Candidate Caitlyn Jenner gets raucous Tenderloin welcome
Reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner got more reality than ever when she took a threeblock walk through the Tenderloin on Wednesday.
“What are you going to do for the community?” hollered a man in a black hat, a few times, while Jenner stood on the corner of Turk and Hyde streets, explaining to reporters why she wanted very much to be governor.
Jenner spun around with the same speed she once brought to the Olympic track.
“I’m going to get you some help!” she roared, pointing a finger his way.
“Get yourself your own motherf—ing help!” the man in the black hat shot back, and he took a tug from a can in the paper sack he was holding. “I’m for Newsom!”
So it went as Jenner’s gubernatorial campaign trail took an amble through one of San Francisco’s more unflinching neighborhoods.
The candidate passed three sidewalk sleepers, three imbibers and a man changing his pants on the sidewalk. In her yellow-and-white designer sneakers, the candidate stepped adroitly over liquids of unknown origin.
Throughout her walk, she touched on familiar campaign themes — Newsom was spending too much, homeless nonprofits were “ripping off ” the state, children forced to wear masks to school were being turned into a “whole generation of germophobes.”
And every chance she got, she reminded her Tenderloin listeners that Disney World in Florida reopened months before Disneyland in Anaheim — a clear case of Newsom’s bungling.
“We could have done it better,” she said.
The path down Turk Street may have been slightly shorter than the 110-meter hurdles course she conquered in the 1976 Olympics, but the hurdles were higher. At one point a campaign aide steered her to the south side of Turk Street so as to avoid a dozen sidewalk tents on the north side.
“To be honest, I feel so sorry for these people,” Jenner said. “Life’s not easy. I know that. We need to do something.”
In the gubernatorial replacement race, Jenner finds herself far back in the pack with a crowded field ahead and not a smidgen of daylight for a breakthrough. By most polls, she is trailing arch-conservative talk show host Larry Elder, former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, YouTube blogger Kevin Paffrath and perennial GOP runner-up-foreverything John Cox.
Just keeping up with whoever is polling in fourth place is tougher than keeping up with a Kardashian.
Jenner called herself a “hardworking common-sense person,” and, during her Tenderloin campaign swing, did her best to ignore a steady stream of catcalls, many of them profane, from passersby.
She did pause to talk at length with a woman who approached her and identified herself as a transgender woman named Lisa Strawn.
Jenner, who is also transgender, took her aside, put her arm around her and offered words of support. Strawn told her she knew she was transgender at age 19.
“At 19, I didn’t have the guts,” Jenner replied.
After Jenner headed off to her next campaign stop at the Log Cabin Republicans club, Strawn said she supported Newsom, opposed the recall and opposed almost every position of Jenner’s.
“Just because she’s trans doesn’t mean I have to roll with her,” Strawn said.