Campaign mailer awards — the best of the worst
Plenty of people will go to sleep Nov. 3 upset about something related to the city’s contentious election. But we can surely all agree on one pleasant outcome: no more campaign mailers! At least until next year.
For a city that prides itself on being so environmentally friendly, political consultants sure do kill a lot of trees to fill our mailboxes with shiny bits of paper about various candidates or propositions, much of it silly, boring or just plain wrong.
Herewith, we present our regular awards for all those mailers. Consider yourself lucky that your job doesn’t include collecting and actually analyzing all these scraps.
The Two Nicest and Two Meanest People in the World Award: Surprise! They’re the same duo. Supervisor Julie Christensen and her challenger, former Supervisor Aaron
Peskin, are either an angel and devil, respectively, or a devil and angel, respectively. There is no middle ground, according to their mailers, anyway.
Photos on mailers from Christensen’s campaign show that the current supervisor is such a nice lady, she regularly sits in random voters’ kitchens and, with a big smile, drinks coffee with them. Between, of course, getting a lot done on the Board of Supervisors.
According to photos on mailers from Peskin’s campaign, the former supervisor is such a nice guy, he regularly climbs jungle gyms with random kids at playgrounds and takes romantic walks on the beach with his wife. Holding hands, of course.
But there’s a very dark side to these two. Just ask the independent expenditure committees supporting them.
San Francisco Tenants and Families, a progressive group backing Peskin, has paid for mailers blasting Christensen for being aligned with groups that supported the 8 Washington luxury condo development and for taking money from landlords, Airbnb supporters, real estate speculators, venture capitalists and developers.
Slogans include “Julie Christensen’s donors want to evict you” with her head floating over an eviction notice and “Who gets rich if Julie Christensen is elected?” with a skinny white guy with a creepy smile hovering in the shadows. Apparently, he’s supposed to be your generic real estate speculator or venture capitalist.
The Committee for a Progressive and Affordable San Francisco supports Christensen and is funded mostly by angel investor Ron Conway and the Police Officers Association. Its mailers show stacks of newspapers with old stories about Peskin’s notorious “drunken calls at midnight” and “outlandish harassment.” (Peskin, by the way, has put out his own mailers saying he’s grown and matured since his first two terms as supervisor from 2001 to 2009.)
The weirdest mailer in the District Three deluge of weird mailers comes from the Asian Pacific Democratic Club. On the outside, it shows a picture of that awful graffiti reading, “No More Chinese,” that was spraypainted on walls around San Francisco in September.
Inside is a big photo of Christensen, Mayor Ed Lee and Chinese lion dancers. It reads, “If you want justice, support Mayor Lee’s priorities to make San Francisco equal for everyone.” Is it just us or is the implication that Peskin had something to do with the racist graffiti? Or would somehow push Chinese people out of the city?
Both Christensen and Peskin seem like smart, hard-working people who love District Three and have their own personal foibles. You know, like regular people, not the ones you see on campaign mailers.
The World Is Ending Award: You may think you’ve got a pretty nice life in San Francisco, but if Proposition F passes it could all come crashing down.
Your neighbors will suddenly purchase huge binoculars and spy on you. You will have to tell City Hall where you sleep every night. You will develop migraines, lose your home, get divorced and have to start charging Grandma every time she comes to visit. Wait, what? Airbnb has spent more than $8 million to defeat Prop. F, which would severely limit homerental services like, yep, Airbnb. It would limit short-term rentals to 75 days a year, require quarterly reporting from hosts and allow neighbors to sue hosting platforms and the hosts themselves for breaking the rules.
Opponents of Prop. F have understandable concerns about the heavy-handed measure, but their mailers make it seem like its passage would be Armageddon. “What happens if Prop. F passes?” reads one. “What would you do? Where would you go?”
Mailers show family photos ripped in half, a wife scowling angrily at her husband as he buries his head in his hands (hey, that could be any fight over whose turn it is to do the dishes), and people spying through blinds and binoculars.
But our favorite (well, least favorite) is the one with an older woman sitting on a couch and reading to her apparent granddaughter. There’s a big red X through Grandma’s face. That mailer points out that, currently, relatives can stay in your in-law unit without paying anything. If Prop. F passes, it says, your relatives would have to pay $397 a night. In other words, it’s curtains for visits from Grandma.
Huh? We asked Patrick Hannan, campaign manager for No on F, to explain that one. It turns out Prop. F would ban in-law units from appearing on Airbnb — so if Granny ever wants to come stay in your in-law
unit, it could not be rented out to vacationers when she’s not in town to make extra money.
But guess what? Current law also bans vacant in-law units from being rented on Airbnb. (The thought seems to be that in a city with a major housing shortage, in-law units should be rented out to full-time tenants, not vacationers.)
The mailer’s assertion that Granny would instead have to pay $397 a night comes from a Bloomberg Business report about the average nightly cost of a San Francisco hotel room. It doesn’t mean you’d actually have to charge Granny $397 a night to stay in your home, as the mailer seems to imply.
“I love my mother-inlaw, and I would never dream of charging her that,” Hannan assured us.
Still, it seems very convoluted. Granny could still stay in your guest room, on a fold-out couch or anywhere else in your house for free. Or — wait for it — she could rent a room elsewhere on Airbnb. Vote how you want to on Prop. F, but if you tell Granny she has to pay $397 a night every time she comes to San Francisco, you’re just mean.
The Conspicuously Missing Two Words Award: The campaign of Vicki Hennessy has mailed a four-page, very detailed mailer that’s basically a biography of the challenger for sheriff.
It has old newspaper clippings and photos from when she was a 31-year-old captain in the Sheriff ’s Department with very feathery hair, replicas of letters and awards she’s received, endorsements from supporters and lots of modern-day photos.
The two missing words? Ross Mirkarimi. Yeah, that guy who’s the current sheriff. You may have heard of him. A lot. But no mention by Hennessy who, perhaps wisely, seems to believe that when a car is crashing you just get out of the way.