Gavin’s Stealth Plan Delivers for the GOP

U.S. ELECTION DISASTER: THE WORLD MOURNS.. Nov 4 2004







"I'm not sure in the light of the last four years whether the Bush team have got the skills to heal a divided America.

"Not only do we have a divided America but also we have a president who is highly polarising in his approach to world politics"

FORMER FOREIGN SECRETARY, ROBIN COOK

__________

"Almost all nations, with about three or four exceptions wanted a change.

"There is a basic lack of understanding, which is lasting and deep, between the American people and the rest of the world and it goes in both directions. The world no longer understands very well what America is."

FORMER FRENCH FOREIGN MINISTER, HUBERT VEDRINE

__________

"The Americans have voted for a militarised Rambo rather than someone who appeals to their reason"

FORMER NIGERIAN FOREIGN MINISTER BOLAJI AKINYEMI

__________

"Sweden and Europe will continue to criticise Bush the same way as earlier.

"But I do not believe that he will be more willing to listen to it during the second period than during the first."

SWEDISH PRIME MINISTER GOERAN PERSSON

__________

"It is a bad day for the environment."

TONY JUNIPER, FRIENDS OF THE EARTH

__________

"I think that people in the United States still don't understand how much Bush is hated all around the world"

SHIN HO-YUN, A 30-YEAR-OLD OFFICE WORKER IN SEOUL

__________

"We are going to see more extremism come out of the U.S. We are going to see even more isolation where Americans will not bother about the United Nations. To me that is a very sad affair."

KENYAN VICE PRESIDENT MOODY AWORI

__________

"Bush is the most hated man in the region. His mentality is naturally against Islam and Muslims. Kerry would have been better for the plain reason that he is not Bush."

HEAD OF NASSERIST PARTY IN EGYPT DIA EL-DIN DAWOUD

__________

"The temptation for Europe to define itself as 'Not America' will be increased."

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN STUDIES AT OXFORD UNIVERSITY

__________

"Bush will interpret victory as a validation of his policies. I don't expect a second term to be any more moderate - on the contrary."

RAFAEL BARDAJI, ADVISER TO FORMER SPANISH PRIME MINISTER JOSE MARIA AZNAR

__________

"We have a dangerous killer on the loose with a mandate to mount further wars. He has threatened Syria, Iran, North Korea and Cuba. Many people will feel that his re-election will make the world a more dangerous place."

STOP THE WAR COALITION CONVENOR LINDSAY GERMAN

That's the devestating line I heard at an election night party.

I don't think the midwest was ready for gay marriage. We pushed too hard, too fast. the reaction helped GOTV for Repukes.

We will all pay dearly for this. We overplayed our hand.

Gavin great that you are looking at efficiency of departments to better serve San Franciscans, while cutting duplication of services. Why not cut the fat cat consultants that pull from the General Fund like Luster etc.? Before you cut the rank and file.

Washington -- San Francisco did not vote for President Bush, but the pictures of wedded gay and lesbian couples streaming from its City Hall last February may have helped return him to the White House.

Those pictures and a Massachusetts court decision to allow same-sex marriage proved to be, if not political poison for Democratic challenger John Kerry, not exactly a tonic, either.

The lesbian and gay community awoke Wednesday morning to a bitter landscape: Bush, who supports a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, re- elected (with a fifth of the gay vote); four new Republican senators, including staunch social conservative Tom Coburn in Oklahoma; the prospect of conservatives filling potential Supreme Court vacancies; and to top it off, 11 state constitutional bans on same-sex marriage.

The state marriage bans passed overwhelmingly everywhere they were on the ballot, including, critically, Ohio, which narrowly handed Bush his victory.

Gay and lesbian leaders faced a sober rethinking of their strategy -- which some said must include reaching out to churches and red-state voters who gave Republicans their sweep of the House, Senate and White House.

Some, however, fiercely denied that their drive for marriage equality contributed to Kerry's narrow loss. The Massachusetts senator opposed a federal constitutional ban.

"There's no evidence whatsoever to suggest that gay marriage tipped the scale in any state," said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Others -- from California Sen. Dianne Feinstein to leaders of the Christian right to outside analysts -- disagreed.

Meeting with reporters outside her San Francisco home Wednesday afternoon, Feinstein was asked whether Mayor Gavin Newsom's issuance of marriage licenses -- which Bush cited as a factor in his decision to support a federal constitutional ban -- had caused a problem for Democrats.

"I believe it did energize a very conservative vote," Feinstein said. "It gave them a position to rally around. The whole issue has been too much, too fast, too soon.''

Several gay leaders insisted, however, that the marriage measures were mostly in states Bush was expected to carry anyway. Even Ohio's measure, they insist, did not hurt Kerry.

They also defended their legal drive for marriage rights, which won a historic victory with the Goodridge decision in Massachusetts last November that ushered in the nation's first same-sex marriages last spring and triggered a national storm over gay and lesbian unions in the middle of a presidential campaign.

"It's hard for me to say Goodridge tipped everything when these folks were making anti-gay law a centerpiece of their strategy since 1996," said Mary Bonauto, the lawyer for the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders who won the case.

Bonauto said that by the time Goodridge was decided, 37 states already had "defense of marriage" statutes on the books, and a constitutional ban had already been introduced in Congress.

"I believe these people would have been out there for Bush in any event," Bonauto said. "He had four years to show he speaks a particular faith code that other people understand. They were going to turn out for him, and they did -- marriage notwithstanding."

But Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said the issue won Bush the election.

"It was these value voters who ushered the president down the aisle for a second term," Perkins said, citing polls showing moral values trumped war, terrorism and the economy as the key issue for many voters.

Same-sex marriage "was the great iceberg," said Robert Knight, director of the Culture & Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women of America. "A lot of analysts saw the tip but didn't understand the power of the mass underneath. It galvanized millions of Christians to turn out and vote, and George Bush and the GOP got the lion's share of that vote."

Knight cited "massive efforts" by religious groups in Ohio "to rally pastors and to get Christians out of the pews and into the voting booths."

Some gay leaders agreed. "I think it's pretty clear that (Bush political czar) Karl Rove's strategy of using gay and lesbian families as wedge issues in this election worked," said Christopher Barron, political director of the Log Cabin Republicans, who refused to endorse Bush. "It's hard to argue with results."

Foreman, however, pointed to Kerry's vote gains in Ohio, Michigan and Oregon, all of which had the same-sex ballot measures, over Democrat Al Gore's tallies in the 2000 race as proof the measures did not contribute to Kerry's defeat.

"It was not what won Florida for Bush," Foreman said. "It was not on the table in New Mexico, it was not on the table in Nevada."

Knight insisted that the marriage issue tapped "a larger perception that the GOP represents the moral order." Although the candidates debated other moral issues as well, from stem cell research to late-term abortion, "normally one issue comes to symbolize that great cultural divide, and marriage is that issue," he said. "The Democrats, to recover, are going to have to leave Castro Street and return to Main Street or they will be hopelessly out of touch for the foreseeable future."

Nathan Persily, a University of Pennsylvania professor of law and politics, agreed that same-sex marriage became a proxy for the larger moral issues that so moved voters.

"John Kerry realized very late in the game that his persona as a secular Northeasterner was something that many Americans found foreign to them," he said, noting Kerry's declarations of his Catholic faith and speeches from Florida pulpits two Sundays before the election.

At a press conference, Newsom expressed little patience for the suggestion that GOP victories and state amendments were related to his decision to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.

"If you listened to the president," he said, "it was the activist judges who had the audacity to interpret the Constitution appropriately and say it's wrong to deny equal protection to all people.

"Why aren't the blogs talking about Schwarzenegger and his popularity at the convention? Why aren't they talking about (the governor) going out to Ohio a couple days ago? Why aren't they talking about the bin Laden tapes?

"I'd like to think I'm that influential. I hardly think I was," Newsom said.

Cheryl Jacques, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, borrowed, perhaps not coincidentally, the moral values rhetoric of an earlier civil rights movement to defend the drive for marriage equality while conceding its difficulty.

"As Martin Luther King wrote in his 'Letters from a Birmingham Jail,' '' Jacques said, "there is no convenient time to ask those who oppose equality to think more kindly about it."

Mayor Gavin Newsom may be sky-high in public opinion polls, but he suffered setbacks on election day -- and city hotels embroiled in a protracted labor dispute apparently are the first to suffer the consequences.

City voters resoundingly rejected two tax measures and an affordable housing bond Newsom sponsored and gave mixed marks to the candidates he backed for school board and the Board of Supervisors -- a political body slam for a popular mayor who won election 11 months ago.

Confronted with an $80 million annual hole in the city's projected revenue stream as a result of the failure of the tax proposals, Newsom announced a series of recommendations Wednesday to keep the city's budget balanced.

He's looking at laying off hundreds of city workers, consolidating city programs and cutting services ranging from pothole repair to recreation programs. His office plans to roll out a more detailed plan today. Some changes he can do with the stroke of a pen; others will need the backing of the Board of Supervisors and possibly voters.

Also Wednesday, he ordered an end to round-the-clock police protection for the hotels that have defied his wishes and continued their lockout of unionized hotel workers.

Why, he asked, should taxpayers foot the bill for city police to baby-sit picketers at the hotels that choose to keep their unionized employees off the job, "when I just had three people shot in Sunnydale, Bayview-Hunters Point?''

The Police Department, he said, assigned three shifts of 16 officers each to the 14 hotels. "That makes no sense to me when you've got real priorities, '' said Newsom. The mayor has been at very public odds with the hotels for not agreeing to a cooling-off period in which the workers, who ended their two- week strike Oct. 12, would be allowed back to work while contract negotiations continue. He even walked the picket line one day.

The Hyatt Regency's Matt Adams, who serves as vice president of the San Francisco Multi-Employer Group, which represents the hotels engaged in the labor dispute, said the city had pulled the cops from his hotel Monday, the day before the election. "It's already been done.''

Newsom spokesman Peter Ragone said that while some officers might have been yanked from the assignment earlier this week, the go-ahead to remove them all had been made Wednesday, with the budget problems driving the decision.

Newsom and the Board of Supervisors managed to close a projected $307 million deficit over the summer to balance the city's $5 billion budget, of which only a little more than $1 billion is considered discretionary. That plan included layoffs, service cuts, labor givebacks and department consolidations. But the final piece of the balancing act was contingent on approval of a sales tax hike and new business taxes, or wiping out the city's reserves.

Now, with the loss of the Proposition J sales tax and Proposition K business tax measures Tuesday, Newsom has to make quick adjustments to deal with a projected $97 million revenue shortfall over the next 18 months.

He said three things he wouldn't do in looking for ways to slash expenses would be to close fire stations, cut substance abuse treatment or take money away from the schools. But everything else is on the table, including the possibility of shutting down city government -- except when it comes to such essential services as police, fire, hospitals and water delivery -- during the week between Christmas and New Year's.

"We're going to make tough choices, and we need to make them immediately, '' he said.

Newsom had been bracing for the pair of tax measures to fail, with pre- election polling showing them trailing from the get-go amid organized opposition.

The mayor wasn't able to transfer his own popularity to the tax measures, the $200 million affordable housing bond he helped develop or all the candidates he hoped to see elected.

Jim Ross, who ran the campaign against Prop. K, the business tax measure, is in a unique position. He ran Newsom's day-to-day mayoral race last year and also ran the successful campaign for Newsom's Care Not Cash homeless welfare reform measure in 2002.

"Gavin Newsom, when he wasn't as popular as he is today, proved he has the ability to push forward ballot measures and his agenda,'' said Ross, who went against his old boss this election cycle. "He needs to go back to what worked for him in the past: building a grassroots and neighborhood-based coalition. He needs to get back to the basics.''

Newsom has a different take on what happened at the polls.

"We have influence, not a lot of influence,'' the mayor said of his and other officeholders' sway over voters. The difference with his proposals, he said, is that he didn't jump on a popular idea simply so he could declare a win. "This is not low-hanging fruit. ... This is tough stuff,'' he said of the ballot measures. "That's why we're prepared, because we didn't expect to win.''

In addition to the tax measures and the housing bond, three of Newsom's picks for school board lost, and it's unclear how he'll do in the Board of Supervisors races.

Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier, whom he endorsed, won the District 2 contest, but the votes are still being counted in District 7, where the mayor backed incumbent Sean Elsbernd. Supervisor Jake McGoldrick also is leading the District 1 contest, where Newsom backed challenger Lillian Sing.

"Mayors don't have coattails,'' said San Francisco pollster David Binder. "But more than feeling bad about his defeat, the mayor now has to worry about the consequences,'' most notably the budget problem.

"I have no problem failing,'' Newsom said. "I didn't come to politics to play things safe. I didn't come to politics to play the margin. I put myself out on J and K; it didn't pass. I put myself out on gay marriage. I put myself out on the picket line. ... If I'm right, I'm right. If I'm wrong I'm wrong. Move on. If there's someone better, find them.''