December 18, 2002

In this issue

I WAS DRIVING my son home from preschool the other day when a fascinating discussion came on National Public Radio, and since Michael talks almost as much as his dad (and has no problem shouting over the radio), I only managed to catch a few moments of it. I don't even know who was talking, but one of the participants had a great point. The reason so many conservative talk-radio hosts are so effective, he said, is that right-wing positions are very simplistic and work well in rhetoric and sound bites. Liberals start to talk about social and economic problems, and all of a sudden things get complicated. They're too open-minded; they see too many sides of the story.

So it was easy for Sup. Gavin Newsom to come up with a simplistic idea (cut welfare payments to homeless people) and a simplistic slogan ("Care Not Cash") and run with it – even in liberal San Francisco, it worked.

What did progressives say? Solving homelessness is complicated and expensive. That happens to be true. But it doesn't play as well in sound-bite campaigns.

But Newsom had something else going for him: he sounded like he was really taking on an issue, that he had a new and different idea. And since this is going to be a big deal in the mayor's race, and everyone's writing off Tom Ammiano as a sure loser, let's go back a few years, to 1987, where there might be a lesson for us all.

Early in that year, an assemblymember named Art Agnos was pretty much considered mayoral dog food. The San Francisco Chronicle had run a bunch of stories linking him to a Sacramento real estate developer, and (although there was less to the story than met the eye) it looked bad. But Agnos did a smart thing: he put together a book full of ideas for the city, real policy proposals that might actually work. He called it Getting Things Done, and it turned his campaign around. He won decisively in the fall.

That's something the progressive candidates for mayor have to do, quickly: tell us what their plans are, very specifically, to deal with an urban fiscal crisis, homelessness, crumbling infrastructure, inefficient services, unfair taxes, high energy costs, and a host of other problems. Agnos got votes from both conservatives and liberals because he acted as if he had a real plan. That's how you beat Gavin Newsom.