News From Our Social Feeds

2006/06/03

Can Money Finally Buy Love?

Left: Assembly Candidate Janet Reilly, in a campaign photograph staged at St. Mary's Hospital. Her husband Clint Reilly is a director at Catholic Charities.


Voters on the west side of San Francisco are faced with possibly the most vicious Assembly race in recent memory, between city District 4 Supervisor Fiona Ma and Golden Gate Bridge Commissioner Janet Reilly. Much like the Westly/Angelides match, there is a temptation to regard the candidates as similar to each other - both women and both professing political stances well within the liberal spectrum of San Francisco - but there are important differences. One candidate has worked hard within San Francisco's political establishment - as a legislative aide, commissioner, and Supervisor - to push issues important to her base while maintaining loyalty to her political mentors - always a difficult task. The other, a relative newcomer, is a former television reporter who has made up for lost time by relying on her perceived charm, her husband's legacy of political largesse, and an brazen willingness to outright deceive the electorate.

California's 12th Assembly District has up until now been the enclave of centrist San Francisco and the northern Peninsula, with past office holders - from Leo McCarthy to Kevin Shelley - carefully balancing (some better than others) the interests of labor, homeowners and neighborhoods. That changed to an extent when former city District 4 Supervisor Leland Yee was elected to that office in 2002. Yee won re-election to the Board, despite the transition to district elections, by abruptly reinventing himself from a moderate pro-education technocrat to a Quentin Kopp model: unscrupulously pandering to both ideologues on the far left and the more base, anti-tax, anti-growth, and anti-infrastructure instincts of conservatives and NIMBY groups on the right. His term in the Assembly has been benign if unremarkable, apart from a quixotic attempt to force ratings on video games. Yee now has his sights set on the State Senate, and that race is a whole other can of worms. Unfortunately, the political environment has left another can in Yee's wake.

Fiona Ma is the current District 4 city Supervisor, having been appointed by Willie Brown when Yee departed for the Assembly. Later that year, she handily won election to that office in her own right, conspicuously without Yee's support. Ma ran a broad-based, inclusive campaign based on improving neighborhood and children's services and infrastructure, creating affordable homeownership opportunities, and fiscal responsibility. All are boring but necessary municipal policy issues, and she was for the most part successful in promoting that agenda. She also attempted to push the envelope for her constituents by strengthening regulation of massage establishments, whose abuse as a cover for prostitution activity exploded in the 90's and early 2000's, and increasing fiscal scrutiny of non-profit service providers. That, and her votes in support of legislation sponsored by Mayors Brown and his successor, Gavin Newsom, has often gotten her in trouble with those who dictate the unreasonable and overradicalized agenda of the Board of Supervisors.

That trouble has come back to her this election season, as she runs for Assembly. Ma's opponent is Janet Reilly, a Golden Gate Bridge District Board Commissioner, former campaign aide to Republican Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, and corporate PR executive. Reilly, who with her husband owns houses in SF's rarefied Seacliff enclave and in Napa, has never stood for public election before. Despite this, she's won the endorsement of Assemblymember Yee, whom she hopes to succeed, and many of Ma's colleagues on the Board of Supervisors.

So how, in a loyally Democratic district, does an inexperienced, ostentatiously rich person with suspect Progressive credentials and comparatively shallow roots in the community get this sort of support? Simple. Be Clint Reilly's wife.

And it is Clinton Reilly, former political hatchet man, ostensible real estate magnate, and would-be City Father, which has become Janet Reilly's unspoken qualification for office, and as such, the unspoken issue of this campaign.


"Clint (Reilly) is one of the sickest people I've ever come across. He's always had a craving for power as the ultimate aphrodisiac... Like sucking a crack pipe for an addict - the ultimate hit. I'm probably as sick as Clint in many ways, but I'm not running for public office. I'm running for cover."

...Political consultant Jack Davis


Clint Reilly is the son of a San Leandro milkman who grew up to be one of the most effective - and vicious - political strategists in the state's history. Much of his work has changed the political landscape of California, some say for the worse. It didn't start that way. Reilly's first successful effort at campaigns was after leaving the seminary in 1971, when he helped elect progressive former cop Dick Hongisto to the Sheriff's office. This was followed by a number of Democratic-base-appeal campaigns, such as the one to defeat the anti-labor Proposition 22 (not to be confused with the more recent anti-gay Prop 22) the following year. After getting Robert Matsui elected to Congress in 1978, Reilly became a national political star and started his own firm in earnest.

It is here that things start to unravel.

On his way to becoming another Bob Shrum, he routinely got patronage campaign work from the Democratic establishment. Much of this was unchallenging work for politically safe incumbents, yet he gained a reputation as a real piece of work to work for, increasingly abusive to colleagues and co-workers to the point of psychosis. It was during this period that he became so enraged (and reportedly, inebriated) in the course of a statewide campaign that he severely beat his then girlfriend and colleague, reportedly bad enough to put her in the hospital. The accounts of this behavior are many and indeed legion, ranging in venues from parking lots to a Noe Valley pizza parlor. Most are unverified and there are no police reports, but many feel the sting of Reilly's behavior to this day.

Dissatisfied with being a political functionary, he endeavored to change the political landscape of San Francisco by marshalling former clients to support local Proposition M, an ordinance that limits the rate of commercial office development. In doing so, he built the political coalition of right-wing NIMBYs and left-wing anti-growth ideologues which continues to dominate San Francisco politics, and allowed Walter Shorenstein, the commercial real estate developer who was the primary sponsor of the initiative, to make a killing by dominating the market.

Blood money may be an acquired taste, but it is also addictive. By the late 80's Reilly had turned into a high-dollar political hack on behalf of regulated industries, running campaigns against two major insurance industry reform initiatives. He made millions on the campaigns, allowing him to enter the Monopoly world of San Francisco real estate himself. Clinton Reilly Campaigns became a pioneering powerhouse, combining strategy, print and air campaign material, and fundraising into one firm. Reilly was also a pioneer in effective and ubiquitous negative campaigning, the bugaboo of today's national politics.

The resulting wealth continued to feed Reilly's unmitigated arrogance. He got into a physical scuffle with Phil Bronstein, then editor of the Hearst-owned Examiner inside the newspaper's offices, which earned him the hostility of California's press. He drove Kathleen Brown's campaign for Governor and Mayor Frank Jordan's re-election campaign into the ground. While it was enough to make Reilly retire from political consulting, he retained his more plutocratic ambitions.

San Franciscans live with the result of those ambitions today.

In 2000, when San Francisco put voter-enacted district elections into effect, Clint Reilly took advantage of the situation by bankrolling a majority of the left-leaning "reform" candidates, who then got elected in each district by a few thousand votes each, throwing citywide policy and planning into the toilet. Among those who benefited from Reilly largesse include Jake "Anti-Homeownership" McGoldrick; Aaron "Anti-Fun" Peskin; Leland Yee (surprise!); and most famously, Gerardo "Anti-Keeping-One's-Mouth-Shut" Sandoval. Sandoval deserves extra notice here as the recurring liberal goat on Fox News shows: you see, the Reillys are major stockholders in Fox's parent company.

Reilly also has significant stock in the abortive administration-on-abdicated-autopilot of San Francisco's flake-in-the-baking-pan mayor, Gavin Newsom: not only are the crazies on the Board supporting his wife, but Newsom has refused to endorse in the race, despite Ma's legislative loyalty to him, and it has he who gave Janet Reilly the coveted Bridge board seat in the first place. Indeed if it weren't for Al Gore, Janet Reilly would probably be on the Board of Supes now.

Which brings us to the conduct of the Reilly campaign, which has become unfortunately reminiscent of the tired and clumsy final campaigns of Clint Reilly, such as his attempt to re-elect Frank Jordan with odd subliminal street signs or his own bizarre vanity campaign for Mayor in 1999, where he spent more than a hundred dollars per vote and didn't even garner 25,000.

While Janet Reilly seems like a talented and articulate individual, virtually none of her experience before meeting Clint Reilly is mentioned in her campaign material: virtually all of the qualifications mentioned come from positions which were acquired primarily through her husband's influence, mainly with the local Archdiocese. The self-reported resume has become a Clint Reilly staple.

Right: See any resemblance yet?

Then there are the wacky campaign tactics: at the recent state party convention, Reilly operatives tried to pack the 4th district caucus and block an endorsement of Fiona Ma by literally dragging people out of the halls and handing them proxies (the strategy failed). When a clerical error by the IRS linked Ma to campaign of an anti-choice Republican governor in the Midwest, Reilly operatives ran with it straight into the showers. Then Reilly's healthcare platform was revealed to have been cribbed from a bill already introduced by another serving legislator. When critics pointed out that Reilly sent her children to an expensive private school out of the district, her campaign responded by calling Fiona Ma anti-Catholic. And the netroots stuff gets worse.

There are all indications that if Janet Reilly were somebody else, she would be an admirable public figure of some kind, somewhere. But as a vessel for the vicarious ambitions of Clint Reilly, a man who already has his fingers all over a nonresponsive Board of Supervisors and a brain-dead Mayor's office, and who even now is mortgaging himself so that he can become either a one-man star chamber or a modern-day Abe Reuf, she is at once both frightening and repulsive. Given that the election is coming up this Tuesday, one can only hope that, even in the age of Marshall McLuhan, one can still be prevented from fooling all of the people all of the time.

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