Mission Local is publishing a daily campaign dispatch for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: Aaron Peskin. Read earlier dispatches here.
“No one likes the stuffy galas,” said Róisín Isner, director of activism and operations for the San Francisco Tenants Union. Behind her, someone laid out a merch table on El Rio’s back patio — SF Tenants Union tote bags and Tenants Rights handbooks. To the left of us, someone readied the bubble machine.
The Friday-evening fundraiser was sponsored by mayoral candidate and Board President Aaron Peskin, Jim Stearns (consultant to many progressive campaigns, including Peskin’s) and Wolford Wayne, Westley Law, and Humprheys Joiner (all law firms specializing in eviction defense). Participants were recruited for Seismic RetroFashion, the spring fundraiser for the Tenants Union, on the basis of being known in the housing justice community as a person already in possession of at least one good outfit.
“We have a defense attorney here who is really stylish, so we were like, ‘You’re going to be one of the judges!’” said Isner, who was not on the catwalk, but was nonetheless rocking a bold floral-print cardigan, knee socks, and ‘90s-retro burgundy chunky-soled shoes.
And the candidate himself? At a point near the end of the fashion show, Peskin materialized on the back patio of El Rio, wearing a gray suit jacket, white dress shirt (open at the neck, no tie) and a bombastically feathered vintage hat on loan from another attendee. The hat looked like something Cher would have worn in the 1970s.
Improbably, the look worked. Peskin wore the hat with supreme confidence, mingling with a crowd that tilted heavily towards friends, colleagues and campaign staff. He posed for a photo with Shane Saldivar, one of the judges and a manager at the Office of Transgender Initiatives (big hat, big shoes, black dress) and Myrna Melgar, supervisor for District 7 (orange and peach jumpsuit with gold cuff bracelets — kind of a Wonder-Woman-on-her-day-off vibe). “I swear, when I last saw Myrna an hour ago, she was wearing a completely different outfit,” said Peskin.
The audience, scattered around the patio eating tamales off of paper plates, was cheerful, convivial, and full of arcane knowledge about tenants’ rights. A few had dressed up, but most were wearing variations on the San Francisco uniform: Muted colors, comfortable shoes, many layers for adapting to on-the-fly temperature shifts from hour to hour and neighborhood to neighborhood.
The fashion itself is not, as this reporter hoped, seismic retrofit-themed—no one was dressed as a bundle of rebar that has been signed off on by a permit officer before it was even installed, or a gas pipe improperly encased in concrete. Rather, the title was an affordable-housing deep cut, a reference to the long struggle between landlords and rent-controlled tenants over how much rents can be raised when a landlord carries out those mandatory seismic retrofits.
Peskin, like every other elected official, is not allowed to campaign while he’s on the job, so his nights and weekends are packed with events like these. This one is low-key, comparatively speaking. Peskin didn’t make a speech; he just chatted and posed for photographs. Probably no one in this crowd needed wooing. Is Peskin not the man who just sponsored item 240174, closing a loophole that allowed landlords to raise rent on rent-controlled tenants to cover increased property taxes that those landlords were not actually paying? Did he not just persuade the Board of Supervisors to declare May “Affordable Housing Month?” (Yes, he did).
Peskin’s field director, Michael Redmond (navy puffy coat and khakis, accessorized with a clipboard) has been working on political campaigns since he was a 12-year-old volunteer for No Wall on the Waterfront. Stearns (black leather jacket, black t-shirt) said that his first political campaign was the realization, at age 7, that he could just say ‘no’ when a teacher told him to do something. This landed him in the principal’s office, where he used this unprecedented access to executive power to successfully agitate for more bouncy balls in the playground.
The show itself was giddy and charming. Audience members threw themselves in front of the stage to snap photos like paparazzi, and Kaylah May, labor rep for the California Nurses Association (long white dress, floral crown) expertly emceed. “CAN WE GET THE SEXY PROFESSOR?” yelled May, as a redhead in a brown tweed suit and turtleneck posed demurely. “THE PROFESSOR HERE IS WALKING BECAUSE HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT! BABY, YES! TWIRL IT! TWIRL IT! I PICKED THAT OUTFIT FOR HIM THIS MORNING!”
Inside the bar, Peskin ordered another Athletic non-alcoholic IPA. The first political campaign he ever worked on, he said, was the 1999 write-in campaign to get Tom Ammiano elected mayor. “It was amazing. We wound up losing, but it energized an entire generation — of which I am a part — that got into local electoral politics.”
That energy coalesced around something that Ammiano had set in motion years earlier. In 1996, he had managed to get a measure on the ballot reinstating district elections, and voters approved it. Beginning in the year 2000, a person running for the Board of Supervisors wouldn’t need to win over the entire city, just a majority of voters in their newly created district. Ammiano’s campaign operatives separated into different district races. At Ammiano’s suggestion, Peskin ran for supervisor of District 3. He won.
As jobs go, it was extremely different from negotiating water rights for Native tribes, which is the work that Peskin had been doing before. It was also, frequently, extremely not fun. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a concerted, funded effort to drive me crazy,” said Peskin. “By the middle of my first term I thought, ‘I’m not doing this.’ But I did!”
The same forces that have made Peskin’s political career stressful in the past are almost certainly marshaling their resources to blast him in the not-too-distant future.“I kind of don’t care anymore,” he said. “I’m 60 years old. People are saying truths about me that I deserve, and untruths about me that I don’t deserve. I’m just going to keep going.”
And with that, he passed the hat on to someone else, and left El Rio to prepare for a weekend on the campaign trail.
Finally a friendly face in Room 200.