A few weeks ago it was revealed that San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie spent about $1 million on consultants to burnish his image during his first year in office. While the tone of much of this coverage was critical, although conceding that it was perfectly legal, there is another way
It is fair to say that the Marina District is not the favorite neighborhood of progressive San Francisco. Over the last few decades, it has earned a reputation as being home for affluent Yuppies, and later tech workers, who are out of step with the more avant-garde cultural, and at
The brief saga of Isabella “Beya” Alcaraz in San Francisco reveals something about the mayoral administration of Daniel Lurie. For those of you who have been paying attention to other things in recent weeks, following the recall of Joel Engardio, the supervisor for District Four, which includes most of the
During the years 2022 through 2024 when San Francisco’s doom loop narrative was at its height, much of the local media as well as conservative groups and observers in San Francisco were committed to the belief that the city was being ravaged by crime with danger lurking on every
In politics, as in so many other parts of life, timing is crucially important. For example, in the recently completed New York City Democratic primary there is little doubt that the salience of the war in Gaza to the left helped catapult Zohran Mamdani, the most outspoken anti-Israel voice in
A charitable way to describe the Democratic Party since Donald Trump’s victory in the November election is that they have struggled to find their sea legs. Many Democratic elected officials have been unable to develop either a message or strategy that inspires or mobilizes voters. A significant exception to
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Daniel Lurie has now been Mayor of San Francisco for just over 100 days. While most of the world’s attention has been on the catastrophic, chaotic, cruel and destructive first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second presidency, it is useful to reflect on Lurie’s first 100 days
The release of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance has set off a policy debate between what is generally called the center and the left, but from an economic perspective is better understood as between the left and the right. Much has been written critiquing the problems
One of the many ways the second Trump administration feels different from the first one is that this time it seems to be hitting San Francisco much more directly. During the first go around, whenever I was in San Francisco the horrors, excesses, cruelty, incompetence and crimes of Trump felt
As recently as a few years ago many would have identified San Francisco as the capital of liberal, or at least Democratic, America. The Vice-President was from the Bay Area and had gotten her start in elected office in San Francisco. One former mayor of San Francisco was the governor
Mayor Daniel Lurie faces a choice. He can continue to embrace the doom loop narrative instrumental to his election victory, or declare victory it and take on the hard work of governance. The doom loop narrative reframed how much of the country and world viewed San Francisco politics, and sought,
The biggest story of the elections in San Francisco was Daniel Lurie winning the race for mayor. Lurie became the first person to defeat a sitting mayor since Willie Brown stymied Frank Jordan’s bid for reelection in 1995. Jordan, in turn, was one of the first high profile politicians