Christensen’s lessons in political hardball

Julie Christensen has been a rising political star, a district supervisor, an incumbent candidate in a bare- knuckles election, the object of fierce disagreement in Chinatown, and a losing candidate who is now looking back at her career in City Hall.

All of which took about 11 months.

Christensen was appointed District Three supervisor by Mayor Ed Lee in December but with the knowledge that she would have to run for election in November. A well- known neighborhood activist, Christensen seemed likely to have the votes.

Likely, that is, until the surprise candidacy of Aaron Peskin, the former supervisor in D3, who jumped into the race March 30. Peskin eventually won the seat by nine percentage points.

“There’s a new alpha dog,” Christensen said this week. “I probably took on one of the most experienced politicians in San Francisco, who was backed by some of the best political minds. And give Aaron credit. He ran a perfect campaign.”

But it was also bruising. Christensen was thrown into a political whirlwind. The subtext of Lee’s appointment of Christensen was that he didn’t appoint Cindy Wu, who was the choice of power brokers among the Chinese community.

“The disappointment in Chinatown about me not being Chinese caused some people to want to hurt me in any way possible,” Christensen said. “In order to get back at the mayor, they would prove me a worthless human being. So I was being called racist or having my words mangled or just flat made up.”

‘ Painful’ insults

In other words, welcome to political hardball.

“When it is your neighbors, people who have known me for a long time, that’s painful,” she said.

“You mean,” I asked, “that it was painful that your neighbors had to hear those things?”

“No,” she said. “That they are saying them.”

Conventional wisdom about politics is how hard can it be? You go to meetings, listen to all sides and then you make a decision and vote.

“We’ve all seen ‘ West Wing,’ ” Christensen joked. “We know how it works.”

But Christensen admits her inexperience showed at times. For example, when she took office, she was expected to attend a series of banquets in Chinatown. At one of the first, an organizer showed her to a table and suggested she sit down.

“So I did,” she said. “And they said, ‘ Oh she’s not friendly. She didn’t go around and say hi to everybody.’ I learned to smile on cue, I can tell you that.”

Christensen did make some media missteps, although she wasn’t helped by the quirky local Chinese media organizations. When she referred to the Stockton Tunnel as a “wormhole,” connecting two parts of town, she says she meant the theoretical passage through space. But the Chinese press claimed she meant that Chinese people were no better than worms.

And if she had it to do over, she’d probably like to rephrase her comments about Supervisor Jane Kim coming up with dire tales of evictions and displacements of lowincome tenants. Christensen said Kim “can bring out these horror stories — most of which have not taken place.” That prompted a strong reaction from Kim and a series of tweets with the hashtag # Dear Julie Im real.

Christensen ultimately apologized to Kim and said she was just trying to make the point that landlords have their own issues and problems with tenants. But it was too late. The issue took off in the media.

‘ The press was worse’

All in all, if you’d like to hear someone say something positive about the media, you probably shouldn’t ask Christensen.

“The board played rough, but the press was worse,” she said. “Hopefully the media will be as merciless on Aaron as they were to me.”

Still, I don’t think Christensen was a bad choice by the mayor. But once Peskin jumped in, she was definitely in the wrong race at the wrong time. Peskin is a savvy political operative who knew the affordable housing issue was a winner.

“Aaron is not going to be able to stop Ellis Act evictions,” Christensen said. “He is not going to be able to extend rent control. Those are going to continue to be a problem. But they make great campaign slogans.”

The irony is, after all the campaigning, debating and election, she’s still in office. Peskin will probably take over in the first or second week of December.

Last week she had a nice moment, opening the Joe DiMaggio Playground in North Beach. Christensen was one of the leaders of a group that raised funds for the renovation, a convoluted process that took 16 long years.

“If someone had told me in 1999, when we started this project, that I would preside over the opening as a district supervisor, I would have thought they were from Mars,” she said. “So yeah, that felt pretty good.”

Christensen says that after her defeat, others who had run and lost told her they sympathized. They used words like “devastated” or said they took to bed and stayed there for days.

“Yeah, well,” Christensen told them, “I’ve got a board meeting on Tuesday.”