A farewell party for The Machine?

Twenty-four years ago, San Francisco hosted the Democratic National Convention. At the GOP’s gathering that same year, Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick used the city’s leftist leanings to coin one of the most damning political epithets in history: “San Francisco Democrats.” Shortly thereafter Walter Mondale got creamed by Ronald Reagan, and so began nearly a quarter century of national irrelevance for the Bay Area.

But that long trip through the wilderness appears to be over. In 2006, Nancy Pelosi, a real live “San Francisco Democrat,” became Madame Speaker. And since California moved its primary up to Super Tuesday, we “America Haters” by the Golden Gate will actually have a say in who moves on to the general election this fall. That might scare the rest of the country, schooled as it is in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous meme about us. But in spite of the city’s reputation, San Francisco politics aren’t as out there as you might think. And the shifting tectonic plates of our local political landscape might just presage a political earthquake on the national scene.

For all of Kirkpatrick’s bile towards us and Bill O’Reilly’s rants about San Fran being the capital of “secular-progressivism” (whatever the hell that means), the city has always been more a Chicago-style Democratic machine town than an outlier of leftist radicalism. Mayor Gavin Newsom may have sent rightwing America into convulsions by legalizing gay marriage shortly after taking office in 2004. But, at his core, he practices good old Clinton-style money and power politics.

Newsom was groomed for office by our own “Slick Willie”—former Mayor and Assembly Speaker for Life Willie Brown. Newsom also knows something about creating a Hillary-like air of “inevitability” around his candidacy. Last year, he piled up such a colossal mountain of cash for his reelection campaign that the only people who dared run against him were a nudist and a man named “Chicken.” In 2003, when he found himself in a dogfight with a local Green Party candidate, he summoned Bill Clinton himself for a last minute push that many credit with putting him into office. Not surprisingly, Newsom threw his support behind Hillary last fall and even signed on as one of her national co-chairs.

In fact, Newsom’s mayoralty has been patently Clintonian. He’s charismatic. He represents the city well (aside from trysts with scientologists and an affair with the wife of his best friend and closest advisor). Most importantly, he takes care of “downtown” interests and major corporate sponsors like PG&E and the real estate industry.

Yet even as Newsom coasted through his first term and moved easily into his second, a more activist leftism has seen a renaissance in San Francisco. In the wake of the Willie Brown regime, self-styled “progressives” like Aaron Peskin, Sophie Maxwell, Chris Daly and others—almost all of them now enthusiastic Obama backers—won a working majority on the Board of Supervisors. They, far more than the mayor, have been driving city policy. Their biggest coup was passing a city-managed—that is, government run—health insurance program last year. Newsom had little choice but to support the popular initiative, even as many of his downtown backers tried, and are still trying, to squash it.

Now that Obama has proven himself to be a viable contender for the Democratic nomination, this local resurgence of a muscular, unabashed progressivism in the face of a deeply entrenched democratic machine looks an awful lot like a harbinger of Obama’s (and Edwards’) candidacy. But could the steady leftward pull on San Francisco politics over the last few years turn into a national phenomenon?

A lot of local rainmakers are starting to believe that might be the case. Some of the deepest pockets in the region—big Silicon Valley and venture capital donors who most observers expected to give exclusively to Hillary—have started cutting fat checks to the Junior Senator from Illinois. Even many “moderate” Democratic pols are switching over. Former state controller Steve Westly went after the “liberalism” of his primary opponent Phil Angelides when he ran for Governor in 2006. Now, amazingly, Westly is co-chair of Obama’s state campaign! Perhaps the most striking sign of a larger leftward shift, however, came just this past weekend. The usually Newsom-backing, ubercentrist San Francisco Chronicle endorsed Obama.

Californians like to brag that “As California goes, so goes the country.” In the coming weeks you might be able to substitute “San Francisco” for “California” in that phrase.

What would Jeane Kirkpatrick say to that?

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JB Powell is a contributing writer and the author of The Republic: A Novel.