Originally posted on the Gazetteer.
Joan Leone lives in a bubble within a bubble.
More specifically, she inhabits a strictly red Republican bubble within the blue Democratic bubble of San Francisco. And the two don’t intersect, or even touch. She has no friends, family, or colleagues who are Democrats — by design.
“I have more Republican friends than I have time for,” Leone says. “It’s not that I don’t want friends who are Democrats, but I just don’t have time for people who think that way.”
That way, for Leone, is the wrong turn San Francisco took since its last Republican mayor was in charge 60 years ago. It is the support for a party that she says has accepted the city’s crime, homelessness, and excrement on the streets. It is also the hardened partisanship preventing either side from convincing the other of anything. Without prompting, Leone points to the embodiment of those entrenched positions.
“First of all, I totally support President Donald J. Trump,” she declared. “And you won’t find a lot of people in San Francisco who support him.”
But Leone’s sphere is bigger and more vibrant than might seem possible in a city where Republicans are just 7.5 percent of registered voters. As president of the Republican Club of San Francisco for the last 15 years, she handpicks speakers for the group’s approximately 250 members, who convene regularly at the Italian Athletic Club in North Beach.
Over dinner (a choice of roasted rosemary chicken, salmon, or eggplant parmigiana) and wine, they listen to the gatekeepers, activists, and partisans shaping the Republican agenda.
Breitbart News senior editor and former Tea Party candidate Joel Pollack spoke earlier this year. University of California Berkeley Law professor John Yoo is a frequent guest. A former top lawyer at the Justice Department, Yoo is widely known for his legal justification of waterboarding as an enhanced interrogation technique in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Political consultant Paul Manafort — who briefly chaired Trump’s 2016 campaign, served time for crimes committed in that role, and was then pardoned by the former president — spoke to the club two years ago.
Whatever your politics, there is a liveliness, a sense of purpose, and an intellectual curiosity at Leone’s events that contrasts sharply with the moribund proceedings of the Republican County Central Committee, or RCCC, the party’s local governing body.
Better known as the San Francisco Republican Party or SFGOP, the RCCC’s primary role is to recruit and endorse candidates, whereas Leone’s club is more informative and social. Even so, Leone’s dinner party in North Beach Wednesday was the place to be for the city’s highest-profile candidates seeking office in November.
Leone introduced Yvette Corkrean, who is running against “the evil Scott Wiener,” she said to loud boos for the Democratic state senator. Manuel Noris-Barrera, running for State Assembly, and Min Chang, seeking a seat on the Board of Education, both spoke.
Then Tony Hall lit up the party. A former San Francisco supervisor, executive assistant at the city’s Superior Court, and longtime political operative, Hall told the crowd that hours earlier he learned his brother had died. Visibly shaken, he said he would keep his remarks brief, and leave early.
The disclosure was at once startling and sincere, making one wonder why Hall hadn’t canceled his appearance to be with family, or do whatever else was required of him.
He then launched into a riveting speech that was one part an insider’s view of San Francisco politics since the 1970s, and another part, it seemed, a speech hinting at an eleventh-hour bid to unseat Mayor London Breed in November.
Hall blames the Democratic political machine, beginning under former Mayor Willie Brown, for what he says is San Francisco’s unsettling dysfunction. Where city officials once climbed their way up by learning the city’s neighborhoods and government functions, he said, Brown “monetized city services.”
The former Mayor sold the city’s operations to the highest contract bidders in pay-to-play schemes, Hall claimed, replacing the ethos of civic duty built over decades by longtime residents with graft, patronage and cronyism.
Hall detailed a plan to help the city’s homeless if they’re from San Francisco, and pay to move those who aren’t from the city. Club members cheered for his call to repeal San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city. His call to end ranked-choice voting won even bigger applause.
The system “assures that the most qualified and the smartest will not be elected to office,” Hall said. “It’s also very good for the machine because it results in dummies on the Board.”
The five candidates with a chance at winning the Mayor’s office are all Democrats, viable only because they have the massive amounts of money required to run for the office, he said. “Four of those five have special interest groups backing them to the tune of a million dollars, minimum,” Hall said.
Mark Farrell is backed by Silicon Valley’s technology elite, according to Hall. Daniel Lurie, who has operated a large non-profit in the city, is supported by “every department in the city” alongside a “cabal of downtown business people” who stand to benefit from his approach, he added.
Ahsha Safaí doesn’t count, he said. “Breed is a disaster. She’s the bottom of the Willie Brown totem pole,” and is now weak, he continued. “This is the last hurrah, Aaron Peskin smells it, and is going to the unions and the far-left because he wants to be there.”
Then Hall delivered his tough love to the club.
“You people have not put up a candidate,” he said. “The Democrats have five, what does the GOP got? They’ve got nothing. The local GOP might as well be working for the Democrats because they haven’t coalesced behind a candidate or come up with the money.
“If Peskin gets in, it’s going to be a new version of the left, although he’s smarter than the rest. You’ve got to watch him. He’s wily. He will come across like a reborn conservative just the way London Breed is trying to come across today. But there is no conservative. There is no Republican. And you’ve got yourselves to thank for that.”
(Brown, Breed, Safaí, Farrell, Peskin, and Lurie didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment.)
As it turns out, Hall was a warm-up for the featured speaker, retired U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Christopher Starling, who was set to talk about national security. But Hall’s speech was the highlight of the evening.
Hall once called himself the only conservative on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. He now calls himself an Independent, a rebranding that could serve as a third political bubble in the orbit of Republicans like Leone. By the time he finished, Hall received impassioned applause, with calls for him to run for Mayor. Leone took the microphone.
“How about it, Tony, will you run for Mayor?” Leone asked.
“We want him!” someone yelled out.
“I don’t have the money,” Hall told the crowd. “I know how to fight but I need the money.”
Correction: The original version of this story mistakenly reported that the Republican candidates running in November’s election didn’t attend an RCCC meeting earlier in the month. In fact, all three were there. We regret the error.