A jumbled political landscape

Yes, we have a mayor in San Mateo finally and, if we were to judge by the trumped-up (non-Daily Journal) news coverage and the social media postings, the collapse of democracy as we know it has been averted for one more day.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

For the sake of the permanent record, Amourence Lee is now mayor, Lisa Diaz Nash is deputy mayor, and Rich Hedges is the new councilmember, although why he would want the job is anybody’s guess. None of this happened without more drama, including, incredibly, now-Mayor Lee presenting a manila envelope with the name of another council applicant as she made accusations about illegal vote-swapping offers, which she declined to delineate. It would have been cooler if Lee had opened the envelope and inside was a winning lottery number, but you can’t always get what you want.

Anyway, we are left with a jumbled landscape that cries out for random rhetorical questions and semi-coherent observations, and I am just the guy for the job.

Starting with the big one: Can the City Council put this whole mess in the rearview or is it only the beginning of a whole string of 3-2 votes?

Who knows? Perhaps more importantly, will some of the council want to? Lee and her allies set a no-holds-barred tone in the campaign up to last month. It worked and clearly helped Adam Loraine win. This behavior — relentless one-sided and outraged social media postings, online petitions, hand-painted protest signs, high-profile allies, stories planted in underinformed news media — continued into the dispute over the mayor’s seat. Is that going to keep happening? It is hard to get out of campaign mode, but it is time for governance now, which requires an entirely different skill set.

Elected citywide (as Lee was), in districts (Nash, Loraine and Robert Newsom Jr.) or appointed (Hedges), all of them are supposed to serve and represent the whole city, including people who voted for someone else or did not have the chance to vote for any of them.

The only way this works is if the councilmembers begin to build trust with each other, with city staff and with the city residents, starting with Mayor Lee, who should step cautiously before assuming she has a mandate to set any kind of bold agenda for her year with the gavel.

OTHER NOTES AND DUST MOTES: Much was made by her supporters about Lee being denied the chance to be the first Asian-American woman named mayor. The same people were not equally excited at the prospect of the city’s first Hispanic woman (Diaz Nash) as mayor.

One of the repeated assertions was that Diaz Nash and Newsom, by refusing to vote for Lee for mayor, were defying the city charter. Couldn’t the same be said about Lee and Loraine by refusing to vote for someone else for mayor?

And when did it become an automatic assumption that Lee somehow was entitled to be mayor? Yes, she was the senior member, but that is a guarantee of, you know, nothing. At least one prior San Mateo council ignored the rotation and named Jane Baker over Paul Gumbinger after new members were elected in the early 1990s.

You don’t get to be mayor just because you think it’s your turn — as has been amply demonstrated by city councils all over the Peninsula. Indeed, in some cities, it often is a surprise when they don’t have a controversy over mayor.

The San Mateo charter only says when the mayor should be elected. It doesn’t say who, or how. That is up to the council and depends, at least in some measure, on whether a would-be mayor can build trust (see above).

It was a big surprise to see U.S. Rep.-elect Kevin Mullin and state Sen. Josh Becker weighing in on behalf of Lee. Who is mayor of San Mateo is an issue of neither national nor statewide import and it would seem to be none of their business. It also is no business of the county, and yet Supervisor-elect Noelia Corzo, a close ally of Lee’s, got involved up to her elbows.

I am told by another friend that this is just the way it is going to be going forward — more cross-pollination, more adherence to alliances. To which I say, well, OK.

Mark Simon is a veteran journalist, whose career included 15 years as an executive at SamTrans and Caltrain. He can be reached at marksimon@smdailyjournal.com.