Would-be thieves hit Kim’s campaign HQ
Supervisor Jane Kim’s mayoral campaign headquarters in San Francisco’s Mission District appears to have been the target of an attempted break-in.
At around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, a Kim campaign staffer went to open the office at 2640 Mission St. when she discovered that the heavy security chain draped over the metal gate in front of the office’s glass doors had been cut in two, said Kim’s campaign manager, Jon Golinger.
The metal gate had been pulled up to about “knee level,” Golinger said, suggesting that someone might have tried to squeeze underneath it. The glass doors behind the gate, which were dead-bolted, were also cracked.
“Clearly an object had been banged against them,” Golinger said. “Thankfully, no one was hurt and (the would-be thieves) were, happily, not successful. And not only did they not break in, they kept the campaign down for all of five minutes while we called the police.”
A campaign headquarters makes an odd target for an attempted burglary. Curiously, just a few doors down, a Verizon Wireless store — stocked with expensive electronic equipment — was untouched. In addition to a few old computers that the campaign bought at a thrift store on Valencia Street, Golinger said Kim’s office contains mostly paper maps of city precincts and campaign materials.
“I couldn’t think of a worse target for a thief,” he said.
There was no evidence to suggest that the attempted break-in was politically motivated, but Golinger said that with just 57 days of campaigning left to go, “this is the time of dirty tricks and shenanigans. And whether or not this was (politically motivated), everyone on the campaigns — not just ours — need to be attuned.”
— Dominic Fracassa What he said: A candidate for the 2019 San Francisco district attorney’s race attacked California’s “liberal policies” during a Fox News interview on Monday, saying they have chased out the middle class.
“Some of the liberal policies are very expensive,” civil rights attorney Joe Alioto Veronese told Fox News host Tucker Carlson, nodding in agreement when Carlson accused California politicians of favoring undocumented immigrants.
“California politicians are spending the overwhelming majority of their time talking about how to help people here illegally,” Carlson said. “Do you worry that you’re not paying enough attention to your own people — to your own middle class — and they’re leaving?”
“Oh, every day, all day long,” said Veronese, a one-time police commissioner and son of mayoral candidate Angela Alioto. He went on to attack “liberal policies” of San Francisco, including a billion-dollar bond measure floated by one mayoral candidate — presumably a reference to Jane Kim’s pitch for an affordable housing bond.
The Daily Caller, a conservative website that Carlson co-founded, recapped Veronese’s surprising statements in an article posted Monday night.
“A California Democrat running for the San Francisco district attorney seat admitted during a Fox News interview Monday that the state needs to focus more of its resources on its middle class,” the article said.
But Veronese pushed back Tuesday, saying he had been misunderstood.
“What I said was, ‘A lot of people are leaving San Francisco because it’s expensive here,’ ” he insisted in a phone interview with The Chronicle.
“Taken in context, the question was, ‘Do we need to focus on the middle class in California … and specifically in San Francisco?’ ” Veronese said. “And my answer was, ‘Yes, absolutely, we need to focus on the middle class.’ ”
Veronese probably will compete with another former police commissioner, Suzy Loftus ,to challenge incumbent George Gascón for the district attorney seat.
His mother is running a spirited campaign to “save the soul of San Francisco” — a message that some detractors privately compare to President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
— Rachel Swan