The Politics of Cynicism

Ordinarily, to keep my cynicism levels in check, I write about politics the minimum amount that allows me to hold onto my job commenting on our city's public life. This week is different, however. We're going to immerse ourselves in politics. We'll observe the clash of ideas, of interests, of differing interpretations on making the world a better place.

We'll visit the efforts of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a politically powerful labor organization that bills itself a champion of the afflicted. We'll examine how last week, at the behest of large nursing home chains, the union used its lobbying clout in Sacramento to torpedo a bill designed to improve conditions in California's Dickensian old folks' homes.

Next, we'll visit a local race for the state Assembly of such apparently high stakes that it's drawn John Kerry to a San Francisco fund-raiser this Friday. We'll look closely at the political milieu associated with that visit, and at a clash between bitter-enemy millionaire political consultants. One, a certain Clint Reilly, plans to commit a small fortune in cash and political favors to run his political-neophyte wife for the Legislature. The other, Jack Davis, master of political black arts, is reputedly coaching her opponent, Fiona Ma, for the sheer glee of jeopardizing his old foe's plans.

After we observe the labor union with the idealistic reputation cravenly gutting the rights of the elderly, and watch the Democratic Party's standard-bearer dragging himself through San Francisco's petty and vicious political muck, it's my hope that we'll rethink what it means to be cynical about politics.

During these moments of reflection, it is my hope we can recall the words of Lily Tomlin, who's reputed to have said, "No matter how cynical you get, it's impossible to keep up."

When I finally reached lobbyist Tamara Rasberry last week at her office at the California State Council of Service Employees, the SEIU's state lobbying arm, I expected her to be in a jolly mood. At the behest of for-profit nursing home chains, she had helped derail efforts by the AARP, California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, and representatives of patients with Alzheimer's and other disabilities to pass the Nursing Home Residents Bill of Rights. This Senate bill would have stepped up enforcement of state laws requiring homes to hire enough orderlies and nurses to ensure patient safety.

Nursing homes are notorious for diverting money from their skilled-care facilities to other divisions, where they book the diversions as profit. The bill would have punished nursing homes that fraudulently divert state subsidies by yanking the subsidy for a year. It would have required nursing homes to submit quarterly payroll records to regulators, to make it harder to divert those subsidies. And the bill would have funded increased audit efforts by the state, so illegal understaffing and fund diversion by nursing homes would be harder still. The bill also included provisions involving basic patient rights, including one that would have hiked the fine a nursing home can receive when one of its employees rapes a patient -- which actually happens on occasion -- from $1,000 to a maximum of $20,000.

Last week SEIU lobbyists succeeded in postponing the legislation for a year, putting the bill into the Sacramento equivalent of purgatory.

But rather than cheerily boast of her victory, Rasberry was snippy and defensive when I spoke to her. For some reason, she seemed upset that I had obtained an e-mail message she'd sent, which detailed exactly how the SEIU would oppose the Nursing Home Residents Bill of Rights.

"That was an internal document, and it's not for public record at all," Rasberry said when I asked her about the e-mail, which she'd prepared for Scott Carlson, formerly vice president of Beverly Enterprises Inc., a for-profit nursing home chain. Carlson is now CEO of the California Alliance to Advance Nursing Home Care, a group formed to carry out a lobbying pact that's the subject of Rasberry's memo.

"It was an internal memo, an analysis I wrote for one of our clients," Rasberry said before refusing to talk to me further and referring me to an SEIU press representative.

How could it be that Rasberry -- a lobbyist for a union that represents humble service workers, that prides itself on uplifting the oppressed with campaigns such as Justice for Janitors and Healthcare for All -- finds herself defending secret memos on how best to defeat or defang a nursing home patient-rights bill? And how did she come to regard Carlson, a spokesman for nursing home industry interests, as a "client"?

This can be traced to the boast, by SEIU and its national president, Andy Stern, that the union will become the dynamic new face of labor, in part by forging cooperative, rather than confrontational, relationships with employers. In the case of nursing homes and California, that's meant using the union's lobbying clout with Sacramento Democrats, to whom the union gave more than $600,000 in campaign contributions last year, to get things private nursing home chains want -- such as fending off regulation of the sort detailed in Rasberry's memo.

"The most disgusting thing in my life has been dealing with these people," says Pat McGinnis, director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, a backer of the rights bill. "Yet instead of people saying, 'Isn't this disgusting that the union is selling out nursing home residents?' they're dazzled by how great it is that these long-term opponents are working together."

In ordinary times, the nursing home rights bill would be the kind of legislation a union representing nursing home workers might support -- particularly given the bill was aimed at enforcing laws requiring nursing home facilities to hire more workers. More workers per patient means fewer overworked orderlies and nurses, and fewer patients who sit for extended periods in their own feces or with infected bedsores, or lie dying from dehydration or starvation, or from all of these things at once. Orderlies don't particularly like working in ghoulish, penny-pinching institutions where owners skimp on staff and training.

From a nursing home chain shareholder's point of view, on the other hand, the closer a home can be run to the model of a self-service gas station, with lots of customers and few employees, the fatter the bottom line. Beverly Enterprises, where Carlson was vice president, seems to boast of pursuing this tightfisted tactic in a recent message to investors: "Going forward, we will focus on continual improvement of our leaner, and stronger, skilled nursing facility portfolio."

A year ago, these seemingly opposed interest groups appeared to align, as the SEIU entered a compact with the owners of California's for-profit nursing homes. The compact involved a coldblooded trade-off: The SEIU agreed to use its connections with the representatives of the California Democratic Party for nursing home industry goals, such as resisting attempts at regulation. In exchange, SEIU officials told me, nursing home chains pledged to allow union organizers unfettered access to employees in their facilities. Previously, nursing home chains have resisted union organizing efforts with Wal-Mart-like verve.

Curious as to what the SEIU had received in return for blocking stricter enforcement of laws designed to prevent elderly neglect, I called union spokesman Tim Jemal. I asked Jemal if there were any new collective bargaining agreements resulting from the union organizing portion of the lobbying pact.

"Example? I cannot give you a specific example, but I can tell you that the SEIU, that it is through organizing that the union is able to help workers have better lives," Jemal said.

Are there any specific organizing drives that resulted from the lobbying agreement, regardless of whether the union obtained a contract?

Jemal said he would need to find a union organizer to speak with me, and that one would call me. That was last week. I'm still waiting.

Which could lead one to suggest that the SEIU is being played for a patsy by the nursing home industry, that the union has agreed to sacrifice its public image as a champion of the underdog by selling nursing home patients down the river in exchange for a promise that doesn't seem to have materialized.

I called Steve Early, a Massachusetts-based organizer with the Communications Workers of America, who writes about labor trends for left-leaning magazines such as The Nation.

The SEIU-nursing home industry lobbying pact "just seems to me a real unfortunate contraction of the broader social vision that the best unions have had and tried to project in a lot of different ways. They're not just representing the members, but they're trying to be a voice for all members and consumers, too," Early said. "It's like building your own position at the expense of the labor movement as a whole."

Not to mention at their own expense. Service workers grow old like everyone else, and many of them will end up in nursing homes left underregulated at their own union's hands.

Eric Jaye, who became cock o' the walk among S.F. Democratic political consultants two years ago by pushing Gavin Newsom over the top in the mayor's race against Matt Gonzalez, is playing the phones, working yet another fat contract.

Jaye has been hired by Clint Reilly -- during the 1980s the big daddy among California campaign consultants, now a downtown commercial landlord and local political dabbler -- to run Reilly's wife, a thin, attractive, fortysomething, blond former press flack for ex-L.A. Mayor Dick Riordan, for the state Assembly.

Reilly's given Jaye plenty to work with, wangling an S.F. fund-raising appearance by none other than John Kerry this Friday on his wife's behalf. "To have the leader of the party host a fund-raiser, that's extremely significant," Jaye says. "Janet is concerned about the state of health in California. To have Kerry, who is so active and successful an advocate for health care in the Senate, it's good politics and great for Janet."

Perhaps. Or perhaps Clint Reilly spent last year filling up his favor bank making phone calls and raising funds on behalf of the Kerry for President campaign, as I've been told by a half-dozen different local and state politicians, political consultants, and political fixers. Reilly donated $2,000 to Kerry's presidential campaign and raised at least another $25,000 for the national Democratic cause, Federal Election Commission records show.

And perhaps Kerry's political handlers have unadvisedly allowed their boss to wander into one of the more banal and ugly catacombs of San Francisco's network of political intrigue. This one involves age-old personal vendettas, smarmy political deals, venal financial interests, and layer upon layer of petty power plays -- a fine place, in other words, to avoid, unless you've somehow failed to keep up to political speed, cynicismwise.

Reilly, whom the Los Angeles Times called a "vitriol-spewing millionaire" and whose mother told SF Weekly that "people do not really like him. He's not lovable" a few years back, once fancied himself a politician. But he lost a multimillion-dollar bid for mayor six years ago. Lately, Reilly's turned to fashioning a political career for his wife, whom he had hoped to get appointed last year to Gavin Newsom's old seat on the city Board of Supervisors. Newsom owed Reilly political favors, and to some the post seemed a gimme shot.

Newsom, however, awarded the position to Michela Alioto-Pier, the niece of a different politico to whom he owed even more pressing political favors. Undaunted, Reilly's now gunning for a west San Francisco Assembly seat to be vacated by Leland Yee, who'll be running for state Senate. The target was made attractive by his wife's main opponent, a woman widely considered a political lightweight, Supervisor Fiona Ma.

Ma, however, is not without qualities, including $250,000 raised largely from local developer and property interests; the patronage of her former boss, Assembly Speaker John Burton; and informal political strategy help from Jack Davis, another one-time big-daddy S.F. political consultant who now lives in Sedona, Ariz., and who happens to be a former comrade of -- and current sworn enemy to -- Clint Reilly.

The coming showdown between these passionate foes has the political world abuzz.

Davis is credited with dashing Reilly's mayoral hopes in 1999 by publicly stating that Reilly beat up a woman. The story was never substantiated, but it influenced Reilly's public image as a volatile, mean-spirited man.

Davis appears prepared to entertain this tried-and-true formula this time around. He offered me highly specific advice on where one might dig for dirt on Reilly and his wife, then iced the cake with a trademark bon mot.

"I chortle at the thought of Eric and Clint and Janet in the bunker of a campaign office dealing with Clint's temper, raised voice, and past," Davis said when I spoke with him last week. "Hopefully they'll videotape it."

Reilly's supporters, for their part, are doing their best to parlay the Ma-Davis connection into a smear of their own, making a whispering campaign issue of Ma's attendance a couple of weeks ago at a 7:30 a.m. meeting where Davis and local political fixer Joe O'Donoghue gathered a roomful of kibitzers to form a new political group they call the San Francisco Taxpayers Union.

Ma was the only political officeholder at the event. Perhaps the Taxpayers Union is Ma's shadow campaign committee, pro-Reilly whisperers say.

Ma, for her part, told me she merely dropped by because she saw a flier. And I'm not so sure the new group is about Ma.

It's apparently being formed for a simpler, more elegant cause. It's all about two old hacks who wish to threaten the power of the standing mayor, to reap possible benefits further down the road.

O'Donoghue, for various reasons, has bet his political fortunes during the current mayoral term on opposing Newsom. The "Mission Statement" on the Taxpayers Union Web site contains unspecific maxims about curbing waste and challenging bureaucracy. O'Donoghue, however, says that the group may be used to float a possible ballot initiative aimed at eliminating the city's Redevelopment Agency. The agency, hated by many for its reputation as a wasteful and arrogant bureaucracy, also happens to be one of the more powerful political and economic tools at a mayor's disposal. It commandeers land, hands out development contracts, and contains ample bureaucratic sinecures for political allies.

Davis, for his part, includes as one of his consulting clients Angelo Sangiacomo, the owner of a property at Eighth and Mission streets. It's slated to be the site of a large new apartment building, thanks to a recent backroom deal involving Supervisor Chris Daly, Davis, O'Donoghue, and skid-row kingpin Randy Shaw. O'Donoghue says Mayor Newsom is angry he wasn't consulted about the deal. Newsom's economic development officer has threatened to absorb that project into a redevelopment zone, O'Donoghue says. And this would threaten Davis' only (formally acknowledged) San Francisco client.

"We're doing it frankly to kick his ass. Fuck ya," explains O'Donoghue, in reference to Mayor Newsom. "We're going to show you that you're messing with us, and you're messing with the wrong guys."

This is advice that John Kerry might consider as well.