Bay Guardian Endorses Chicken John for Mayor

The Bay Guardian took a decidedly weak position in endorsing the "Anyone but Gavin" candidate for mayor today. Among the reasons cited for the SFBG's self-described 'protest vote' is Newsom's decision to not attend the monthly Board of Supervisors meetings despite a non-binding resolution demanding that he do so, largely at the behest of his apparent nemesis on the board and resident San Francisco ass-clown, Chris Daly (some of Daly's antics can be found here and here).

To be fair, this is not the only reason cited by the Guardian in their endorsement of Chicken John and two other candidates for mayor (it's a protest vote, remember?). Underneath the front page tease for the story of, "Plus: we grill Newsom!", there are true-to-life mentions of a few of the successful initiatives to which the current mayor has been attached - almost providing a veneer of impartiality to the casual reader or recent j-school graduate.

As a rather new resident to The City I certainly don't want to throw stones at a respected publication like the SFBG, but this really reeks of tabloid journalism - the sort of sensational hyperbole that one might expect in the supermarket line, but certainly not in the alternative to the alternative paper in this fair city.

The Guardian's position (I would cite the author here, but in another decidedly weak move the SFBG does not provide a byline for this article) would likely be more tolerable were it not so blatantly sensationalist. To say that San Francisco is, "at best, wallowing helplessly in problems under Newsom" is simply too much poetic license to bear from a paper that many consider a semi-respectable news source. Perhaps I'm just too new to notice, or perhaps I've just been lucky, but I certainly would not say that this city is in any way wallowing helplessly. Far from it.

Big city mayors aren't the stuff of Santa Clause. Almost by definition they have to get their hands dirty to get the job done. In my book Newsom is not much different, and frankly the insinuation that he is supposed to be, or that 'a candidate to be named later' somehow will be, smacks of the type of illogical blind idealism that gives us hard-working progressives a bad name.

(Photo credit: Chris Stewart, San Francisco Chronicle)