How Bay Area became political island Democrats are embraced here year in, year out

[MORTARDUDE]

James : This one's for you !!!!

>>>>>>>>>>>>

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...12/BAYAREA.TMP

How Bay Area became political island
Democrats are embraced here year in, year out

Mark Simon, Chronicle Political Writer Sunday, October 12, 2003

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What is it with us? How did the Bay Area become the odd man out in California politics?

On Tuesday, while the rest of the state eagerly dumped Democratic Gov. Gray Davis and replaced him with Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Bay Area said no and not him.

Bay Area voters opposed the recall by 63 percent to 37 percent -- while Californians as a whole voted to oust Davis 55 percent to 45 percent. Without the nine Bay Area counties, the recall would have passed by 20 percentage points instead of its 10-point margin.

Meanwhile, the region's voters gave Schwarzenegger 33 percent of the vote as a replacement candidate -- while statewide, he garnered 49 percent. Without the Bay Area, Schwarzenegger would have earned 53 percent of the vote.

As San Francisco political comedian Will Durst joked: "It's obvious we're out of goose step with the rest of the state."

There are a lot reasons for this. Some of it's history and some of it's geography. Some of it's intellect, and some of it's emotion. And for a lot of us, it's because we had nowhere else to go, or nowhere else we'd rather be.

"I don't know if it's the food, I don't know if it's the water," said Durst, a Wisconsin native who moved here in 1980 because "comedy was illegal in Milwaukee."

"It's something special," he said. "I think it's because people were already here who thought like that, and more people came here."

But San Francisco's openness was social, not political. It took a while for the city to become a bastion of Democratic liberalism, and it took longer for it to spread to the entire Bay Area.

Midway through the 20th century, the Bay Area was as Republican as the rest of California.


REPUBLICAN MAYORS
Until the mid-1960s, San Francisco elected only Republican mayors -- and the Bay Area followed suit, electing Republicans to virtually ever local, state and federal office.

Then, in 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected governor, but San Francisco voted for its native son, incumbent Edmund G. "Pat" Brown.

That began an unbroken string of Democratic successes in San Francisco -- the most significant first step being the 1967 election in which Joe Alioto was elected mayor, the first Democrat to run City Hall in a half-century.

It's no coincidence the changing of the political guard began in the mid-1960s.

The beat poets of the 1950s begat the hippies in the 1960s, and their social revolution was overlayed with the push for civil rights and the movement against the Vietnam War. San Francisco was one of the nation's anti-war epicenters.

Then, the hippie movement begat the gay rights movement.


POLITICAL POWER
"The gay community came here to find political liberation," said state librarian and California historian Kevin Starr, and the gay community became a dominant political force in San Francisco politics.

San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Quentin Kopp, a former state senator and a San Francisco supervisor, can recall the mayor's race of 1967, at which he appeared on behalf of Jack Shelley before the city's first gay political organization, Society for Individual Rights.

"You couldn't ignore the gay community, but you hadn't yet reached the stage in which candidates would personally appear there," said Kopp.

By 1971, when he ran for the Board of Supervisors, candidates were expected to appear before gay political organizations and make a personal appeal for their endorsement.

In 1978, San Francisco was the only county in the state to oppose Proposition 13 -- the landmark rollback of property taxes.

And then, as the Bay Area began to grow dramatically and the region's population soared, the political liberalism of San Francisco began to spread, one-by-one, to each of the region's nine counties.


REAGAN VS. CARTER
In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president, carrying California by more than 1 million votes over Democratic President Jimmy Carter. San Francisco and Alameda counties went for Carter.

In Reagan's 1984 re-election landslide, Democratic nominee Walter Mondale carried San Francisco, Alameda and, narrowly, Marin County.

In 1992, the entire Bay Area went for Democrat Bill Clinton over Republican Bob Dole, as Clinton carried the state.

In 1994, the Bay Area's position as a dissenting voice in California politics became a regionwide reality. That year, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson defeated Democrat Kathleen Brown, but Brown carried most of the Bay Area -- San Francisco, Alameda, Marin, San Mateo and Sonoma counties.

On the same ballot, Proposition 187, Wilson's anti-illegal immigration measure, was approved statewide -- while the core Bay Area counties voted no. Only Napa, Solano and Contra Costa counties voted with the rest of the state to support the measure.


CLINTON'S RE-ELECTION
But they joined the Bay Area parade in 1996, when Clinton was re-elected -- he carried all nine Bay Area counties with San Francisco delivering the incumbent a gaudy 72 percent majority.

Over the same period, Democrats gained majorities throughout the region on school boards and city councils, took over county boards of supervisors and reached the point today where they hold virtually every Bay Area legislative and congressional seat.

But if the Bay Area became a Democratic bloc, San Francisco remained what political consultant Mary Hughes called the "white-hot center of the contrary view."

The city's history dictated such an attitude.

"It was on the left side of the continent. San Francisco was cutting edge on a lot of things, right from the beginning," said historian Starr, a San Francisco native.

As a seaport, it was a stronghold of unionism, and San Francisco became famous as the starting point for the eight-hour workday and as a town with solid working-class credentials.

San Francisco's political independence was forged in a "kind of splendid isolation," Starr said. It was cut off by geography from the rest of the country, reachable only by a seaport that brought visitors and residents and attitudes from all over the world.

As a result, certain social attitudes became an inherent part of the region -- openness to new ideas and different cultures, a Gold Rush-inspired belief in opportunities and the chance to reinvent yourself.

By the mid-20th century, all this made San Francisco irresistible.

"A lot of people came here in the 1960s and 1970s because they thought San Francisco represented a political alternative," Starr said.

"We came to San Francisco for 'be sure to wear flowers in your hair,' not 'Hey, Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand,' " said Bing Gordon, co-founder and chief creative officer for Electronic Arts, the pioneering high-tech games company.


HISTORICAL BASIS
"It goes way back to the founding of the city," said Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose San Francisco bookstore, City Lights, became the epicenter of the beat and hippie movements of the mid-20th century.

"It was founded by desperadoes, outlaws, nonbourgeois adventurers, not your usual establishment types," he said. "It's always had a tradition of total independence. Even when I arrived here in 1951, the citizens had an island mentality. We're San Franciscans first and members of the United States second."

And there were colleges and universities of world-class caliber bringing more young people here.

"You count the major educational complexes around the country and this is one of them," said Jack Bunzel, a Hoover Institution fellow, former president of San Jose State University and head of San Francisco State University's political science department in the 1960s.


EDUCATIONAL FACTOR
And some say intellectualism breeds liberalism.

"It strikes me that the better educated people are, more often than not, they tend to be more liberal, and I think this is a very well educated area," said Orville Schell, noted author and dean of the UC Berkeley graduate school of journalism.

The intellectual attributes of the region are matched by its physical setting -- a place of such beauty and splendor that people come here and never leave.

"When you live in a beautiful place, which the whole Bay Area is, you draw people for whom that is important and the idea of preservation, moderation, of walking a little more softly is important. And I think that creates a kind of liberal mind-set in an environmental sense and in a larger political sense," Schell said.

"There's really something here that is still worth protecting. You can't really say that about Los Angeles or many cities of America. They're finished. They may have a nice downtown, but, really, nobody's heart beats faster when they see Houston," he said.

All the Bay Area offers -- a stunning environment, intellectual freedom, a political and philosophical liberalism -- draws people to the area, especially young people.

"What's continued to happen is essentially an in-migration into the area, a lot of which is young," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a San Francisco native who was a city supervisor and mayor during much of the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s.

"In the Central Valley, people are inherently more conservative," said Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, a native San Franciscan, a former governor and the son of a governor.

The valley has a farming tradition and the people who live there are "more tied to the land, more connected to families over time. People judge people in terms of their families," Brown said. "In San Francisco, a lot of people's families are back in New York and Kansas and Wisconsin. There are a lot of migrants, young people, singles, and it creates a more liberal philosophy."


WORLDLY OUTLOOK
The newcomers were not just young, they were from everywhere -- Ireland and Italy in the city's early days and Asia and Latin America and all over the United States in more recent history.

It makes for a cosmopolitan, worldly view.

"It's really hard to live in the Bay Area and not have certain fundamental progressive beliefs," Hughes said. "I don't believe you can live in the Bay Area and not believe diversity is a good thing."

What Feinstein called the in-migration has gone on long enough that it is a fundamental characteristic of the Bay Area -- we expect new people to be coming here.

And it has been going on long enough that generations of young people, who came here looking for openness, have grown up and spread out.

"San Francisco, as kind of a hub city, has sown its roots into a very big, multicultural panoply -- much bigger than anyone ever though it would," Feinstein said.

"San Francisco has attracted people of a libertarian, if not liberal or progressive point of view," Hughes said. "Those people who come here when they're young -- they move to San Carlos, Brentwood, Pleasanton, the Lafayette-Moraga-Orinda corridor."

It has become, Starr said, "a whole way of life."


GENERATIONAL PATTERN
And as Tuesday's election demonstrated, Democratic politics and political liberalism have become the Bay Area status quo.

Could it be just a question of time before there's a new dissent against the left?

"A lot of people have been brought up in a political culture that is very left," said Shanto Iyengar, a professor of political communication and mass media at Stanford University. "They really live in a cocoon."

It has become a form of conservatism to be a liberal, Starr said.

"Today, outside the box is the box," he said. "Who would be outside the box in San Francisco? A thoughtful conservative."

[BLUEHAWK]

Larry -
I lived in the Bay Area for 21 years, 1972-93, so can testify from experience that most of what your thread discusses is quite true...When I got there I was renting a second floor 2-bedroom in the Fillmore district for $125/month... now you can't pay your electrical bill on that amount of money.
I also worked in SF city government quite awhile and remember Quentin Kopp very well. He was THE SOLE voice of conservatism, financial restraint, adherence to constitutional issues and the like. It would be difficult to imagine a government representative of his era who took and gave more rations of s--t than he did. But, having had to appear before his committees on policy and budgetary matters, I can say that he was the only Supervisor who EVER asked any city employee in the dock to back up their requests with facts (vs liberal wistful thinking), and then held us to our claims.
I was lucky to have arrived in Frisco (they hate that term but I don't care) just at the end of the Free Speech Movement and Hippie/Yippie period. We had a really great Dem Mayor, and Italian guy whose name I have forgotten, who was dignified and cautious. Then Feinstein and others gave carte blanche to developers downtown, Frisco became "Manhattanized", Silicone Valley ascended as the economic base of an entire State and all hell broke loose. A huge faction, not much mentioned because Gays dominate news, is the enormous Hispanic population on the SF penninsula who make up probably at least 30-40% of the population and are growing. Also, the power of Chinese people in that city is almost unbelievable, a little scary at times, and they too are growing RAPIDLY not only in Frisco but all throughout the east Bay and south of The City, everywhere you turn. In short, Frisco is a barely governable mish mash of conflicting power grabbers, in addition to all the other fairly bizarre history it has had since the mid-1800s.
It's a wonderfully scenic place to live, with a heavenly climate most of the time, but how it has managed to survive itself is not a slightly amazing miracle.
One thing I can also say is that it is not fun being a Republican in Frisco, discretion becomes the better part of valor on a regular basis.

[HARDCORE]

HEY GUYS -

Even here in California, we often cast a suspicious eye north, in the direction of San Francisco!

Up there, they often think a helluva lot differently than the rest of the State, and for us in other areas of The Golden State, that's alright with us, cause many of them are different, often in an odd (word variant) sort of way! (opinion)

VERITAS