Scott Wiener and "good government"

Photo by Keeney + Law

Aptly comparing Supervisor Wiener to a machine in its cover story last week, the Bay Guardian notes that he's "relentless, driven, prolific---and changing San Francisco in sometimes alarming ways." Wiener is a relentless self-promoter and a media slut, but fortunately he's had no success in changing the city. 

His proposal to dilute our initiative rights---oddly not mentioned in the Guardian article---was rejected by city voters, and his CEQA "reform" was rejected unanimously by the Planning Commission. Randy Shaw nicely deconstructs Wiener's latest condo conversion initiative in Beyond Chron (Shaw's good when he writes about housing, which he knows something about).

What's left of Mr. Moderate's policy initiatives? There's the nudity issue, which Wiener botched in the first place, with his fatuous notion that all the nude guys in the Castro need to do is put napkins under their privates when they sit down.

There is something robotic about Wiener's policy attacks, since he is Terminator-like in how he keeps coming at us. But while the Terminator was well-programmed to kill one person---and everyone in his way---Wiener's programming is about "good government," which his programmers at Harvard Law School---or wherever he was assembled---left too vague to make him an effective android. 

He's like one of those automatic vacuum cleaners that circle the carpet and bump into furniture but still don't get the carpet clean.

Note that in his initiatives Wiener is unable to provide examples of the problems he's supposedly addressing. The only examples of the abuse of CEQA he's given are clearly invalid. Same for the initiative "reform" rejected by city voters.