This Week in Willie Brown November 24th, 2010

 
Photo by Steve Rhodes.

Well, this is awkward - Da Mayor kicked off his week with some uncharacteristic self-depreciation, calling himself a loser in his Sunday column in which he points out there were “More losers than winners” in the recent election. (Which: duh, Willie, when you have half the Tenderloin running for District 2 Supervisor there’s gonna be a lot of losers.) Willie says he’s a loser because he supported Measure B for pension reform, which “went down in flames.”

On the bright side, those flames could presumably be used to grill a whole lot of Kobe beef hamburgers at Boulevard, which is the subject of his entire Inside Scoop column this week and clocks in at a whopping 7-sentences. (One of which is: “And they even had relish.”) Willie agrees that sometimes it’s OK to put a “Rolls Royce price tag on what McDonald’s gives away”, but if you’re headed to Boulevard you’ll want to “take the amount you’d need for your monthly mortgage payment with you.” City workers must be relieved that Prop B didn’t pass then, because that really would have cut in to their ability to afford bougie hamburgers.

Getting back to the Winners and Losers, Da Mayor implicitly endorses Jean Quan’s history of supporting Ebonics education by dubbing Oakland’s Mayor-Elect “She-B-Mayor”, which is kind of a fun title actually. Like the sequel to “Da Mayor” or something. Let’s hope she has custom hats embroidered. Other losers: The California Republican Party because “they even lost a state Senate race against Jenny Oropeza, who died two weeks before the election.” Also: Meg Whitman, who “would have gotten more votes if she had just flown over the state and tossed her $140 million out the window.“

Speaking of Meg Whitman, Willie points out that if we continue to have Ranked Choice Voting, which he says is dumbing down our political system along with district elections and public campaign financing, we’re going to end up with two kinds of candidates: Millionaires and “people with nothing to lose” because there’s no longer a need for candidates to have any political experience before running for office. Would it be so wrong to say this kind of makes us excited for some really weird electoral shitshows in San Francisco’s future?

In statewide politics, it’s good to know Willie already has a directly line to Jerry Brown, who he rang up the other day to ask him to stop the sale of state buildings in order to prevent more cuts to the state budget. Willie thinks Brown’s decision on the matter will be a great way to see if the new/old governor will be running the state “on the cheap.” For us in San Francisco though, it sounds like this will be a handy barometer of how much Jerry is willing to let Willie play backseat governor.

Even in his downtime, Willie couldn’t stop thinking about politics this week and went to see hometown hero Sean Penn in Fair Game: the Scooter Libby story. As he says, “the story may no longer be timely, but it is finally told in a way that the public can clearly understand.” We can definitely understand the appeal of Naomi Watts, but he might be overestimating the people’s ability to understand Sean Penn.

Finally, the former Mayor wanted to recap some common questions he’s been getting during recent speaking events. When asked if he could have been elected governor or senator, Willie says, “the answer is ‘no,’ at least not as long as my name is Willie Brown.” So keep an eye on the part of the Chronicle where they announce legal name changes. The second question, which has really been nagging at us all, was whether he would ever consider being Mayor for during 2011, when Gavin Newsom heads off for Sac-town. Although, we thought he answered this question by withdrawing his name from the running a few weeks ago, he does lay out one condition in which he would gladly accept the position: “only if all 11 members of the Board of Supervisors asked me, and only if they agreed not to meet for the entire time that I served.“

Now if we can only get the supes to take a yearlong sabbatical, we can get Slick Willie to make it rain Boulevard hamburgers around here.

[Chron] [Inside Scoop]