So much ignorance in the reporting of two San Francisco recall elections locally and nationally. I just had to write this blog quickly. This home of Nancy Pelosi has had two successful recalls in three months and all the media I see gets it completely wrong.
Why me? What is my special insight?
More than five years ago I figured out that only a modest part of San Francisco was crazy woke, but that part of the electorate was most active, aggressive and was well organized because of the strong local unions and the most powerful Democrat Party West of the Mississippi.
The local San Francisco Democrat Party elects more statewide offices with its small population than Los Angeles with a population six times greater. Six times greater and one third the elected statewide offices.
Up until 1965, San Francisco had Republican mayors, state representatives and members of Congress. That hasn’t been true since then, since the end of the hereditary elite that I have written about in earlier blogs.
Three of the great leaders of the Democrat Party were San Franciscans and built the local party into the Statewide mega-machine. Pat Brown, Dianne Feinstein and Willie Brown. The other great power was Jesse Unruh from Southern California.
What I figured out, with 45 years in local politics, was that a major part of the San Francisco electorate was Asian with conservative pro-police and pro-business values. The Chinese had been co-opted into a strong voting group in the Democrat Party by Rose Pak who used the Democrat corruption to decisively help her voters.
The Chinese of Rose Pak along with a large Filipino group, Vietnamese and other South Asian settlers in San Francisco constituted a large near majority. This large population had common values: they believed in the value of education, they supported the police and they were all part of the small business working population.
My idea was to start running city propositions that supported the police. Based on these propositions I would raise money for this new pan-Asian group, find and reward the good community organizers and build a new conservative political machine.
I had to get the support of the police union leaders. I tried for two years and failed. I even went to the only honest politician in San Francisco, Quentin Kopp, who wouldn’t help me at the time because of his ties to the Democrat Party machine.
Those efforts five years ago are how I know why San Francisco was able to organize two recall elections and voted to recall three School Board members and a District Attorney.
The Asian voting community was appalled by the School Board that had ruined the schools, with the student population dropping from 85,000 students in 1970 when I was involved to 43,000 today. Many students moved to private schools and many white families moved to suburban schools. The number of classrooms and teachers remained the same and the administration expanded. The key mover in the recall was the School Boards elimination of the historic college prep high school (Lowell) because it had become 75% Asian.
The Asian community also voted to recall the openly communist District Attorney because he failed to stop the 10-fold increase in auto break-ins which affected nearly every Asian family in the City. He allowed the open public robbery of every small retail business and the consequent closing of many chain stores that served the Asian community. He was also openly at war with the local police.
THAT is the story of the San Francisco recall elections.