If you happened by city hall on a recent Friday evening, you would have stumbled on a particularly San Franciscan phenomenon. On the edge of Joseph Alioto Piazza, within shouting distance of the grand balcony outside our mayor’s office, a half dozen or so would-be mayors were arrayed around a microphone, leaning into the wind as they discussed how best to manage homelessness, crime, and development.

The talk was earnest and unscripted, as politics should be but rarely is these days. It was also highly entertaining. A call of “Come out, Gavin!” from the crowd of 40 echoed off the Civic Center’s beaux arts facade, accompanied by chicken noises and much flapping of arms directed at the empty balcony above the plaza, at the mayor who is so popular that he need not acknowledge his opponents’ existence. The bawk, bawk, bawks were met with silence.

It has looked something like this every Friday for the last three months. Dubbed a Candidates Collaborative, the debate is a local invention birthed during the campaign for District Five supervisor in 2004, in which almost all of the 22 candidates convened to discuss the issues and meet the voters. The mayoral crowd at these events was often sparse, but it was a good introduction to the candidates—both the just-crazies and the impassioned long-shots.

In the only-in-San Francisco category, you’ll find George Davis, a small man in Velcro shoes who wants to make Golden Gate Park clothing-optional (he is universally known as the Naked Yoga Guy); Kenny Kahn, a professional clown who attended at least one debate in a suit and purple frightwig; and “Grasshopper” Alec Kaplan, a homeless taxi driver with a droopy Donald Sutherland mustache who lives in his van. During one debate, he showed the crowd the bottle he pisses in and the bucket he craps in.

Many of the candidates, though, are dead serious. They know they don’t have a bum’s chance in Seacliff of winning. But they feel strongly that something is missing from the city’s political discourse. Lonnie Holmes, a San Francisco native who lost much of his family to the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, spoke for most of the group when he said, “Our city government caters to the rich, and the rest
of us are left to fend for ourselves.”

Then there’s Josh Wolf, the video blogger who did seven and a half months in a federal pen for refusing to turn over his footage of an anti-globalization protest to the justice department. A self-deprecating policy wonk with baggy jeans and big glasses, he pushed community policing and municipal broadband. Ahimsa Sumchai,
an elfin ER doctor, offered a blistering critique of the city’s slipshod disaster-preparedness program and of mega-developer Lennar Corporation’s conduct in Hunter’s Point. Just about the only conservative in the bunch was former supervisor Tony Hall, who, until he dropped out of the race, seemed the challenger most likely to break single digits. A flinty career civil servant fond of the third-person declarative (“Tony Hall is for clean streets”), he was also one of the most enjoyable speakers at the early debates, peppering his speeches with sneering insults aimed at the “kid” in city hall’s Room 200.

The Friday-night debate format allows questions from the audience. Besides the de rigueur discussion of medical marijuana one night, there were also questions about tackling homelessness and affordable housing—about how, in short, San Francisco can keep its edge without losing its soul. In the end, the forum was less of a firing squad in-the-round (see the Democratic debates) than a group therapy session.
By 6:30, Holmes was on his way out for a beer with some other candidates. Glancing behind him, he noticed Davis, the Naked Yoga Guy, stripping down to a black stocking cap for some postdebate exercise. “Uniquely San Francisco,” Holmes said, between snorts of laughter, then headed off for that beer.