Rafael Mandelman is San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors president

Love what you read? Love that it was free?

Mission Local will never have a paywall. All our articles are free for everyone, always. Help us keep it that way — donate to our end-of-year fundraiser to make Mission Local free for your neighbors.

Donate today!

Watching the Board of Supervisors elect its president often feels a bit like observing a live-action game of three-card monte. There’s ever so much twirling about and, until the cup is lifted, you don’t know where the votes are going to be. 

Today, however, the political legerdemain took place off-camera. After several furious days of votes being whipped and deals being brokered, District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman ended up being the sole nominee for the position. And, lo, he won.

Myrna Melgar spared her colleagues, the assembled crowd and the city another 17-round slugfest of the sort we saw two Januaries ago, and withdrew from contention ahead of today’s vote. Mandelman was the unanimous winner.

There’s a lot of cachet in being board president, because it’s a position that has great possibilities. If Mayor Daniel Lurie is hit by a meteor, or runs off and joins the French Foreign Legion, for instance, Mandelman will be your new mayor. And it could happen: In just 2017, Mayor Ed Lee was felled by a heart attack while in the frozen-foods section of the city’s worst Safeway, and Board President London Breed was the next woman up. 

So, there’s a lot at stake, potentially. But, 99.9 percent of the time, board president is an inward-facing job. It isn’t a powerful position on par with Speaker of the House; within some of the more jaded quarters of City Hall, a nickname for the board president is “King of the Dipshits.” It’s tempting to apply such a sobriquet to Mike Johnson, but inaccurate. And you’d never, ever say this about Nancy D’Alessandro Pelosi. 

Electing a board president is a bit like electing the president of your office. It’s tempting to read every move as part and parcel of an overarching political dynamic, but it can be a lot smaller than that. You may agree politically with Dave from accounting, but you also may resent what he did with the break-room microwave, or how he handled that collaborative project. 

Board president, again, is an inward-facing position, and relationships matter. That’s why Tony Hall voted for Matt Gonzalez in 2003, even though they were leagues apart politically. They still are. They’re still friends.

Just who’s friends with whom after today remains to be seen. Melgar circumvented what could’ve been a bruising contest — Jackie Fielder and Shamann Walton had apparently indicated that they intended to vote for Walton as a bloc of two, indefinitely — and opted for half a political loaf. 

So, Mandelman is board president, having been the sole nominee. But expect Melgar to oversee the County Transportation Authority and its billions of dollars in transit monies. Expect Melgar to also accept the mixed blessing of helming the land-use committee. 

Why did this happen? Mandelman is perceived by his colleagues as more predictable than Melgar in his votes, for good or ill, and more willing to make deals. The bloc of left-leaning supervisors is counting on it; it will be lost on nobody that he is in this position because of their votes. Expect Connie Chan, who successfully lobbied her colleagues for Mandelman, to remain budget chair. 

That’s a big deal in this most difficult of budget years. Organized labor which, in its own words, mounted an “all hands on deck” effort to re-elect Chan in District 1, definitely wanted this. 

Also, if you’re looking for other bigger-picture political implications, yes the schism between urbanist moderates and more traditional get-off-my-lawn moderates, which ruptured over Proposition K, the Great Highway measure, just played out in the board presidency. On this day, the old-school side won. 

As was the case two years ago, District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey nominated Mandelman for the position. That he and the progressive bloc all lined up behind the centrist Mandelman defies any simplistic Manichaean read of San Francisco politics. And Mandelman is president of his office.

In an unsubtle, choreographed move, Mandelman had Dorsey and Chan escort him to the presidential dais.

The election of a board president is a strange and terrible thing. The supervisors are sworn in, and everyone laughs and cries. And then the sausage is made — in public, in full view — and everybody keeps their feelings to themselves.

Disciplined, professional boards keep the interpersonal strife behind closed doors and go about their business; it’s these people’s jobs, after all, to work together. That, to an extent, happened today. It didn’t have to. So that’s something.

It remains to be seen how Daniel Lurie performs as mayor of San Francisco. But this much is certain: Lurie is not London Breed. Board members Mission Local spoke with were looking forward to a different — namely, less bellicose — way of being.

A centrist put into power by his colleagues on the left and right could portend a centrist board free of ideological extremes. Or, like a game of three-card monte, a surprise could be in store.

You never know when that next political meteor may hit.