I could have a greater impact on social change by becoming a leader myself, as opposed to a facilitator of leadership."

Reilly's first foray into citizen politics was financing and quarterbacking a barely losing campaign against Willie Brown's proposition to build a "stadium-mall" for the 49ers football team. (When 49ers then-owner Eddie DeBartolo pleaded guilty to a federal bribery count in Louisiana in 1998, the stadium-mall deal died.)

In 1999, Reilly announced the birth of his daughter, Jill, and his candidacy for mayor. He sold stock and took out loans on his buildings to finance his $4 million campaign, which he lost with 12.5 percent of the vote after ex-Mayor Jordan and Supervisor Tom Ammiano jumped into the race at the last moment -- and after a charge that Reilly had a history of abusing women was splashed all over the front pages of the papers.

"Losing the mayoral race was humiliating and embarrassing, but losing is part of winning," Reilly sighs.

Last year, the multimillionaire citizen made a more successful foray into the public consciousness, filing a federal lawsuit aimed at stopping the Hearst Corp. from paying $66 million to Independent Publisher Ted Fang to "buy" Hearst's dwindling afternoon paper, the San Francisco Examiner, as part of a deal that would allow Hearst to purchase the much larger San Francisco Chronicle without breaking antitrust laws. Testimony in the highly publicized trial revealed that top Hearst executives and Brown discussed "horse-trading" favorable coverage of the mayor in return for his support of the newspaper sale. United States District Court Judge Vaughn Walker called the whole deal "malodorous." The judge ruled against Reilly on a technicality, but, in an unusual move, Walker awarded $2 million in attorney's fees and costs to the loser. News coverage of the suit generally portrayed Reilly as public-spirited and concerned with ethics. It was a true public relations coup.

Then, last fall, citizen Reilly met with more success, spending $340,000 on the district election cycle, funding "soft" money campaigns for several candidates who ran against and beat supervisors supported by Mayor (and longtime Reilly detractor) Willie Brown. Reilly was also the primary money-man behind Proposition L, a measure aimed at further limiting the development of commercial office space in the city. The proposition was narrowly defeated, but Reilly's support of it forged new ties to the city's so-called progressive groups and politicians.

Reilly is proud of his ties to the new supervisors ("I had no allies. Now I am electing people who are allies of mine!"), and says he wants to work with them to improve their images, lest they be sullied by the Chronicle, which, Reilly says, is trying to portray them as kooky. Mostly, though, Reilly is concentrating on improving his own image, which took a phenomenal beating during his run for mayor.

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"I used to get a lot of puff pieces in the press," Reilly tells me on the way to a Warriors basketball game at the Oakland Coliseum, where he has season tickets. (The team lost, as usual, and we left early, not caring.) But after Bronstein broke his ankle, he claims, the puff pieces were suddenly filled with razor blades. In 1994, for instance, the Los Angeles Times ran a major profile on Reilly, written by Amy Wallace. Her first sentence labeled Reilly a "vitriol-spewing millionaire." Reilly complains that Wallace's long list of his sins gave too much credence to the opinions of his enemies. There is some truth to his beef. Considered in the long view, the profile does seem one-sided, at one point describing Reilly as "a walking cluster bomb."

Unfortunately for Reilly's image, the Los Angeles Times' account has become his semiofficial biography. Reilly blames the press for keeping his enemies' allegations that he is a violent and mean-spirited man alive.

During the final leg of the mayor's race in 1999, Willie Brown's chief campaign adviser, John R. "Jack" Davis, went on the record with an unsubstantiated accusation that Reilly beat up a woman 20 years ago. No medical or police records were produced. In fact, no woman, or name, was ever produced in public by Davis, who worked with Reilly on Frank Jordan's successful 1991 race for mayor. But Davis enjoys tremendous access to the local press, due in no small measure to his intimacy with Brown.

Reilly believes that reporters and editors for the Chronicle and the then-Hearst-owned Examiner were consciously or unconsciously biased against his candidacy because they wanted to please Davis, their reliable source, and Bronstein, the Reilly foe who ultimately became senior vice president and executive editor of the merged newspapers. Reilly also blames his campaign manager, Jim Stearns, for the domestic violence debacle, saying Stearns did not do a good job of answering the allegation, which was repeated endlessly in newspaper accounts, commercials, and mailers. "I was limp and passive. I stayed out of running my campaign last time," Reilly says. "But next time I won't."

(Stearns responds to Reilly's comments this way: "The responsibility for telling the city what happened 20 years ago rests with Reilly. He had ample opportunity to answer the charges. He was unable to do that." Bronstein says the Examiner's coverage of Reilly's 1999 candidacy was fair, and adds: "That's a bizarre theory to explain losing an election.")

As he blames others, Reilly consistently minimizes the responsibility he might have for the damage done to his image. He has admitted that he once had a drinking problem, but has never publicly addressed the charge that 20 years ago he broke his girlfriend's jaw. The way he usually deals with reporters who ask about the incident, Reilly says, is to go off the record, providing facts that supposedly show the incident is not what it seems. Reilly says the incident involved his then-girlfriend Gale Kaufman, a political consultant. He offers to explain further, off the record. I decline the offer; he declines to explain further, on the record. (All interviews for this article were on the record and tape-recorded.)

Reilly's concerns about the San Francisco press extend well beyond the prominent play given to Davis' woman-beating charges.

Both the Chronicle and the Examiner endorsed Brown for mayor, and Reilly is particularly bitter about the Examiner's gushing endorsement of Brown. There is some factual basis for his bad feeling. That endorsement was issued after the paper had criticized the mayor editorially for years, and after the paper had published months of reports on an FBI investigation of the Brown administration. Most galling to Reilly is a fact made public long after the mayor's race was over, during his antitrust lawsuit against the Hearst Corp.: The endorsement followed a lunch at which the Examiner's publisher, by his own sworn testimony, offered to "horse-trade" favorable editorial page treatment to the mayor, if the mayor would stop opposing Hearst's ultimately successful attempt to purchase the Chronicle.

Reilly also remains angry about the Chronicle's pre-election profile of him, written by Susan Sward, which essentially mirrored the image painted by the Los Angeles Times several years before. In the Chronicle profile, Sward portrayed Reilly as someone who was feared far and wide for his skill in manufacturing campaign hit pieces. To refute this allegation, Reilly takes me to his personal archive, several rows of filing cabinets that contain almost every piece of campaign literature he ever wrote. He says that he did not attack candidates personally, or on the basis of race, sex, religion, or other inherent attributes, and a random review of the archive seems to support his contention.

But the same review shows that Reilly was certainly a master of the negative campaign. The cover of one glossy pamphlet, for example, features a toothless homeless man in Los Angeles standing near a shopping cart; inside the pamphlet are a series of photos depicting murder victims, graffiti, police officers, and uncontrolled riot fires. This picture of urban hell is blamed entirely on city Councilman Mike Woo, who was running against Reilly's candidate for mayor, Riordan.

The negative campaign waged against mayoral candidate Reilly was personal, to say the least. It painted him as violent, unprincipled, even loony. ("A political consultant for Mayor? That's nuts!" was the core slogan.) Reilly says he now considers the personal attacks to be "a necessary rite of passage." He is sure the charges will not stick a second time around.

Unless, he adds, the San Francisco press keeps them alive.

For the next 30 minutes, Reilly paces the conference room, anxiety all but shimmering in the air around him. "I hated the Examiner [when it was still owned by Hearst]," he exclaims. "Bronstein, Rob Morse, Scott Winokur, John Jacobs, James Finefrock, Will Hearst -- these are little people." He expresses similarly uncharitable feelings about the Chronicle's managing editor, Jerry Roberts, and its legal reporter, Reynolds Holdings, who covered Reilly's antitrust lawsuit against Hearst. According to Reilly, his worst enemies are now gathered together at the Chronicle, which wields monopoly power over the business of image-making in San Francisco.

"I leave myself vulnerable by running for public office," he observes. "San Francisco is such a small place, everything gets personalized."

Yes, it does.

It's a few days later; Reilly is driving me toward his home in his black Mercedes. A few hundred yards from his house, he swerves down a cul-de-sac.

"See that green house?" he growls. "That's where Bronstein and Sharon Stone live."

A man appears in the driveway of the green house.

"I think that's him!" Reilly exclaims, and then peels away, red-faced.

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Janet Reilly, 36 years old, blond, and fashionably attired, gives me a tour of the Reillys' Sea Cliff home, which features a gorgeous view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Janet, who is due to give birth to a second child any day now, is very hospitable, but the pin-clean house has a sterile flavor. Nothing is visibly out of place, even in the master bedroom. It's kind of like ... an art gallery.

Almost every wall in the mansion displays an abstract expressionist painting. These are not soothing pictures; the Reilly art collection -- valued at well over $1 million -- is dark. In the living room, for example, a plaster humanoid screams silently from deep inside some private hell.

Janet jokes about the omnipresent art. It relaxes Clint, she says.

Janet and the house and the art collection are important parts of The Image that Reilly is refining for his next stab at the mayoralty. The Image is a collage of bits and pieces of his real life, artfully glued together, Reilly admits, to appeal to a certain demographic. To Reilly's horror, though, unwanted scraps from his real life keep attaching themselves to the collage, messing it up.

Fixing The Image, Reilly believes, is simply a question of technique.

"The best campaigns are a two-edged sword," Reilly says. "They sum up a candidate's strengths in terms of his opponent's weaknesses. Take the brilliant slogan "Coke, It's the Real Thing.' Its claim for authenticity implies the opposite of Pepsi."

In the 1999 mayor's race, Reilly used a double-edged formula to mold his image and guide his campaign. He attacked Brown as ineffective and corrupt, while at the same time putting forth his own programs for reforming Muni and the city's homeless policy. But, in the face of mud slung Reilly's way, being the Anti-Brown was not enough.

Reilly admires former President Bill Clinton for the way he handled personal attacks with political responses. "He essentially did almost nothing in office, yet he had a 65 percent approval rating, despite Lewinsky! That's because he targeted the economic self-interests of the middle class."

Reilly wants to define himself as a champion of the middle class, too.

"The power of leadership has been enormously cheapened," Reilly remarks. "Government and politics have been marginalized by the constant muckraking of the post-Watergate press. Voters are skeptical. They do not want their tax dollars spent on charity for the poor. They want college tuition and health care subsidies for themselves. They want more police on the streets and the death penalty."

Reilly supports the death penalty -- "I believe in an eye for an eye," he says -- but has no apparent ideology beyond a self-interested pragmatism. Like Heidegger, Reilly is searching to define himself (and his political agenda) in relation to other beings -- voters, in this case. He is not looking into his soul to discover his true self and present it to you for approval or disapproval. He is looking into your soul to discover the secret desire, fear, or hate that will make you punch a ballot for him.

When I ask him to list, specifically, what he would like to accomplish if elected mayor of San Francisco, Reilly talks about being a "fiscal conservative and a policy liberal" and "reinventing government from transactional to transformational." He says he believes the city's business community has failed to be a watchdog for the common good because "it benefits from the corruptibility of city government." But he says he does not want, at this point, more than two years before the mayoral election, to go into the details of changes he might make at City Hall.

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Driving down the mountain from his Napa house, Reilly says casually, "I'll bring you up here next summer, if you want, and you can stay for a couple of weeks." I say nothing.

A bit later, Reilly returns to one of his favorite themes: There is no honor left in politics because of the press. Because, as it turns out, there is no honor left in journalism, either. Even the man on the street thinks most journalists are corrupt. Young reporters start out with noble intentions, Reilly says, but the owners of newspapers -- the de Youngs, the Hearst Corp. -- co-opt them, gradually changing them until they can no longer distinguish rumor from fact.

He laughs. Most journalists are envious of the lives of the rich and famous, he says. I turn off my tape recorder. I remember what his mother said. The emotion I feel is not envy.