The first thing I noticed about the latest mayoral debate was how unhappy Mayor London Breed looked. She didn’t want to be there.
The second thing I noticed was how angry Mark Farrell looked (“he doesn’t like San Francisco,” one person who watched the debate told me).
The third thing: The moderators spent so much time going back and forth with Breed, Farrell, and Daniel Lurie attacking each other that Sup. Aaron Peskin got very little airtime. By my count, Breed was in front of the camera for 15 minutes, Peskin about five.
Marisa Lagos started things off quickly, asking Breed, Farrell, and Sup. Asha Safai about political corruption. That seemed like a significant new twist in the race: If public integrity and corruption become the focus of the race, that helps Peskin and Lurie.
Safai simply ducked, talking about his history as an immigrant and basically ignoring the question about his connections to a developer charged in a bribery scandal. Farrell said that all of his campaign money issues don’t matter because his lawyer says it’s all fine. “That doesn’t make it legal,” Lagos said, as the audience laughed.
Breed made a rather stunning, remarkable statement: When Lagos noted that two of her senior staff were now in prison, and others facing serious charges, and the head of the Human Rights Commission just had to resign, Breed said that the city has 34,000 employees, “and sometimes we have issues with some of them.”
Wow: The people in prison, facing prison, and resigning in trouble are not low-level clerks. They are department heads who reported directly to Breed, and in some cases, were her close friends.
Lagos raised another interesting question: Lurie claims he’s the outsider, and above all the corruption. But he’s part of the city’s economic oligarchy; could he stand up to his powerful friends? “How would you push back on the economic interests that dominate San Francisco?”
Lurie, again, gave an astonishing answer: “We challenged the status quo when we started Tipping Point,” he said. “Nobody thought it would work.”
Um, that’s not taking on the economic elite.
For much of the debate, policy issues were pushed to the side as Breed, Farrell, and Lurie attacked each other. Peskin tried to get to the point, to talk about things like affordable housing; Scott Shafer, from KQED, just asked about the very old, tired issue of Peskin’s former drinking problem.
If voters were tuned in, here’s what they saw: Three candidates, all of them looking unhappy, telling you that the other two were awful, and one candidate, Peskin, more or less sitting on the sidelines.
Seems to me he may have had the best of the night.
Full disclosure: Both of my kids work for the Aaron Peskin for Mayor campaign.
