“Thank you for supporting a racist liar tonight!”

That’s what groovy young Matt Gonzalez supporters, all but one of them white and well-pierced, shouted at a multiracial crowd of Gavin Newsom backers Monday night, when former President Clinton came to San Francisco to endorse the embattled Democratic candidate for mayor over his Green Party challenger. Nobody bothered to explain why Newsom was a racist, or a liar. It was the Gonzalez campaign in a sound bite: Sanctimony over substance, personality over policy, and a good time was had by all of his supporters — a helluva good time! — as they vilified the opposition without offering an agenda for change of their own.

This may be the strangest political race in San Francisco’s strange history. A candidate of privilege, the child of a wealthy family, with an Ivy League pedigree, squared off against the dyslexic son of a single mom, who worked during high school to help support his family, and went to a middling California college on a sports scholarship. But despite the national hype about the wealthy yuppie vs. the working-class bohemian, the rich kid happens to be Gonzalez the Green, while the hardscrabble lad is Newsom, who has been caricatured as a silver-spoon son of patronage since he was Mayor Willie Brown’s “straight white male” appointee to the board of supervisors in 1997. Go figure. I still can’t.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Nancy Pelosi: Democrats in the last few weeks have gone all out to elect Newsom and defeat the Green Gonzalez. After Arnold Schwarzenegger’s storming of Sacramento, the party can’t afford to lose another stronghold. Meanwhile, outgoing Mayor Brown, who’s been savaged by Gonzalez, is making the Green’s defeat and Newsom’s election a test of his legacy. On the other side, local and national Greens have swarmed the city to try to elect Gonzalez, who’d be by far the highest-ranking Green if he defeats Newsom. And yet the Democrat-Green matchup doesn’t fully describe the depth of the feeling catalyzed by the race.

In my five years at Salon, I’ve suffered the most hostile ad hominem attacks when I’ve written about two people: Bill Clinton (the hate came from the Free Republic right) and Gavin Newsom (whose haters come from the left). So forgive me my solipsism when I say Clinton’s appearance backing Newsom Monday night was surreal but strangely soothing, a sanity check for a lifelong ultraliberal who nonetheless has come to believe — along a winding, rocky road — that Newsom is the better candidate for mayor in this upside-down election.

When I called Newsom a “Clinton Democrat” in an earlier story for Salon, I got nasty e-mail and voice mail and in-person dressings-down from Gonzalez supporters, who insisted Newsom is a Republican who occasionally wears Democratic drag, the better to fool voters and dumb liberal writers like me. So it was validating to see Clinton himself embrace Newsom, for the same reasons I respect him. “America has some serious challenges, and hardly anybody has done serious thinking about the next 20 years,” Clinton told the crowd. “I’ve actually read Gavin Newsom’s platform, and I know what he wants to do,” he went on, one policy wonk praising another. He even slipped in praise for Newsom’s backing a local version of the Clinton-expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, which until that moment I believed only I was nerdy enough to have noticed. “I’m here tonight only partly because I’m a Democrat — I believe in Gavin Newsom and his policies,” Clinton said.

He never mentioned Gonzalez; in fact, he acted like Newsom was facing a Republican, warning his listeners that a Democratic loss in what he called the nation’s “most progressive city” would only encourage Bush supporters in the “great struggle to define the shape of the country” that Clinton said he joined with the 1992 election. “I won the first skirmish, and with the help of the Supreme Court, they won the second.” The sweaty, giddy capacity crowd of Newsom precinct captains and other loyal volunteers, who’d waited almost three hours for Clinton after his flight was delayed, ate it up. Before Clinton spoke, Fred Sanchez, a firefighter supervising a Newsom phone bank, asked me as a reporter whether I thought the ordeal would turn out to be worth it to the Newsom camp: Could Clinton’s appearance actually help Newsom on Election Day?

I told Sanchez, speaking mostly for myself, that I thought it would: Newsom, strangely, used to seem as if he was running away from his Democratic Party ties. He invented himself as a Clinton-style problem-solving triangulator, without any of Clinton’s lefty political history. And so the left, which had a love-hate relationship with Clinton, reserved only hatred for Newsom. Then came Green Matt Gonzalez, and the left fell in love with the youngish bohemian defense lawyer whose moral certainty and self-righteousness matched its own. Clinton, I told Sanchez, could give some liberals pause if they were thinking of going with Gonzalez.

Certainly his visit strengthened my resolve — once furtive and apologetic — to back Newsom. I honestly tried to like Matt Gonzalez when he declared his candidacy for mayor in August. I had already come to believe that my anger at Ralph Nader’s self-indulgent 2000 presidential campaign — widely shared by lefty Democrats — was corrosive, a political dead end. The Democrats need a vital left, the Greens control a good portion of it, we all need to get along or else resign ourselves now to another four years of the Bush presidency.