The Bay Citizen: Running for Mayor, but With Her Money Not in Play

How’s this for a Harvard Business School case study: The Bay Area is renowned for its entrepreneurial culture and the fortunes amassed by its technology elite. But leaders from that world have been notably unsuccessful persuading voters that business smarts qualify them for elective office. (Think Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and Steve Westly.)

Can a member of this tribe win an election here?

As she campaigns to be elected San Francisco’s next mayor, Joanna Rees, a moderately successful venture capitalist and a Columbia M.B.A., is determined to prove that the seemingly immutable laws of local politics do not apply to her.

Ms. Rees, a 49-year-old mother of two, has spent the past two years visiting coffee shops and churches and riding Muni buses (in four-inch Chanel pumps) to chat up voters — employment anxiety dominates the conversations — as she angles to break the business elite’s string of electoral losses.

A formidable networker, Ms. Rees has an impressive list of campaign contributors: Mark Pincus of Zynga, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, assorted Pritzkers and Bronfmans and Coppolas, the wife and the sister of former Mayor Gavin Newsom and the musician Quincy Jones.

As Ms. Rees makes her rounds, with a business-friendly message that puts her well to the right on the San Francisco political spectrum, she is winning some support. “She is as smart as hell, a real person, not political,” said James Ludwig, former head of Saks Fifth Avenue in San Francisco.

Impressed by her focus on public-education innovation and her business savvy, Mr. Ludwig recently sent out hundreds of letters on Ms. Rees’s behalf. Hilary Newsom, the former mayor’s sister and president of the PlumpJack Group, has done the same.

Yet Ms. Rees remains mostly unknown. The mayoral race has many contenders, with old City Hall hands — David Chiu, Bevan Dufty, Leland Yee, Dennis Herrera, Phil Ting, John Avalos and Michela Alioto-Pier — crowding the field. In a March poll, Ms. Rees’s name did not even register. The powerful San Francisco Labor Council has not included her among the seven candidates invited to speak to 500 union delegates next week.

Ms. Rees’s problem is money. She has it. (She and her husband, her partner in a venture capital firm that is now being dismantled, live in Presidio Terrace, a gated enclave with uniformed guards.) But she has, as yet, refused to spend it.

Though she stands to collect as much as $900,000 in public financing by agreeing to campaign-spending caps, Ms. Rees herself has not yet contributed a single dollar. And under the campaign-spending caps, none of her well-heeled contributors can give more than $500.

“I am an entrepreneur who bootstrapped my way into the old boys’ club of venture capital,” said Ms. Rees, who is not affiliated with a political party but has contributed to Democratic candidates, including the liberal Senator Barbara Boxer. “I have been down in the trenches with entrepreneurs, rolling up my sleeves, to help turn a small idea into something real.? That is why a grass-roots field campaign is so compatible with who I am.”

“I am raising money the old-fashioned way, supporter by supporter,” she said.

Corey Cook, a University of San Francisco professor who organized a candidates’ forum last week, sees promise for “someone who can really claim to reform from the outside, who is effective on the business side.” However, Mr. Cook notes, “that’s not a message that traditionally plays well in San Francisco.”

And, of course, Ms. Rees cannot win if most voters do not know she exists.

“She cannot just go to bus stops and shake hands with strangers,” said Nathan Ballard, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Mr. Newsom. Mr. Ballard is not involved with any of the mayoral candidates, though he is one of the many local political operatives Ms. Rees has consulted.

“I would advise her to write a big check,” he said. “She needs to help herself.”

And that, even if you didn’t go to business school, is Marketing 101: Under-investing when launching a new product is a recipe for, well, nothing.

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Baltimore Journal: For Late ‘Mr. Mayor,’ a Last Tour of Town

?A motorcade led by a shiny black hearse cruised through closed streets, making stops at some of his most famous achievements, including the National Aquarium, the stadium at Camden Yards and the Inner Harbor, the glittering heart of downtown that is considered one of the country’s greatest urban renewal success stories.

?It ended at City Hall, where a small crowd watched as his coffin was unloaded near a giant American flag hung between two fire engine ladders.

“This is history,” said Bernard Smith, 43, who had come with his 13-year-old daughter. “We’re never going to have another mayor like him.”

It was a fitting finale for a man who loved public spectacles, and it gave the residents of this city a chance to pay their respects to Mr. Schaefer, a ferociously energetic politician whom many locals referred to as “Mr. Mayor” or ?“Willie Don,” and who served in elected office for most of his 89 years. A public funeral will be held on Wednesday.

?But the applause and tributes seemed to be as much about this city’s yearning to return to the Schaefer era, to a time when anything seemed possible, and before the city’s vast social problems settled too deeply into its bones.

“Sometimes you just want to go back to the old days and the old ways, when there were morals and grace and respect,” said Melody Sayre, 54, a bus driver who lived near Mr. Schaefer. “He was the last of the Mohicans. He was an original man.”

By all accounts, Mr. Schaefer made this gritty port city feel good about itself at a time — after the race riots and a long-term decline in manufacturing and transport jobs — when its spirits were touching new lows.

“He put Baltimore on the map,” Ms. Sayre said.

But while his downtown development gave the economy a boost, those gains ultimately were swept away by the storm of social and economic woes — like the crack epidemic and the dwindling numbers of working-class jobs — that continued unabated, and have made it one of the country’s most troubled cities and a natural backdrop for police-themed television series like “The Wire” and “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

?“What Schaefer did was mostly psychological,” said Matthew Crenson, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University. “He turned around the city’s morale, but not so much its economy.”

?Marc Levine, a professor of history and economic development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said Mr. Schaefer might have stopped Baltimore from becoming an abandoned city like Detroit, but he nevertheless was unable to stem its economic decline.

Today, less than half of the city’s working-age, black male population is employed, down from 68 percent in 1970. And despite the downtown renaissance, it has relentlessly lost ground as a regional employment center, with just 25 percent of the Baltimore region’s jobs, down from 62 percent in 1970. Fifty years later, the city continues to lose residents, and it is now home to just 23 percent of the population of the larger metro area, down from 44 percent in 1970.

?“He had an important impact, but that doesn’t mean he turned the city around,” said Professor Levine, who has studied Baltimore. “All the indicators suggest that the larger economic trajectory remained unchanged.”

But that mattered little to people who were celebrating him on Monday, who praised him as a down-to-earth man who helped them feel a sense of pride about their city.

 

New York City marks April 16th as Foursquare Day, Mayor feeling good about his chances

By Vlad Savov posted Apr 14th 2011 2:48PM 16 is the product of squaring four, so naturally the date of April 16th is the most logical one to be called Foursquare Day. Just why such a celebration should exist is less obvious. As it turns out, a grassroots movement of Foursquare users built up steam around the idea of dedicating a day to the online check-in service, that concept then filtered through to Foursquare's founders who decided to go "100% in on this," and now, somewhat surprisingly, so has New York City Mayor (the elected one) Mike Bloomberg. As Mike sees it, Foursquare represents a fine example of NYC's startup-friendly environment, which is why he's giving it and its heretofore informal Foursquare Day celebration the official NYC seal of approval. He even went so far as to deliver a Mayoral Proclamation to the Foursquare offices, which you can see for yourself after the break.