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Ammiano often seems like a substitute teacher trying to keep order at unruly Board of Supervisors meetings. Most of the board opposes his policies, and he is consistently overruled on key issues like cable deregulation and the living wage. Although he may have the best chance of forcing Brown into a runoff, purveyors of conventional wisdom give him little chance in a head-to-head match-up with Brown.

Ammiano now seems to be relishing his public flirtation with a mayoral run, playing the role of reluctant warrior thrown into the race by an overwhelming ground swell. For months, he denied he was running, and last year, he exchanged his endorsement of Brown's re-election for Brown's public backing of his as supervisor. But the deal didn't stick. Brown is running a touch scared, even enlisting progressive patriarch Jesse Jackson to place a personal call to Ammiano pleading with him not to run. The preachy left-wing Bay Guardian, on the other hand, ran a cover story begging him to enter the race.

Leland Yee, another potential candidate, moved up from the school board to become one of two Chinese-American supervisors. Brown's advisors have been trying to keep Yee out of the race, hinting that they'll back him for mayor in 2003 if he stays out of the running this year. Chinese-American support has been crucial to Brown, and he would hate to lose it to Yee. But Yee has held out, and the prospect of becoming the city's first Chinese-American mayor seems too enticing to say no to outright -- just yet. Yee chairs the board's Finance and Labor Committee, which clashed with Brown in last year's budget wrangle, in which Brown called for the hiring of more than 1,300 city workers.

Yee's core support comes from the heavily Chinese-American pockets of the city's outer neighborhoods, which have been galvanized over a never-ending fight about a downtown freeway. Progressives like Ammiano have called for the freeway's removal, while Yee has been the freeway's primary supporter on the board. If Yee does throw his hat into the ring, the freeway issue will be a central tenet of his mayoral campaign.

Sensing a glimmer of hope, former mayor Frank Jordan, who Brown vanquished in the last election, is all but certain to announce his political comeback. Jordan's one term was lackluster, marked by rising homelessness and declining city services. The genial but ineffectual former police chief sealed his defeat when he allowed himself to be photographed naked in the shower with radio shock jocks from a Los Angeles station -- a photo that got national play. Jordan said he was posing for the photo to show that he "had nothing to hide." And who was the campaign manager who gave his OK to Jordan's fateful plunge? None other than Clint Reilly.

Brown's re-election could still be a cakewalk. None of his likely challengers is without serious political flaws. He has survived worse than the current chaos: A multi-year FBI investigation of corruption in the state capital resulted in the indictment of legislators and staff, but Brown walked away unscathed.

Politicians have gone to defeat underestimating Brown's intelligence -- and endurance -- before. But his current problems are a comedown for a man whose first election seemed to herald a new era of multiracial urban reform politics in San Francisco.
salon.com | Aug. 5, 1999

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