On Monday evening, I went for a long run (for me) at Sunset Dunes: a four-mile out-and-back from Sloat to Lincoln along what used to be the middle section of the Great Highway. It was a gorgeous night. Skateboarders skated. Children learned to ride bikes. Couples kissed as the sun dropped lazily into the Pacific.
As I huffed and puffed along the sandy road, I was likely one of the few people thinking about Supervisor Joel Engardio. He’s the earnest politician who lost his job Tuesday night for the sin of creating the park that was bringing so much joy to the people frolicking all around me.
I texted Engardio a selfie from the already beloved promenade he had willed into existence. Even at that late hour, one day before his fate was to be decided by voters, he was out walking, knocking on doors in a getup that purposefully made him look like a postal worker. (People are more likely to answer the doorbell when the mailman rings.) He had just changed the minds of two voters who had planned to toss him from office, he claimed, and had mobilized two others who hadn’t planned to vote at all.
My endorphin-charged mind wandered back to early 2024, shortly before I began writing this column, and the house parties I attended for Democrats for Change. This was a group of moderate-minded San Franciscans who promised to bring back sanity to the Democratic Party in our famously progressive city.
These Dems, who referred to themselves as being on “Team Reasonable” and “Team Common Sense,” promised to overhaul the Democratic County Central Committee, which provides the party’s endorsements for elections. Their priorities were solid: improving public safety, building housing, improving schools, and ending the dysfunction of an entrenched bureaucracy that obviously wasn’t serving its citizens well. Eventually, these pols, including several newcomers to the game, got the power they sought, taking control of the DCCC in March 2024.
But here’s where the story turns. Earlier this summer, in the first instance when the newly constituted Democratic party was faced with a truly difficult decision — whether or not to endorse the recall of a fellow moderate — they threw one of their own under the bus. These self-styled Dems for Change, despite controlling the party’s political organ, voted not to make an endorsement on the Engardio question.
There are a lot of tedious, inside-baseball aspects of this saga that don’t deserve much more than a lightning-round summation. Did Engardio betray or lie to residents of the Sunset? The Chronicle editorialized persuasively that he did neither, and in June, I explained why I was standing with Joel. Did Engardio receive horrible advice from his consultants and top donors? Definitely. And would the recall vote have turned out differently had the DCCC supported him? Likely not. Conventional wisdom holds that the committee’s say isn’t what it used to be — and definitely wouldn’t have swayed infuriated District 4 voters any more than Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s support for Engardio did.
What bothers me, though, is the message these people are sending in their unwillingness to stand by someone they agree with on most policy matters. The Democratic officials who say they want to fight their ideological opponents in city politics chose to abandon someone on their own side.
And the way they went about it was just plain weaselly. Rather than voting “yes” on the question of recalling Engardio at an Aug. 27 meeting, members of the DCCC did a combination of not taking a position on the endorsement, not showing up, or abstaining. The effect was that there weren’t enough “no” votes to take a position.
Sorry, folks, political leadership is all about taking a stand, particularly a difficult one. Nancy Tung, the steely prosecutor who chairs the DCCC, sounded pained Tuesday when we spoke ahead of the results on Engardio’s fate. “It was a very divided party on a truly polarizing issue,” said Tung, who voted not to make an endorsement. She told me the situation saddened her, but so did the fact that many people are angry about Engardio’s role in closing the section of the Great Highway.
Another DCCC member I respect, the public-safety advocate Lanier Coles, challenged my assertion that she and her colleagues had abandoned Engardio. She argued that the furor over the Great Highway was effectively a neighborhood issue, not a party matter. Her vote to not take sides was “deeply difficult,” she said, but didn’t mean the moderate coalition wouldn’t be able to coalesce on other, citywide issues. “Coalitions don’t vote in lockstep 100% of the time,” Coles said. “We’re still a functioning coalition.”
More likely, it is a collection of aspiring politicians who have shown a propensity for fear-based pragmatism over reason-based leadership. None of them acted like the changemakers they claim to be.
That brings us, uncomfortably, to the most prominent official who said he’d bring change to San Francisco: Mayor Daniel Lurie, who sat on his hands throughout the Engardio recall effort. He now gets to appoint an ally he hopes will be able to get elected next year, when Engardio’s term would have ended.
Lurie wasn’t a fan of closing the Great Highway, but he should have been a fan of Engardio, who consistently voted for the mayor’s agenda. And as a critic of San Francisco’s knife-fight-in-a-phonebooth political culture, Lurie could have lent his popularity to defending a dedicated, engaged, and competent public servant. The mayor may rue the day his popularity flags and he needs San Francisco moderates to stick their necks out for him.
Given his and their example this year, they likely won’t.