By Tim Redmond

Mayor Gavin Newsom, meticulously groomed and looking steadfast and serious – every bit the politician he has tried so hard to become – strolled into City Hall on election night and proclaimed a great victory of "good government" over "ideology."

He brushed off questions from pesky reporters and stuck to his talking points: Phil Ting's election to the Assessor's Office and the defeat of Propositions C and D demonstrated, he said, that the public has "seen through" a political agenda that has come largely from the progressive wing of the Board of Supervisors.

If Newsom is right, the center of local politics has shifted dramatically in just three years. In 2002 the voters overwhelmingly approved a plan promoted by board progressives that clipped the mayor's authority to appoint the entire Planning Commission. A year later a measure giving the board a voice in Police Commission appointments passed decisively.

But this time around, a measure to shield the Ethics Commission for mayoral budget cutting lost by 10 points while a proposal to give the supervisors more control over Muni went nowhere, losing by almost 30 points. And Newsom, who campaigned hard to kill the Muni measure, was happy to claim that the balance of power has shifted in his direction.

We shouldn't make too much of this one election: It was a low-turnout, off-year vote, and that always favors conservatives. The prevailing mood in the electorate was to vote No (thanks to the brilliant and effective labor campaign against the governor's initiatives). Props. C and D had almost no Yes campaign.

But there's no denying this: The mayor's popularity is at almost mind-boggling levels. His polls show an 86 percent favorable rating, and since there are always at least 5 percent of the people who don't have an opinion, that means less than 10 percent of San Franciscans think the mayor is doing a bad job.

And the popularity of the district-elected board, once in the high 60s, has been dropping fast. A source close to the mayor told me that recent polls put the supes in the low 50s, meaning just slightly more than half the voters are pleased with their elected local legislators.

And it's not hard to see why: The board, particularly the progressive wing, has been especially disjointed and fractious this past year. "We need to be looking at the larger policy issues and picking fights we can win," Sup. Tom Ammiano lamented.

In fact, progressives don't even seem to be able to hold together a simple majority when it counts, as Sup. Aaron Peskin's abrupt and unexpected turnaround on the election day vote approving Home Depot demonstrated.

Coming into a year when five of the incumbent supervisors – Chris Daly, Sophie Maxwell, Bevan Dufty, Fiona Ma, and Michela Alioto-Pier – are up for reelection, and when some people, led by Sup. Sean Elsbernd, are already talking about changing the district system, this is not good news.

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Robert Haaland, longtime labor organizer and all-around activist, warns that portraying this election as a Newsom knockout is not only overreaching but dangerous: "We empower him by letting him get away with that spin," Haaland told me.

Mirkarimi has a similar argument: "I don't give Newsom much credit," he told me. "The local results were status quo. The voters were in a mood to say 'no' to change, and that's what happened."

And they have a point: The Ting election, for example, was hardly a typical Mayor-against-the-left proposition. Ting had the endorsement of the Harvey Milk LGBT Club along with activists like Haaland and Debra Walker, and had strong support in the queer community. Sandoval was backed by the progressive supes and the Bay Guardian, but even some of his allies questioned whether he was the best progressive challenger for this job. And Ting's slogan – "a professional, not a politician" – hit home after Sandoval made the big mistake of launching a nasty negative campaign in the waning days.

That, of course, has been part of Newsom's political brilliance: He has made alliances with labor and the queer community and has taken strong progressive stands on issues like same-sex marriage and the hotel strike. His nominee for assessor had a background in public-interest work and was by no means a typical downtown hack (in fact, he's already taken on Clear Channel over the appraisal of its billboards).

And it still leaves the mayor proclaiming he's the champion of "good government" and that the district supervisors are just wasting everyone's time with ideological (read: left) positions that have nothing to do with running the city. It's an alarming sentiment – and the more the public buys into it, the more damaging it will be.

The truth is, terms like not competent and too ideological have long been used to disparage left candidates. For a while there, with Willie Brown in the Mayor's Office, the mantle of reform and good government was firmly with the supervisors – but Brown is gone, and Newsom is happy to use it to cloak an agenda that is by no means bereft of ideology.

Frankly, the supervisors haven't helped their own cause: They've spent a lot of time fighting each other – sometimes bitterly and personally – over fairly minor ideological differences (the battle over medical marijuana regulations is an obvious example).

These are not pleasant political times. The country, the state, and the city are in terrible shape. Money is scarce, social programs are starving, homeless people continue to die on the streets, violence and death are a way of life in parts of the Western Addition and Bayview-Hunters Point, public housing tenants live with raw sewage pouring out of the sidewalks and buildings on the verge of collapse, and the gap between the rich and the poor is rising (there are now, tax activist Marc Norton informs me, 20 billionaires in San Francisco, up from 11 a year ago). These are issues that scream out for ideology – for someone to say that keeping the buses running on time and corruption under control just isn't enough.

"Newsom has an ideology too – it's just what we say Tuesday night, status quo," Mirkarimi said. "There's no vision coming out of the Mayor's Office, and that fact is being neutralized by an impressive spin machine."

And if Newsom continues to get away with saying that the city needs no fundamental, structural change, then his good-government agenda will allow the rich to get richer while the poor wallow in shit lagoons and duck the police while they beg for spare change. And that's just not acceptable. E-mail Tim Redmond at tredmond@sfbg.com.