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Whatever got Ammiano's thousands of volunteers through the door of the campaign offices, it kept many coming back for the duration of the run-off. For some, giving time was the only way to fight back against the torrent of money lavished on the Brown campaign by the Democratic Party machine. Soft money contributions to Brown were expected to top $1 million.

Ammiano spent $20,000 on his last-minute write-in campaign to win a quarter of the vote, forcing Tuesday's run-off. Final campaign expenditures won't be reported until next month, but early reports showed Brown dwarfing Ammiano in campaign spending.

These volunteers, like me, were fired up not about race or sexual orientation but about economic issues that have become acute problems for anyone who doesn't own property or a pile of stock options in an overhyped Internet start-up. San Francisco's growing pains have become a national story.

As the Internet economy continues to drive rents and house prices to astronomical levels, as evictions rise, as congestion chokes the city and surrounding areas, longtime San Franciscans and hopeful newcomers alike find they are being squeezed out of an increasingly homogeneous, monied city. Many of us find ourselves half hoping for the earthquake to come and scare some of this prosperity away. Tom Ammiano unseating Willie Brown seemed like the next best thing.

"So what attracted you to Ammiano's candidacy?" I asked a woman last night after we'd finished calling voters right up to the 8 p.m. poll closure. She mutely pointed to the button on her lapel. It read: "Another terrified tenant for Tom." Most volunteers I queried cited similar bread-and-butter issues. Roughly half said that Ammiano's integrity was what drew them to the campaign.

Another combustible element fueling Ammiano's popular support was the perception that Brown's City Hall has been a four-year free-for-all for well-heeled corporate lobbyists. A fat target for Brown opponents has been his close advisor Jack Davis (gay guy, incidentally), who was revealed to have earned $330,000 from Home Depot in order to lobby the mayor to approve the chain's expansion into San Francisco. Ammiano, a staunch defender of neighborhood businesses against the encroachment of chain stores, refuses to meet with paid lobbyists.

I was drawn into the campaign first by the idea of having a citizen mayor, someone who rode Muni instead of limousines, someone who listened to renters and neighborhood activists rather than big landlords, big corporations and their lobbyists. What helped keep me there was the energy of the Ammiano offices: disorganized sites of passionate arguments, littered with hand-lettered signs, cobbled together with borrowed equipment, they were a time-warp to the political bunkers of the 1970s, where my sister and I could be found tagging along with my mother on her feminist and abortion rights crusades.

The spirit of political activism and street theater, which apart from ACT-UP all but disappeared in the 1980s under the twin burdens of Reaganism and AIDS, is a large part of the San Francisco I grew up in and loved. It was thought to have received its final death blow from the ultracapitalism of the Internet economy, so it took many of us by surprise when it resurfaced with the Ammiano candidacy.

Spirit, it turns out, will be our consolation. Ammiano lost, and badly. But this reluctant candidate met his original campaign goals. Concerned that the rogues gallery of mayoral candidates in November's general election gave progressive voters no reason to go to the polls, Ammiano stepped into the race at the last minute as a write-in candidate with the stated purpose of ensuring passage of a number of lefty ballot measures and helping liberal incumbent district attorney Terence Hallinan in his troubled bid for reelection.

The gambit worked, and the D.A. owed Ammiano again last night, as the very last precincts reporting showed him pulling ahead of his more conservative challenger Bill Fazio by a hair's breadth, buoyed by progressives who came to the polls to support Ammiano. (A final tally is expected later this week.)

The question now is how to retain the momentum of the Ammiano campaign. Looking beyond the season's electoral goals, queer, neighborhood and other liberal activists could be heard, even as the numbers came in spelling out Ammiano's defeat, planning how to consolidate and resuscitate the insurgent campaign's organization for the next progressive cause.

In addition to laying the groundwork for future campaigns, the success of the Ammiano write-in and the sheer energy of the scrappy campaign should remind the local Democratic machine that the left cannot be taken for granted. As the candidate said last night to cheering supporters, "We have moved a mountain. The mountain is still there, but we have moved it."
salon.com | Dec. 16, 1999

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