Prop. H: $10 million and it's this closeBy Tim Redmond
Well. Prop. H, the Clean Energy Act, is going down to defeat. But the public-power campaign -- against very little money, with $10 million in PG&E cash against it -- made a remarkable showing. In the end, Yes on H will have about 45 percent, which demonstrates both the ability of the organizers (great job, Julian Davis) and the willingness of nearly half of the voters to defy the most expensive campaign in San Francisco initiative history. It appears the progressives will still have control of the Board; this isn't going away.
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Comments (2)
By moving forward on Prop H at this inopportune time, without having done the groundwork required to fend off the tens of millions, public power is now off the agenda and CCA is all but DOA.
It is probable that PG&E's tens of millions of dollars might have brought out enough conservative votes to sink Prop B on a razor thin margin.
Let us learn a lesson here, that political science must trump political religion. Sometimes, doing what appears to be the right thing can make matters worse, and that is the case here.
-marc
Posted by Marc Salomon | November 5, 2008 10:59 AM
The Prop H campaign laid the groundwork for a soon to come victory against PG&E - not a loss.
1) PG&E has spent more money than ever before on a San Francisco ballot measure. (This and Lennar's disturbing $7 million in the June '08 election will make passing an extremely strong local corporate/independent-expenditure campaign finance reform law easily winnable over the next year.)
2) PG&E was forced to show us every argument that it is going to use to attack CCA (and CCA is -much- more defendable against PG&E's attacks than Prop H was).
3) PG&E has galvanized a whole new core of activists ready to fight PG&E's attacks and make sure CCA gets implemented right away, when a year ago CCA wasn't even on anyone's radar screen.
4) PG&E has so pissed off the Board of Supervisors that either incoming president of the Board will have PG&E as public enemy number one on his or her hit list. The next year in the Board of Supervisors is going to be very bad for PG&E.
5) PG&E has revealed to the 41% of voters that heard, and understood, the Yes on H argument (and the reports about PG&E's anti H spending) that PG&E is an evil fossil fuel corporation that will stop at nothing to kill renewable energy - when a year ago, most of those people thought that PG&E was a 'green' company. That false green curtain has now been pulled back.
PG&E may have knocked us down, but in the process it gained itself a very -big- black eye of dirty fossil fuel domination, which it can no longer hide from the public.
The Prop H campaign, though barely held together with rubber bands and paper clips, kicked some serious ass, and was a huge victory, not a loss.
We knew getting into the Prop H fight that it was likely that all of this (both the good and the ugly) would happen, and that there was a strong chance we could lose the vote itself; but we knew exactly what we were doing.
The result is a better armed public and Board of Supervisors with which to hit PG&E -hard- in the next fight.
PG&E's days in San Francisco are now identifiably numbered, and small.
peace
Eric Brooks
Posted by Eric Brooks | November 5, 2008 01:19 PM