SAN FRANCISCO — Tom Ammiano moved into uncharted territory the day this city's registrar of voters declared that the county supervisor had forced incumbent Mayor Willie Brown into a runoff election.
Never had a write-in candidate scored such an upset in any major American city. Never had San Franciscans faced a choice between a liberal candidate and an even more liberal candidate for mayor. Never had a gay man been a serious candidate here for the top job.
Now Ammiano has three weeks to convince San Franciscans that a former schoolteacher and stand-up comedian, an impassioned advocate for the city's disenfranchised, can be a mayor for all San Franciscans.
Ammiano hopes to do that with a crusade to "take back the city" from developers and business interests that he says are squeezing out the working class.
"This should be a city for families, for children, for seniors, with a City Hall built on integrity," Ammiano said in a recent debate with Brown, in which he flayed the mayor for cronyism and for allegedly kowtowing to business.
The populist message holds appeal in a city where studio apartments rent for $1,000 a month, a downtown building boom has created traffic gridlock and financial district workers must pick their way among homeless people sleeping on sidewalks.
When he entered the race three weeks before the Nov. 2 general election, Ammiano said he was doing so largely to ensure that the ultraliberal voters who are his core supporters would come out to vote for ballot measures he wanted to see passed. Now he says that he is running to inspire young people, restore power to the city's neighborhoods and clean up city government.
Faced with a need to broaden his base and appeal to more conservative voters, Ammiano has positioned himself as a reform candidate; one newspaper dubbed him Jesse Ventura in heels. He says that Brown has paid too much attention to downtown business interests, too little attention to the neighborhoods, the homeless and renters.
But in an extraordinary 10-day registration drive, his campaign turned to--among others--the homeless in signing up about 10,000 voters for the Dec. 14 runoff election.
The matchup between the sharp-tongued Ammiano and the debonair Brown has excited San Franciscans and attracted attention from the national media. A recent poll showed Brown ahead of Ammiano by 10 points, but enough voters remain undecided that the winner is still far from certain.
