District 6 Supervisor Chris Daly. Photo by Luke Thomas
By Luke Thomas
May 19, 2010, 3:35 pm
District 6 Supervisor Chris Daly today announced details for an upcoming Progressive Primary election to be held Saturday, July 17 at the War Memorial building.
In a letter addressed to progressive allies who Daly hopes will sign on to become an election co-host or observer, Daly wrote: “Even though District 6 is a progressive district, there is a very real risk that, even with ranked choice voting, the progressive vote could split and not transfer to the strongest progressive candidate. Our political opponents sense this as an opportunity for a pick-up. We have a responsibility to prevent that from happening and do what we can to hold the District 6 seat!”
A separate invitation letter has been sent to all candidates declared in the District 6 race, Daly said, but only those candidates who sign a Progressive Pledge (see below), who have qualified for public financing, and who agree to endorse the winner of the primary, will be eligible to participate in the primary.
The filing deadline for qualifying for the Progressive Primary ballot is 12:00 pm, Thursday, June 17, Daly said.
Daly’s letter in full:
Dear Progressive Ally,
On Saturday, July 17th, the District 6 Progressive Primary will be held at the San Francisco War Memorial, 401 Van Ness Avenue, between 10AM and 2PM.
As an important progressive ally, you are invited to participate in the Progressive Primary as a co-host or an observer. Progressive Primary co-hosts endorse the eventual winner of the Progressive Primary as their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place endorsed candidate for Member, San Francisco Board of Supervisors, District 6 for the November 2, 2010 election.
As you are aware, the District 6 seat on the Board of Supervisors is critical for progressives in San Francisco. Without it, progressives may lose majority control of the Board of Supervisors.
At least five serious progressive candidates are already in the District 6 race: raising money, seeking endorsements, and reaching out to voters for their support. Even though District 6 is a progressive district, there is a very real risk that, even with ranked choice voting, the progressive vote could split and not transfer to the strongest progressive candidate. Our political opponents sense this as an opportunity for a pick-up. We have a responsibility to prevent that from happening and do what we can to hold the District 6 seat!
The Progressive Primary will be open to all District 6 residents who are registered to vote. District 6 residents who register to vote on the day of the event will also be able to participate.
In order for candidates to qualify their name for the Progressive Primary ballot, they will be required to:
1) Become certified as eligible to receive public funds by the SF Ethics Commission and agree to comply with the City’s Individual Expenditure Ceiling;
2) Sign the Progressive Pledge; and
3) Agree to endorse the winner of the Progressive Primary as their first, second, or third choice for the November election for District 6 Supervisor.
The filing deadline for qualifying for the Progressive Primary ballot is 12:00pm on Thursday, June 17th. Candidates who are unable to qualify their name for the ballot may file a statement of write-in candidacy.
The Progressive Primary will use the City’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system to determine the winner of the Primary. This is a unique opportunity for us to learn more about how votes distribute between progressive candidates in this race.
In addition to co-hosts and official observers, all participating candidates will be allowed to have one designated observer present during the counting of the ballots.
The Progressive Primary will provide an early test of candidate and campaign strength in District 6. The Primary will give us a better idea about how votes distribute between progressive candidates with ranked choice voting. It will ensure that the strongest progressive candidate on July 19th has the support of other participating candidates and co-hosts. Most importantly, the winner of the Progressive Primary will get a major momentum boost going into the November campaign season.
Please join the effort to keep District 6 progressive. Complete the co-host or observer forms and return directly to me or mail to:
Progressive Primary
PO Box 410686
San Francisco, CA 94141-0686
In Solidarity,
Chris Daly
Progressive Pledge
The Progressive Pledge
The Progressive Pledge is an amalgamation of baseline progressive positions on important San Francisco issues identified by the progressive stakeholder organizations: SF Bay Guardian, SF Tenants Union, Sierra Club, Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, and SEIU Local 1021. (To complete the pledge, candidates need to agree to at least 28 of the following 30 progressive positions. Strike-through any position with which you do not agree.)
I hereby pledge to…
support the current system of 11 district elections for Supervisor and would oppose any effort to repeal or amend district elections;
support the Clean Power SF program, a community choice aggregation program which would contract with an energy service provider to supply half of the program’s energy from renewable sources;
oppose Mayor Newsom’s proposed sit-lie ordinance and support adequate funding for homeless services;
support the general legalization of immigrants currently living in this country and the protection of due process for immigrant youth accused of a crime;
support rent control on vacant units and support extending rent control to “new” (built after 1979) construction;
oppose “means testing” of rent control whereby only tenants whose income or assets were below a certain level would be able to get rent control protection;
support changing the Rent Board’s composition to 3 tenants, 2 landlords, and 2 homeowners and split the appointments between the Mayor and Board of Supervisors;
oppose raising the annual condo conversion cap of 200 units per year, even if existing TICs can convert by paying a fee as a revenue raising measure to help balance the budget;
protect our rental housing stock threatened by “tenant buyouts” and would support legislation to protect these rental units;
oppose the privatization of public parks through the lease or sale of park land or facilities to private entities, including selling off land in Candlestick State Park to a private developer;
support the city’s Natural Areas Program (NAP), which sets aside small portions of city parks to dedicate to restoration of native plant species;
support creating revenues for MUNI by increasing revenue from parking fees and fines, implementation of congestion pricing for vehicles, or transit assessment fees for downtown businesses;
never cross a picket line sanctioned by the SF Labor Council;
oppose contracting out work currently performed by City workers;
prioritize services for the most vulnerable San Franciscans during budget deliberations;
oppose mass-scale lay-offs of specific job classifications and re-offering the same job duties with a new title and less pay;
oppose the creation of new business tax breaks or holidays;
support the creation of new revenue sources for improved public services;
support San Francisco’s Healthy SF program including the employer mandate;
support the allocation of local resources to provide benefits for homecare workers, such as healthcare, retirement benefits, and sick pay;
support the position that all buildings owned by the county and leased to private entities should use unionized janitors and security officers;
publicly support card check recognition and neutrality agreements;
publicly support and actively encourage workers who are organizing a union and discourage the intimidating effects of any employer interference;
oppose capital punishment;
support a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion;
support safe medical cannabis cultivation, permitting, distribution, and use;
support the decriminalization of sex work;
support an inclusive version of ENDA;
publicly oppose Propositions 16, June 2010, which would require a two-thirds vote of the electorate before a public agency could enter the retail power business;
publicly support Proposition F, June 2010, a measure to let tenants postpone new rent increases if the tenant is unemployed or had wages cut or did not get a COLA benefit for government benefits.
Luke Thomas
Luke Thomas is a former software developer and computer consultant who proudly hails from London, England. In 2001, Thomas took a yearlong sabbatical to travel and develop a photographic portfolio. Upon his return to the US, Thomas studied photojournalism to pursue a career in journalism. In 2004, Thomas worked for several neighborhood newspapers in San Francisco before accepting a partnership agreement with the SanFranciscoSentinel.com, a news website formerly covering local, state and national politics. In September 2006, Thomas launched FogCityJournal.com. The BBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, New York Times, Der Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine, 7x7, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Bay Guardian and the San Francisco Weekly, among other publications and news outlets, have published his work. Thomas is a member of the Freelance Unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, TNG-CWA Local 39521 and is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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May 27, 2010 at 5:11 am
I’m also fed up with commenters who refuse to honestly identify themselves.
May 23, 2010 at 12:42 pm
You know… I was thinking about this whole “progressive primary” business. And while I said from the beginning that there are a lot of problems with it, and I still think there are a lot of unresolved issues, I have to acknowledge Chris for doing something that no other politician ever does.
See, when other politicians are termed out, they pick whoever they want to back. That’s their right. But Chris isn’t doing that. He’s saying, “I want to help a progressive, but I want the PEOPLE to choose which one. And whoever they choose, that’s the one I’ll use my resources to support.”
Whatever the merits of this particular proposal, Chris deserves major kudos for that. And, may I add, in doing so, he’s showing his true character, the character of someone who cares about what his constituency thinks rather than just paying lip service to it like most pols. And he’s showing way more class than all the nattering nabobs put together.
May 22, 2010 at 10:06 am
“‘Richmondman’,
Glad to exchange comments with you if you’ll use your real name. I don’t feed trolls.”
Not to get into the middle of a good foodfight, but “el Greco” doesn’t use his real name either. A lot of people don’t. I’m jus’ sayin’…
May 22, 2010 at 10:04 am
Maybe el Greco just kept pestering the Supervisor so much with his “repeated phone calls and emails” that he made a reputation for himself as a crank.
May 22, 2010 at 2:59 am
el Greco,
Chris can definitely be petty. They all can to some degree at times. I think it’s a measure of personal insecurity. I’ve both praised and attacked every supe at one time or another and all of them except Chris seem to be able to get past it. It is what it is as they say. Somehow we’ll just have to put together the broken pieces of our shattered lives and go on.
h.
May 22, 2010 at 12:41 am
Here’s another statement about what it means to be a progressive Democrat, or even a radical American politician in the age of Obama:
Grayson introduces ‘War Is Making You Poor Act’ to highlight cost of ongoing wars (headline in ThinkProgress):
“GRAYSON: So I believe that the thing we need to do is to take that $159 billion that the President has set aside – we’re not saying he has to stop the war, we’re not giving a cut-off date for the war – we’re simply saying you need to fund that out of the base budget of $549 billion.”
Now I’m not saying Chris Daly did or would say that himself. Only that I didn’t find a word about resisting the War (on Terror) in his “Progressive Pledge.”
May 21, 2010 at 3:39 pm
No, h. I have to disagree with you here. Daly was spectacularly bad at responding to phone calls, letters, emails. If you were a D6 constituent who didn’t happen to be a progressive, he or his staff would simply not respond to you. I could cite you many instances of this.
The job of any elected official is to listen to ALL constituents, whether or not they happen to share one’s politics. In that regard, he was an abject failure. I did not publicly turn on Daly until he repeatedly did not answer my calls or emails.
May 21, 2010 at 3:35 pm
‘Richmondman’,
Glad to exchange comments with you if you’ll use your real name. I don’t feed trolls.
h.
May 21, 2010 at 1:26 pm
“second only to Gonzalez in the class of 2000” You mean the Gonzalez who quit the Deomcratic Party after securing their endorsement and switched to the Green Party to help win his district in a run-off? Or the Gonzalez who quit on his district and the entire City of SF when he lost the Mayoral race? Or the Gonzalez who quit the Green Party to run as VP candidate? Great “class”…quitter.
May 21, 2010 at 9:21 am
The sensible thing for Chris Daly to do at this point in his career is this:
Make peace will all the factions and personalities in his camp. Articulate in an inspiring, positive way the basic values that he stands for in politics. Acknowledge the good that others besides himself have done to promote the causes he believes in. Say some positive things about his opponents. Leave the stage gracefully.
None of this is going to happen. That’s because Daly has gone into a rage and a panic over term limits. He realizes that he won’t be the Boss Man anymore. All the implications of this stark limitation are now starting to sink in.
People in his district will no longer have to put up with his swaggering and bullying. Other leaders, with other priorities, will be calling the shots. They will be beyond his control.
There’s also a deeper dynamic at play here. Daly, the perennial child with temper tantrums, can’t deal with term limits in the broader sense.
The sign that a human being has attained adulthood is when he or she comes to understand, and appreciate, that everything in life has term limits, including life itself. Those who can’t come to terms with this fact never grow up.
The situation is even worse when the child in the adult’s body, who can’t deal with term limits, is a bullying man who exercises power. The ancient Greeks had a word for the attitude displayed by such a man: hubris.
They also had a word for that which hubris brings upon itself: nemesis.
May 21, 2010 at 8:42 am
el Greco,
No, you’re wrong. Daly was the best supe in the City vis a vis personally dealing with the people in his district. For 9 years. The last year has been different. He’ll fair quite well in my book. Second only to Gonzalez in the ‘Class of 2000’.
h.
May 21, 2010 at 7:13 am
“Worst thing is that Daly won’t even answer my pleas that he deal with the issue.”
h., now you know what most of us in D6 have been dealing with for years.
May 21, 2010 at 6:43 am
h.
I’m with you as far as picketing this sham primary. I gotta start getting my Chris Daly effigy ready. Can you bring rope?
May 21, 2010 at 6:05 am
Howard,
Yeah, really. ‘ I poop you not’ to paraphrase an old term from the hood. Worst thing is that Daly won’t even answer my pleas that he deal with the issue. The old Daly would have been on it like a bulldog. The old Daly halted the practice of having your guests leave ID’s at the front desk. ID’s that were often stolen. Desk clerks used to to charge money to have guests to your room. Some of these practices still exist in the ‘Patel’ places but Chris made it all better. The old Chris I mean. This new guy is one step from wearing a beanie with a propellor.
h.
May 20, 2010 at 5:20 pm
h,
Seriously??
I guess I’ve lead a sheltered life. I’ve never heard such bull shit.
Howard
May 20, 2010 at 5:07 pm
Howard and Matt,
Howard, it’s illegal for anyone to visit me on payday because it is assumed that anyone visiting an SRO resident on payday is either a drug dealer or a whore. Don’t you have that rule at your house?
Matt, I intend to be there to participate well before the festivities begin. In fact, I’m asking all candidates who can’t meet Chris’ cash limit to join me in a picket of the voting place. Anyone who crosses our picket line is in opposition of grassroots democracy and is for sale.
h.
May 20, 2010 at 4:02 pm
Still no word on whether any of the candidates are going to participate in Chris Daly’s brainchild?
May 20, 2010 at 4:02 pm
h,
what makes it illegal for Luke, David or anyone else to have a beer with you on payday or any other day?
H
May 20, 2010 at 3:56 pm
Any candidate who agrees to back-out if they don’t win Daly’s primary isn’t a serious candidate.
May 20, 2010 at 3:38 pm
h.!!! h. brown!!! After years of hostilities and a near knock down/drag out at your old hangout, La Reina Taqueria, we finally agree on something!
Balloons for Blue Angels!!! I love it!!!
But I can’t object to Fleet Week and the Blue Angels solely on the grounds of public safety; that’s as San Francisco NIMBY as trying to elect Gavin Newsom Lt. Gov just to get him outa City Hall ASAP. I object to the humanly and environmentally catastrophic War on Terror, which is really a war for the world’s resources to keep feeding the military industrial machine, and I’m sick of San Franciscans acting like there’s nothing they can do about it but elect a president, because war’s a federal decision, so there’s nothing they can do about it.
The feds can’t make war if Americans all over the country don’t cooperate every day. The Blue Angels Air Show comes here to shock’n awe recruit and celebrate lethal force at San Francisco’s request. We can cancel it and if we did, it would be a stronger antiwar action than anyone in the U.S. has taken in years.
In 2007, I studied the official website of the Blue Angels Air Show, learned that they come at the City’s request, then called Boxer, Pelosi, and Feinstein’s offices to ask “Who the hell requested this???” Boxer’s office called back from D.C. at about 8:00 the next morning to say, “It was a local request,” and gave me Gavin Newsom’s telephone #. That should tell you how important the local request routine is.
Even if neither the Mayor nor the Board nor the voters will stop it, an unwelcoming committee, with balloons or whatever, is long overdue.
The war and all the predatory builder/lenders and investment banks, including Lennar and its Universal American Mortgage Company (UAMC), are what hammered the City budget and will keep it up if no one does some more serious, creative legislating, at whatever level, than I’ve seen yet. San Francisco has the power to stop inviting the Blue Angels here, and it has the power to get out of the Redevelopment racket with Lennar/UAMC and its kind.
May 20, 2010 at 3:31 pm
What about bikes? Daly forgot that crucial means of saving the planet. And I don’t see graffiti/tagging as “public art” as per Tim Redmond, a prog in good standing.
http://district5diary.blogspot.com/2005/02/jive-turkey-progressivism.html
May 20, 2010 at 9:28 am
I should not have used the word “bastard”. I apologize. The rest is spot on, however.
May 20, 2010 at 8:26 am
What is it?
I don’t know, but will guess.
Daly is using this Progressive Confab as a last ditch effort to show that he has some influence in the city. He has virtually none today– he was frozen out of power– like the best– because he was too much of a wobbly wheel to the Democratic Party Central Command (the party’s consensus).
I think he should have finished with them and become an independent. He is proud of making the Party in San Francisco more progressive– an illusion as Anne Garrison suggests when she points out the “Progressive” failure to address substantive issues like our participation, or aquiescence, or silence to illegal and devastating wars of our own making.
It is probably too late for Daly– a decent man who did his best to be a responsible representative.
The future belongs to chameleons.
May 20, 2010 at 7:37 am
Arrogant bastard. Trying to be D6’s version of Aaron Peskin. Pathetic
May 20, 2010 at 7:10 am
Morning campers,
Chris has done a mountain of good work over the years and I appreciate it. Unfortunately, he no longer has his shoulder to the wheel for we D-6 residents. What’s missing here?
Open Boedekker Park!
He should organize and picket the locked park and the cop shop across the street. It is outrageous that people sit all over the streets all around a perfectly functional little park.
Replace the benches in Civic Center
Willie Brown had these removed in the middle of the night. Daly is silent while D-6 residents are forced to sit on the ground where the benches once stood.
Allow SRO residents visitors on paydays
Just because we’re poor doesn’t mean that we should have our rights to interact with our friends and family curtailed at the whims of TNDC and THC and the Patels. There are 15,000 of us and we have regularly voted en masse for Daly but he hasn’t done anything for us for the last year. Could it be because the poverty pimps who restrict our freedoms regularly give him money and foot soldiers?
Oppose the Mid-Market PAC
This group just got a million dollars from the Mayor to re-assemble and pursue their ‘death of fun’/make SF ‘Peoria by the Bay’ agenda. Daly should be condemning them daily.
Balloons for Blue Angels
Every year the Navy jets make simulated bombing runs a couple of hundred feet (or less) above the Tenderloin. Daly has given up on stopping them. The Angels do this in no other city. He should organize a welcoming barrage of colorful balloons for them. Hey, it worked for London.
Folks, I like Daly. I attack him to try and ‘encourage’ him to support my ideas regarding public policy but I do that to all politicians and, unfortunately, even to people in bars and on buses and in the street that I don’t even know. Daly’s done a ton of good things for us locals.
But, he doesn’t anymore. He’s spending his last year in office with truly insane shit like making public the addresses of cops who have been threatened and now this dipshit election. All for his ego.
I know that fighting for little things like taking the locks off gated parks and returning a few benches or making it legal for Luke Thomas or David Campos to come over and have a beer with me on payday are not huge items to most. But, they are to me. And many thousands like me.
Won’t you come home, Chris Daly.
Won’t you come home.
And, I don’t mean to Fairfield.
h.
May 20, 2010 at 12:24 am
The endorsement that emerges from this process will be the kiss of death for the candidate who receives it. All the other candidates will immediately attack the endorsed one as the choice of the machine.
The endorsed one, in turn, will be on the defensive throughout the entire campaign, trying to prove that he or she is not a stooge of Chris Daly. It will be an impossible situation for any candidate to be in.
The folly of Daly’s current effort reminds me of Tom Ammiano’s folly in the 2003 mayoral race. Ammiano was furious at the way that Matt Gonzalez jumped into the race at the last minute, cutting Ammiano off at the knees.
As a result, Ammiano held off endorsing Gonzalez in the runoff. Finally, as late in the game as possible, Ammiano announced that he was endorsing Gonzalez “in the spirit of forgiveness.”
An endorsement like this is the kiss of death. It couldn’t have been more poisonous. It cost Gonzalez votes that he could not afford to lose.
The actions of Chris Daly and Tom Ammiano go beyond stupidity. Something is at work here that’s truly bizarre. What is it?
May 19, 2010 at 11:29 pm
Now we will see who, out of the candidates, will bow to Boss Daly’s orders.
The Boss forgot one item in his “progressive pledge”. Candidates must publicly kiss the Boss’ ring and promise, if elected, to take their marching orders from the Boss.
Pitchers of Kool Aid will be prepared in advance for use if necessary.
May 19, 2010 at 9:56 pm
Chris Daly has always voted more as I would than any other Supervisor on the Board, but I find this a rather odd list, including many particulars but no clear vision of sustainable culture that I can discern.
Most notably, this “progressive pledge” says nothing about how to resist the war, meaning the many wars that make up the humanly and environmentally catastrophic War on Terror.
I might think this means that Supervisor Daly excluded any issues that San Francisco Supervisors have no jurisdiction over, if he hadn’t included several such issues, most notably capital punishment and a woman’s right to choose.
But this exclusion of opposition to the War on Terror seems typical of progressive Democrats in the age of Obama, in which resistance to the war has come to seem futile to so many.
And thus perhaps irrelevant to the current “progressive” Democratic agenda. E.g., Joe Sestak, the “progressive” Democrat who just unseated Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, seems to be called a progressive because of his domestic agenda, though after 09/11, he became Director of “Deep Blue,” the Navy’s anti-terrorism unit. (Sestak was, before his political career, a career naval officer, http://goo.gl/5qr0.)
To be fair, I should add that Chris Daly was the first Supervisor I know of to make the Blue Angels Air Show an issue at the Board, which, to me at least, finally revealed both what the Blue Angels Air show is: 1) one of the Pentagon’s biggest all forces military recruitment drives, and, 2) a festival that the City of San Francisco not only welcomes but requests, year after year.
Daly’s former aide, District #6 candidate James Keyes later told me that he had to deal with between 200 and 300 hate phone messages in one morning over the Blue Angels, in 2007, after a hate radio jock gave Daly’s phone # out on the air.
May 19, 2010 at 8:55 pm
This can not work, no one will buy into its legitimacy, so many questions; which candidates are eligible, who can vote, who chose the criteria, who will monitor the “election”, who cares
And even if all the above are answered, the other candidates will highlight holes in the process. possibly doing more harm to the winner than good.
Daly should move on and put the disappointments of last 10 years behind him, its too late to make a difference now.
May 19, 2010 at 7:44 pm
What? You need to support only 28 positions in order to get the stamp of approval from Chris Daly?
I would have expected hundreds. Is he going soft on us, or what?
Then again, these are a smaller number of positions than you need to hold in order to become a Moonie.