The capitalist and the supervisor

Anna Haifisch

Mission Local:

On the morning that one of the richest men in San Francisco took to the pages of the New York Times to accuse Aaron Peskin of ruining the city, Peskin, mayoral candidate and president of the Board of Supervisors, was standing at a foggy bus stop on Mission Street in the Excelsior, engaging in the election ritual known as “morning visibility.” This entails making small talk with commuters and answering questions about political developments, like school closures, before heading into work at City Hall.

The New York Times op-ed, written by Michael Moritz, a former tech journalist turned venture capitalist turned funder of a local newspaper (the San Francisco Standard) was titled, “The Progressive Politicians Who Failed San Francisco.” 

Despite the use of the plural in the title, it was accompanied by a picture of exactly one guy: An enormous Peskin playing with San Francisco’s skyline like a collection of TinkerToys.

The op-ed didn’t name any progressive politicians other than Peskin. It described him in one very long run-on sentence as the most powerful example of “a generation of local politicians who have burrowed themselves into the city and used its resources to execute their devotion to a polarizing ideology that embraces a knee-jerk opposition to progress, a deep-rooted antipathy to many forms of law enforcement and a belief that higher taxes are a cure for all evil.”

Moritz charged that Peskin was almost single-handedly destroying San Francisco by blocking the construction of new housing, levying a tax on commercial real estate to fund childcare and early education, increasing the transfer tax on real estate sales of more than $5 million, and supporting an extra payroll tax for businesses whose highest-paid managerial employees earn more than 100 times the median employee salary.

“He is now serving his third stint as president of the board,” Moritz wrote, “a position he has helped transform into an office that, arguably, approaches that of the mayor. He did this via an impressive command of the arcane legislative and procedural rites of city government and a willingness to endure late-night negotiating sessions.”

Peskin disagrees. The board president is not that powerful, he says. They don’t have more power than any other member of the board. If they can put together a coalition of votes to support their legislation, their legislation gets passed, same as anyone else. A major component of the position is running the board meetings. “It is largely a job of making sure that everybody’s working well together,” says Peskin. “I’m glad that he thinks that I’m good at it.”

“This is a guy who wants San Francisco to be a monarchy,” says Peskin, of Moritz. “Here’s a guy who paid the Queen of England to — you’ve seen the picture.” In 2013, Moritz, who was born in Wales, was granted a knighthood “for services promoting British economic interests and philanthropic work.” He donated $115 million to Oxford University in 2012.

Peskin has known Moritz was targeting him in a piece for the Times for nearly a month. On Sept. 11, during a meeting with Hamid Moghadam, the CEO of ProLogis, the San Francisco-based logistics and real estate conglomerate, Moritz appeared suddenly via videoconference, and complained that Peskin had never reached out to meet with him.

“I said something to the effect of, ‘Well, there are 800,000 San Franciscans,’” says Peskin. “I’m very accessible. I don’t understand why I’m supposed to reach out to him. But I said I was happy to meet with him.”

A little over a week later, at 9:43 a.m., Peskin got an email from an editor in the New York Times opinion section. The paper was publishing a “guest essay” by Moritz. He had until 11 a.m. the next day to respond to....

Peskin wrote back:

I have received your email advising of the highly derogatory and false (and potentially libelous) statements that presumably are to be included in a piece the NYT is planning to publish shortly. You should be aware, and your readers should be aware, that Michael Moritz has a partisan and direct financial interest in the outcome of San Francisco’s Mayoral election. He has endorsed Mark Farrell for Mayor and just this week made a $500,000 contribution to a Political Action Committee supporting Farrell’s candidacy. To put that number in context, most voters in San Francisco are subject to a $500 limit on political donations, and there is no Political Action Committee being used as a slush fund to support my candidacy.

Peskin did his best to refute each statement, turned in his response by the deadline, and waited. Shortly after that, he says, he was contacted by a member of Moritz’s staff. Moritz was wondering, they said, why Peskin hadn’t followed up about the meeting.

Peskin invited Moritz to meet him the morning of Sept. 27, at his standing coffee date with former mayor Willie Brown at Caffe Greco, so that he would have a witness if things went south. When Moritz arrived he, surprisingly, did not want to talk political shop. Instead, Moritz took out his phone and showed Peskin pictures of the Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste performing at Moritz’s 70th birthday party the night before. 

“He repeated again and again and again, very insistently....how great he was because of all of his philanthropic contributions,” recalls Peskin. “I sincerely thanked him for his philanthropy.” 

When Peskin excused himself to leave for a meeting, he says, Moritz followed him into the street and told him that he was going to make it his life’s work to make sure that Peskin wasn’t elected mayor. “I said, ‘fine, whatever,’” Peskin recalls.

The op-ed that came out in the Times on Wednesday shows signs of Peskin’s responses to the newspaper’s request for comment. There’s a brief paraphrase of Peskin’s written response to the accusation of being anti-housing, and some disclosure of Moritz’s support for Peskin’s opponent, Mark Farrell. 

Moritz describes making a $500,000 contribution to a committee created by Farrell in support of Proposition D — the PAC that Farrell has been accused of using to circumvent the $500 contribution limits on giving to candidates directly, and of borrowing from to commingle staff and resources for his own campaign.

Moritz’s article also admits, in a roundabout way, to having some financial stake in Peskin not becoming mayor. (“Mr. Peskin has attacked my involvement in an ambitious plan to build a large housing development in northern San Francisco”). He cops to funding Prop. D, a ballot measure that is opposed by Peskin and would strengthen the mayor’s already-considerable powers (Moritz describes it as “an initiative, of which I have been the principal financial backer, to halve the city’s roughly 130 commissions”). 

He does not mention the existence of Proposition E, a rival ballot measure authored by Peskin, that would also make cuts to the city’s commission-heavy structure, but via an independent blue-ribbon panel and without permanently enhancing the authority of the mayor and the police chief.

When describing Peskin as “one of the city’s two most powerful politicians,” Moritz, oddly, does not mention by name the city’s single most powerful politician — its current mayor, London Breed, who is also running in the mayor’s race. 

There’s a lot about San Francisco’s economy and well-being that is beyond the control of any one individual, but Breed is, arguably, the single person most responsible for the San Francisco of the last four years — particularly the city’s admittedly bloated budget, over which a mayor has far and away the most control — in the 2023-24 budget, Breed controlled about 80 times as much of the budget as the entire Board of Supervisors.

The text of the final op-ed, Peskin says, is still riddled with other easily refutable factual errors. Moritz writes that Peskin has “a deep-rooted antipathy to many forms of law enforcement” when Peskin has voted to increase the police budget, overtime, and staffing.

Moritz states that Peskin believes that “higher taxes are a cure for all evil” — like most politicians, over the years Peskin has supported raising some taxes and cutting others. Also, Peskin points out, all those taxes that Moritz objects to were passed via ballot measures, and approved by a majority of San Francisco voters.

Pew Research has found that many readers slip up when distinguishing between op-eds (which typically aren’t fact-checked — what Peskin received was a request for comment) and news stories (which, at least at the New York Times, typically are). This is particularly true regarding online articles, Pew concluded, which people tend to read in isolation, instead of section by section the way that print readers do....

“I have, for seven months, been saying that I am running a real grassroots campaign, and that I am the only major candidate in this race that is not being supported by a bunch of billionaires,” says Peskin. “He’s trying to change the entire conversation to be about me, because I may well become the next mayor of San Francisco.”