Tornado Tuesday: San Francisco's Return to Glory

I’ve been covering this campaign season largely, and rather embarrassingly, from a microfiber couch in San Jose. Mostly, I flip from MSNBC to Comedy Central and peruse the internet and I call that “reporting”. But now that Gigantor Tuesday has blown through California, I have to say it looks a lot different when the election actually comes to town.
I saw enough surreal and marvelous things in my hometown of San Francisco on Super Tuesday to carry my enthusiasm for the campaign on into the fall. The question mark first appeared over my head in a barber shop in the Fillmore, where every few minutes a teenager strolled in for a haircut wearing an “I voted” sticker on his oversized Scarface tshirt. Later on, I saw the two bike riding Mission hipsters, standing on the corner of Van Ness and market, holding a banner that read, “San Francisco Chooses Obama”, smiling and waving at passing cars. At the donut shop on the same corner, two homeless Vietnam vets shared a cup of coffee. The one with the beard told the one in the camouflage, “I voted for Mrs Clinton, brother. You?”
Across the intersection, a graying couple with wool socks in sandals held a sign up for Hillary. A Filipino lady slowed her Honda down and stuck her head out of the window, smiling at them, to grab her own Hillary sign. An old white guy drove by in a Mercedes and honked for the Obama hipsters.
If I tried to analyze it, I would say in very loose terms that it looks like the old people voted for Hillary and the youngsters voted for Obama. But that’s not really true and I don’t really care. This is a different kind of politicized San Francisco than I’ve witnessed in my life. I’ve only ever seen combative and angry political action in this city (however necessary). Stop The War (both wars). Impeach Bush (both Bushes). Stop gentrification (first with the artists then with the tech boom). It was either that or some ridiculous Spearhead concert in Dolores Park with barefoot dancing to free Mumia or Tibet or whatever. Noble enough causes, all of them, but I never saw any glimpse of hope in the tactics.
I’ve never seen people genuinely excited about alternatives or any tangible progress. People came out in record numbers back in 2004, but not because they liked John Kerry, rather because they didn’t like the president. And even though yesterday, people had signs supporting different candidates, this was not a day of divisive politics. Most San Franciscans seem to want the same thing, we just have a different idea of who should do it.
An old friend and fellow native San Franciscan sent me text messages all day long, sharing similar observations. He told me he saw some kids holding “honk 4 obama” signs and he gave them a honk. Then he made a poetic comparison by saying that sharing that moment with them felt like when he wore a 49er jersey in the Mission District as a kid and every body waved and gave high fives.
Those were the proudest San Francisco moments I can remember—excitement about the Niners and the Giants, in better days. It says a lot that my friend made that comparison and it taps into something deep from my childhood that I miss. And not to trivialize the unifying power of professional sports, but it’s even more exciting to be brought together by a viable political movement at the end of some dark days in this country.
Still later in the day, down 9th street, I saw a flock of 60something hippies in full gear—jester hats, tie dyed shirts, beads in the hair, round sunglasses—and they all carried Hillary signs, laughing as they made their way. As I rode my bike across the street, I watched them long enough to see the storefront they slipped into: one of South of Market’s famed cannabis clubs.
I’ve heard that these presidential nominations used to be decided by a bunch of old, rich white men in the proverbial “smoke filled rooms”. Well it seems that in San Francisco, we still anoint our candidates in smoke filled rooms. It’s just a different cast of characters and a better variety of smoke.