I almost feel bad for Beya Alcaraz. She stepped into a political shitstorm that anyone with any sense could have predicted, and now it’s going to follow her for the rest of her life: She will be the person who served only one week as a San Francisco supervisor. Someday, this will be a political trivia question.
The real issue here is that Mayor Daniel Lurie demonstrated something that undermines his entire campaign pitch, his entire political standing: He was supposed to be a competent manager.
That’s what outsiders like to say when they run for high office: I come from the private sector, and we are better managers than people in the much-maligned “government.”
Well, no.
I give credit to Gabe Greschler at the Standard and Joe Eskenazi at MissionLocal for doing the most basic things journalists do: Vetting candidates and politicians to establish their qualifications for office. Both are good reporters and did a great job—but we’re not talking about Watergate-level secret-source-in-the-FBI stuff here. Checking with the person who bought a store from a former owner is pretty routine. Checking the Department of Public Health to see if there were complaints about the pet store is Investigative Reporting 101.
That, of course, is the point here. The reporters did their jobs. The mayor didn’t.
Lurie brought a lot of outsiders to his team. He apparently has nobody in a senior position who knows enough about local politics to say: What do people in the Sunset think about this candidate? What’s her background, and is there anything that will reflect badly on her—and on the mayor?
As Eskenazi notes:
All of the above could be done without leaving the house. One needn’t call up the head of the health or building inspection departments — though a mayoral staffer could do that. But all of the above records are available online. You could find this information. Journalists did find it — and quickly.
This looks bad for Lurie, and now the mayor will have an even harder time finding someone to fill that seat. But the deeper issue here is that this easily avoidable bungle demonstrates the risk of putting someone with no political experience in a political job. As my former boss, Bruce Brugmann, told me when I started at the Bay Guardian, you don’t want to recruit someone for the big leagues who has no minor league or even sandlot) experience.
Some ‘outsiders’ succeed in politics. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was a bartender when she ran for Congress. She was also an organizer on the Bernie Sanders for President campaign, an intern for Sen. Ted Kennedy, a member of DSA, and an activist working on environmental issues. And she ran in a contested primary, where her qualifications and positions were vetted.
I don’t have Lurie’s cell phone number, and he probably wouldn’t listen to me anyway, but Mr. Mayor: If you want to succeed in this job, you need a senior staffer who has a deep understanding of local politics. Because right now, your administration looks like amateur hour.
