December 17, 2003

opinion

THE MONDAY BEFORE the runoff election, a well-dressed elderly man entered the Mission Street Gonzalez campaign headquarters. Making his way through the streaming masses of overwhelmingly young people who had poured into the headquarters for most of the previous week, he stopped by the first old guy he came to, me.

"I want to volunteer," he said to me, with his clear eyes missing nothing of the at times purposeful hustle and bustle surrounding him. He looked to me like an old lefty with a damn good pension and health plan. I directed him to the menu of choices offered by the campaign – phone banks, get-out-the-vote sign-up, visibility, canvassing – and he wondered off toward the phone banks.

About an hour later, Matt Gonzalez was holding a press conference in an effort to offer some counter images to the ones of former president Bill Clinton sure to dominate local TV as he dropped into town for Gavin Newsom's campaign. There, in the front row of the press, with a smile on his lips, was the elderly gent I had seen an hour or so earlier. The press was, as expected, asking Gonzalez what he could say to Democratic voters that could overcome Clinton's endorsement of his opponent.

The old gent raised his hand and, before Gonzalez could call on him, asked, "Isn't it true that you have the very values of the Democratic Party that made it a majority party and that need to be stressed today?"

Gonzalez, smiling back at the fellow, asked, "What press organization did you say you were from?" and then answered the question with a rather eloquent "yes." In fact, part of it was quoted in the paper the next day.

It was right after the election of Ronald Reagan that folks of my generation, stunned by the wave of "Stepford kids" who supported the Gipper, inverted the old '70s slogan of "don't trust anyone over 30" to "don't trust anyone under 30." It was ageist and wrongheaded in the '70s and equally wrongheaded in the '80s, but it had a certain objective reality. That reality was intensified in San Francisco during the dot-com boom when, it seemed, the city was overrun with young tech types eager to run you over in their SUVs or run you and your neighbors out of your neighborhood.

All through the late 1990s San Francisco's left was at odds with dot-com youth, a situation that brought deep distress to folks who knew their future was mainly past and their political values certainly doomed without the embrace of the young. Then, starting with the Proposition L campaign in 2000, a new set of young San Franciscans began to become politically active. These young people had the same values as the older activists: money was needed but not everything; politics should give something back to the community; working hard, together, in politics actually worked, changing both polices and politicians.

Yet, at the outset, the mayoral race threatened once again to drive a wedge between the legion of "experienced" activists and young people. Newsom seemed to have all the youth. Tom Ammiano and Angela Alioto seemed locked in a time warp. Then Gonzalez announced his candidacy.

In the course of the next 120 days, the Gonzalez campaign became the ground on which a great generational meeting took place in San Francisco politics. Young and old found not only a common candidate but also discovered a shared set of political values. New friendships were made, new allies found. The campaign produced a shared political experience that belongs, equally, to young and old, allowing both to refer back to it when planning future political actions, together.

That's how you make real political change happen, grassroots style. Thanks, Matt.