I ran into Clint Reilly in a donut shop on Fillmore Street in the spring of 1987. I think we both just watched a funny movie called Bad Lieutenant, which had a rare X-rating because we got a very brief look at Harvey Keitel’s penis, but my timing on the movie might be a little off.
At any rate, Reilly, who died this week at 79, was a campaign consultant helping a woman named Nancy Pelosi run for Congress in a special election. Pelosi had zero local experience, had never even served on a local commission, paid zero attention to local politics, had never stuffed envelopes for a San Francisco campaign … but she was the designated pick of the last gasp of the Burton Machine for a seat that Rep. Phil Burton and then his wife Sala had held since 1964.
I was a young reporter who was supporting Harry Britt, who had deep roots in local politics. Britt was an early leader of what became the Harvey Milk Club, a close ally of Milk’s, and the person who Milk said in a video will that he wanted to fill his seat on the Board of Supes if he was every killed.
I confronted Clint: Why the fuck are you helping a dying political machine elect someone who has no business representing San Francisco in Congress? His response: Harry Britt lacked the “gravitas” to fill Phil and Sala Burton’s seat.
Translation: Britt was, as the Chronicle repeatedly said, a “homosexual socialist,” and Reilly, who was building a career at one of the top campaign managers in California, was paid well to keep him from winning.
It was close, but Reilly was a genius at his job, and he used what was then a little-know strategy of getting occasional voters to fill out vote-by-mail forms. Britt won on Election Day; the VBN votes put Pelosi over the top, and the rest, for better or for worse, is history.
About 35 years later, I ran into Clint again at a fundraiser for the McCarthy Center as USF, where I teach. His wife, Janet, said she liked what I was doing at 48hills, and asked if she and Clint could help.
By then, the guy was pretty rich, so I said: Why don’t you give us $5,000? Clint, without hesitating for an instant, said: Sure. I should have asked for more; I was new to the nonprofit fundraising biz.
At any rate, Clint Reilly and I have a history, and most of the obits on him have missed a lot of the important points.
Reilly was born into a working-class Catholic family. The obits say he was raised in the East Bay, but he always told me his father was a milkman in the Mission.
Either way, after an aborted stint in the seminary, he ran a junk shop at Fisherman’s Wharf before he got involved in the antiwar movement and worked on a radical campaign for Congress by Western Addition Catholic priest Eugene Boyle. Boyle lost; Clint learned.
Next, he helped a liberal cop, out of nowhere, get elected sheriff of San Francisco.
Soon, he was a part of the first generation of people who made their living running political campaigns. He was a pioneer in the professionalization, and the privatization, of American politics.
He was among the first to run a full-scale operation, a general contractor for politics: He did polling, messaging, mail, TV ads, the whole show. He was really good at it.
In 1988, Ralph Nader and Harvey Rosenfield, consumer advocates, raised $1 million to put a measure on the California ballot reforming the auto insurance industry; among other things, it created an elected insurance commissioner.
The insurance industry was livid, and hired Reilly to beat Prop. 103. The campaign cost $100 million. Reilly took a 17 percent commission on everything; that’s what consultants did.
He lost, but walked away with enough money to start a successful business as a real-estate invesetor
There were issues: In 1990, he was working for Dianne Feinstein who was running for governor of California. She and her rich husband weren’ raising the kind of money Reilly wanted, so he fired her as a client, saying she “didn’t have the fire in the belly.” This, shortly after she had a hysterectomy.
But what all the obits have missed is that Clint volunteered to run the campaign in 1986 that passed Prop. M, the most important progressive planning measure in the history of San Francisco. Prop. M limited new highrise office development; it preserved blue-collar jobs, saved the city from the 1988 real-estate crash, and is still the center of neighborhood-based planning. (It had nothing to do with stopping new housing; that’s Yimby misinformation).
He was up against millions from the developers. He had limited resources. He figured out a way to win. The city owes him a huge debt for that.
Later in life, he bought the San Francisco Examiner, and kept it alive. No idea what happens to it now.
So Clint, rest in peace, you had bad clients who made you rich, but in 1986, you came through for the neighborhoods. I’m sorry nobody in the media remembers.
