The Looking-Glass Campaign

There are precedents aplenty of politicians who were initially billed as fringe leftists becoming hard-nosed policy-makers once they arrive in office. In Mexico City, left-wing Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has allied himself with the country's richest businessman. In Brazil, international leftist symbol Ignacio Lula Da Silva has become a bankers' darling. Closer to home, a former host of the left-wing radio program We the People, home of anti-nuclear activists, Earth First! enviro-rebels, Tibetan monks, and anti-war-on-drugs conspiracy theorists, recently became mayor of Oakland, where he allied himself with developers and systematically disempowered the city's leftist old guard.

These weren't cases of politicians flip-flopping; they were situations in which old-fashioned ideas of left and right provided a lousy map for governing, so politicians drew their own maps.

San Francisco faces a similar circumstance; our economic slump, gasping budget, discredited public-safety departments, creaking infrastructure, and desperate housing shortage are problems to which neither S.F. business groups nor the S.F. progressive coalition has coherent solutions. Our next mayor will have to find his own way. Likewise lacking reliable ideological road maps, so will voters.

As Matt Gonzalez and Gavin Newsom barnstorm San Francisco during the next few weeks, voters should question them vigorously about their records, and about how they plan to carry out purported solutions to city problems. Ask the "Why should you be mayor?" question, then parse and criticize the answers, ignoring preconceptions of left and right.

And I suggest that the old hipster Joe O'Donoghue wait awhile before buying a closet full of black turtlenecks and berets.