Friday, March 26, 2004
Gavin Newson, My Apologies
"I'm not promising miracles... There is no quick answer." --San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, 26 March 2004
I admit, I hate to be wrong. I’m not too different from other Americans in this regard. I don’t see myself as ‘all knowing’ or ‘without fault’. But on matters that are important to me, I hate when I’m wrong.
So all though I voted for Gavin Newsom, I did not: trust him, care for his affiliations, or believe in his vision for San Francisco. I voted for him because I had been blindsided. Who knew that Matt Gonzalez would end up in the run off against him? Not I, I thought assuredly that Angela Alioto, Susan Leal, or even Tom Ammiano stood a better chance.
I was pretty confident about my supposition, prehaps even cocky. I hadn’t even looked at Gonzalez’s platform. So when the run-off results indicated Newsom versus Gonzalez, I was able to showcase a deep expression of my own stupidity with the resoundingly artful, “Who??!!”
Why didn’t I vote for Gonzalez, like most of my friends? Oddly enough, in many ways I acknowledge that I’m more conservative than most would expect. I’m not abandoning my leftist leanings. It’s just that I have these streaks of practicality that override politics; and at least in the arena of public debate. I feel that the left has given up much ground to the right. We’ve abandon our claims on moral, civil, family, and a whole host of terms that can be used to accurately represent our lives, because the right has twisted their meaning. There’s no mistake that ‘society’ is one of my topic categories—civil duty, civic responsibility, social justic, politics, morality, and society are all issues of importance to me.
So back to my apology. I voted for Mayor Newsom because I didn’t trust that Gonzalez would do the right things in office. I did assume his heart and his efforts would be in the right place, I just didn’t know enough about him and his political savyness to believe that he would do anything other than leave San Francisco in fiscal, political, and social quandry that could deter progressive politics for years to come. So as I told a friend, “I voted for the evil I know.”
But now, as it turns out, “I didn’t know the evil I knew” nearly as well as I thought. In fact, ‘the evil’ is turning out to be a fairly nice guy with strong moral principles and fairly good instincts, and better yet, he hasn’t abandon his instincts and sense of civic responsibility to the realm of politics and political expendency and longevity. From lesbian and gay marriages, to city contracts, to cleaning up Hunter’s Point, the San Francisco Mayor’s website is proving an interesting read, and Gavin Newsom is proving to be a enigma. Not in the dark, greek, tragic meaning of the word, but in the wonderful, suprising, inexplicable sense of the word.
I apologize Mayor Newsom: for disparaging your name, for not believing you had a moral compass, and finally for not believing that San Francisco was more important to you than political games. You may, in the immediate or not so distant future, do many things that I disagree with, but your actions to date have let me know that you care about San Francisco and the world-at-large. That your willing to stand-up for your principles even if I heartly disagree with them.
I’ve been disillusioned with politicians for so long, that I thought you no better than most. Now you are gradully moving towards taking a place with a small group of politicians, most of old, who I can say have impressed me, and even smaller group who I state are admirable. That group includes mostly politicians of old, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Jimmy Carter, but some current such as Senator Russ Feingold, and now you.
Footnotes
Sites of Note
Franklin D Roosevelt Library & Museum, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu
Jimmy Carter Library, http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.org
Senator Russ Feingold, http://feingold.senate.gov
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