Mark Leno's tightrope
As a San Francisco supervisor, he was a centrist. Now that he's in Sacramento, he's acting more like a progressive – or is he?

By Rachel Brahinsky

THERE ARE JUST two minutes to go before the next hearing begins, and Mark Leno is fixing his hair. Tanned and with a fresh-scrubbed, just-out-of-the-spa look, the first-term state legislator gets his coif in order and then slams the gavel on the block in front of him with intense focus, announcing the California State Assembly Public Safety Committee is back in session.

Leno is small in stature and very slim, and his posture is stunning: he never seems to slouch, and he rarely glances away from the presentation at hand. As committee chair, he taps a stack of papers before him in an orderly way, folds his arms, leans in, looks each speaker in the eye, and thanks nearly every one of them by name.

Leno's committee spends a good amount of time dealing with gun legislation, and this afternoon is no different. Today Assemblymember Jay La Suer, a Republican from San Diego, is grilling a member of the public over his support of a bill that would limit the sale and use of .50 caliber BMG rifles. La Suer probes the man's credentials, inquiring who sent him, and tauntingly asks if he thinks knives should be as tightly regulated as the rifle, which has a precision range of up to a mile.

The questioning gets more and more heated – La Suer is really after the man – until Leno abruptly interrupts: "The speaker is not to be cross-examined." La Suer, whose crusty demeanor contrasts sharply with Leno's seemingly ever present smile, concedes and eventually moves on.

Suddenly the hearing is over, and Leno is off. Rushing down hallways clogged with legislators, he races up toward the back stairs to the room where the Health Committee is meeting. He's there to present a bill that would make it easier for school employees to administer emergency help to kids with diabetes. Passing out a sheet of diabetes facts, Leno seems pumped about presenting the legislation. "This is a good bill," he says, in a tone of voice most people usually reserve for talking up grandchildren. He loves this bill.

Next Leno heads to his office, and then back to the Health Committee to count his votes and wait for a possible emergency budget session to begin. Amid the chaos of the state capitol, he appears to actually feel at home. Originally pegged by many in conservative Sacramento as a crazy San Francisco lefty – and tagged by many back home as a pro-business moderate – Leno has carved out a comfortable place for himself in a few short months and has drawn a fair amount of media attention for his early success with several controversial bills.

He has been able to appeal to enough moderates and conservatives to begin pushing through initiatives on transgender civil rights and domestic partner benefits. At the same time, to the surprise of many, he also seems to be keeping the San Francisco left – which did not support his candidacy – remarkably happy.

Mending fences

When Leno won the contentious 13th District assembly race last fall, beating out activist favorite Harry Britt, city progressives felt defeated. They had put a lot into the Britt campaign, and at times the battle between the two gay candidates, seeking to represent San Francisco's east side, grew ugly and bitter. The race was seen as a fight for the soul of the city, with Britt representing the more radical core and Leno representing more monied, moderate interests, who weren't unfriendly to downtown.

Yet as Leno heads into his sixth month in Sacramento, he's garnered headlines for taking political risks and for pursuing his longtime passion for decriminalizing medical pot and increasing access to solar energy. He's also trying to protect SRO tenants from eviction and is a coauthor of state senator Joseph Dunn's energy re-regulation bill.

Politically, he's reaching out to opponents and mending fences with even his most outspoken critics. Left leaders like Debra Walker, the former president of the Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Club, who attacked Leno during last year's campaign, tell us they've changed their mind about him.

"I'm so happy to say I was wrong," she says. "Transgender rights, removing SROs from the Ellis Act, domestic partner benefits: these are pretty progressive things." Walker and others who supported Britt say that for the first time Leno has begun to seem like someone they can trust, and they're glad he's taking nationally significant stands on difficult issues. More than a dozen activists and representatives of progressive groups we talked to independently confirmed Walker's analysis.

Leno has even continued to distance himself – ever so slightly – from Mayor Willie Brown, who originally appointed him to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Most recently, he's clashed with Brown over how fast to push through a bill to create new oversight for the development of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

He's been credited with pushing the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, once very much the voice of Brown's political machine, further to the left – getting it to support instant-runoff voting, which threatens entrenched politicians.

But still it's clear Leno isn't interested in becoming a leader for the San Francisco left – or for that matter, for any ideological agenda. While most progressives are debating between Tom Ammiano and Angela Alioto, Leno gave an early endorsement to staunchly moderate Susan Leal in the upcoming mayoral race. He didn't ask her to make any policy promises, either; he tells us she was an old friend and that was enough for him.

Leno has also endorsed John Kerry for president over progressive candidates Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich.

And, as his bill to create a local income tax option shows, Leno remains primarily a pragmatist – albeit with an idealistic bent. He's generally committed to doing things that are likely to pass and knows how to present risky issues in moderate packaging.

In a sense, that's no surprise. Leno is following in the footsteps of San Francisco politicians like Board of Equalization chair Carole Migden – the former assemblymember and onetime Leno mentor who split with him over the Britt race. And nobody expected him to become a political firebrand like former state senator Tom Hayden.

But where it leaves him is not yet clear. In the name of coalition building, Leno's walking a political tightrope: compromises may help him move some good issues forward through a sometimes unfriendly statehouse – or they may leave him stranded in the middle with no real enemies but no real successes.

The tax man

The late-afternoon light sets off the muted colors in Leno's well-appointed office, with its huge windows overlooking a redwood grove and magnolia trees on the lawn surrounding the state capitol. (The office assignment drew his first headlines as an assemblymember last fall. Leland Yee, S.F.'s other representative, has a far plainer, windowless office.)

Positioned behind a large black desk, Leno speaks slowly and deliberately about his work and drifts off on policy tangents at every opportunity. He's particularly passionate about legalizing medical pot – "We're struggling through an era of prohibition," he says – and vows to push the issue as far as he can: "I intend to go to Washington with this." One of his proudest accomplishments so far is authoring an assembly resolution pushing for state's rights on pot laws.

His attention to medical marijuana – an issue he has focused on for some time – is a good example of Leno's strategy to date. He has taken on progressive causes that have popular support in his district – and aren't likely to scare away big donors. After all, he almost certainly earned his cushy office because the Democratic Party leadership is pleased with him – quite possibly because of his fundraising talents.

But now Leno's taking a stand that puts him at odds with the California Chamber of Commerce; he thus risks losing his traditional business community support. He's promoting a bill that would give local governments the ability to enact income taxes to generate new revenue for social services. But he's written it to please some powerful constituents: the statewide police, firefighter, and sheriff associations.

If A.B. 1690 passes, cities or counties would be able to vote to enact an income tax – generally considered among the more progressive ways to raise revenue. The local tax would be modeled on the state income tax: very-low-income people would pay no tax at all, and the levy would hit the wealthy the hardest.

Leno's political maneuver: an amount equivalent to half of the money raised would have to go to police, fire, and sheriff's departments. But local officials could simply divert existing funding to those agencies and use the new tax money for other programs.

In 2000, Leno's tax could have brought an additional $240 million into San Francisco's city coffers, had voters approved the maximum allowable tax.

Leno says he crafted the plan after seeing the cuts threatening Bay Area firehouses, but he also says he saw an opportunity to build a new coalition. "I believe there's wisdom in bringing together a coalition of public safety with social services," he says. "Even with that, it's going to be a big challenge to get this tax passed."

And he concedes that, even with the political muscle public safety associations will bring to bear, he's also depending on social service types – who in San Francisco typically have criticized overspending on public safety – to stick with him.

"If social service activists want to oppose it, I can tell you it won't get to the ballot anywhere," Leno explains. On the other hand, if it does get to the ballot, "if the left doesn't support it, it won't happen because the business community will fight it."

Conversely, if the left does support the bill, and if Leno is successful at passing it, he will have taken a new political risk, and where he goes with it could prove to be a key litmus test of how independent he truly has become. As he put it, "Already I'm hearing from friends of mine in the business community, 'What are you doing?' "

But as Bruce Livingston of San Francisco's Senior Action Network points out, by trying to please everyone, Leno is taking a chance.

"It's part of Leno's M.O. that he tries to be a consensus builder with compromises that are sometimes difficult to understand," Livingston tells us. "[It can] help sometimes to get us through political roadblocks, but at times it fails, because it's hard to explain and therefore is too easy to kill."

The tax plan is a telling case study. To the left, it sounds like a way to give more money to the cops – nothing that deserves the sort of all-out support needed for a brutal political fight. To big business, it sounds like higher taxes – and that's easy to oppose. Leno wants it to be something for everyone, so it could end up as something for no one.

'A raging moderate'

To a certain extent, Leno is still finding his own political center.

After dropping out of rabbinical school at age 23, he was a lost soul, he says. "It was the hardest time of my life," he recalls. "Those disco '70s did me in."

For 25 years he ran a small sign-printing business in the Castro District, which still is in operation. He first entered politics as a fundraiser, working for Migden and others. When a seat on the Board of Supervisors opened up in 1998, he became the mayor's choice. The mayor's people "always had a need to get a gay man in who would be more moderate to balance out Tom [Ammiano], because Tom was leading people so far left," gay activist Jeff Sheehy tells us. Leno was their choice.

And for a time he performed. The Bay Guardian scorecard of Leno's early votes shows he often supported patron Brown, along with the rest of the majority-appointed board.

Eventually, as he was reelected in his own right, Leno distanced himself from the mayor. His political allies and advisors in those days were Migden and downtown political consultant Robert Barnes. In a certain sense, he was seen as moldable.

"[He] did not really come out of an ideological community and has developed a persona as someone who can make compromises and [win]," Livingston says.

So while Leno wasn't an all-time enemy of the left, and while he pushed for solar power and an affordable housing mandate, he did little to win progressives' complete trust, in part because of a basic element of who he is: he seems to want to be everyone's friend, and he doesn't have an ideological meter by which to measure public policy. "In San Francisco there was a joke that I was a raging moderate. I always had an open-door policy. I received everybody on all sides of the issue," he says. "I'm working within the system – while challenging it."

But, with a few exceptions, politicians who ride the middle don't have a great record in San Francisco. This is a town that inspires, and seeks, political passion. The people who want to be everyone's friend generally don't go far.

And although it's sometimes easier to be a San Francisco politician in Sacramento – where the press pays little attention and the public isn't in your face all of the time – Leno will also need to define himself as a local leader.

In a sense, the future for Leno is wide open. He's moved away from Brown, who reportedly cursed at him over the shipyard deal at a recent event in Chinatown. He's split with Migden. And Barnes – who was a trusted adviser – died last summer.

Where does Leno look now for direction? "I'm more independent now. I'm really more of myself," he says. "We all have styles: some people are bombastic and threatening. But we are probably most effective when we are ourselves."