***** Gonzalez's district up for grabs Supervisor's decision rocks political scene. RECENT STORIES
. . . District 5, which encompasses residents of the Haight, Hayes Valley, the Western Addition and a handful of other neighborhoods, is home to The City's most progressive voters, according to the Progressive Voting Index, a measure of local voting trends.
Ranked by political scientist Rich DeLeon, the analysis scored Gonzalez's District 5 at 77 out of 100. In comparison, The City's more conservative western Districts 4 and 7 have an index ranking of 31. . . .
. . . [Ross] Mirkarimi [a Green Party strategist who worked on Gonzalez's mayoral campaign] is high on the list of potential candidates for the office after ditching a 2000 run in deference to Gonzalez. . . .
A dozen potential candidates are lined up for a shot at the District 5 seat on the Board of Supervisors in November. The district includes the Haight-Ashbury, Japantown, the Inner Sunset, Hayes Valley and the Western Addition.
- Bill Barnes -- Democratic County Central Committee, aide to Supervisor Chris Daly
- Joe Blue -- Former Golden Gate Bridge District member
- Lisa Feldstein -- Planning Commission member
- Robert Haaland -- DCCC, labor organizer
- Jim Hammer -- Prosecutor
- Dan Kalb -- Environmentalist, former DCCC member
- Susan King -- Green Party activist
- Michael O'Connor -- Businessman
- Ross Mirkarimi -- Green Party activist
- Jim Siegal -- Businessman
- Tys Sniffen -- Neighborhood activist
- Andrew Sullivan -- Chairman of Rescue Muni
- Vivian Wilder -- Political activist
<http://www.sfexaminer.com/article/index.cfm/i/033004n_gonzalez> *****
***** Local Heroes: Ross Mirkarimi
By Tim Redmond
POLITICS RUNS IN Ross Mirkarimi's blood. The son of a Russian Jewish mother and a Shiite Muslim Iranian father, Mirkarimi spent most of his youth in Rhode Island, and going to protest marches around the country.
"My dad was out of the picture pretty early, so I was basically raised by a single mother," he recalls. "She was an antiwar activist and feminist, involved in all sorts of 1960s organizations. I was seven, eight, nine years old, and I remember going to protests with her. Those images are seared in my mind."
It didn't take him long to launch into a political career of his own: by eighth grade he was student-body president. "In high school I was like the lead character in the movie Rushmore," he says. "Always over extended in great causes but luckily my grades didn't suffer much."
It's a pattern that has continued. Mirkarimi, who is now spokesperson for San Franciscans for Public Power, has been deeply involved in great political causes for much of his adult life. A college internship with Ralph Nader led to a job fighting the Clinch River nuclear power plant in Tennessee and then another organizing citizen utility boards ("My first connection with public power," he recalls). Shortly after he arrived in the Bay Area in 1984 (to study Russian at the Monterey Institute), he got involved in the green movement, and he was one of the leaders in the campaign to create the California Green Party.
In the early 1990s, as a staffer at the Arms Control Research Center, he directed a study of the environmental impacts of the Gulf War - a project that took him to Iraq twice. Former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark used Mirkarimi's findings to bolster his antiwar efforts, and the material was later incorporated in a report published by the Harvard School of Public Health.
Mirkarimi has turned his political interests into something of a career: for several years he was a freelance political consultant, and for a while he was a staffer in the office of then-supervisor Terence Hallinan. He ran Hallinan's successful campaigns for district attorney in 1995 and 1999.
But most of his political work has been less than lucrative. There wasn't a whole lot of money to be made, for example, in running Ralph Nader's presidential campaign in California or running the campaign to pass the San Francisco Sunshine Initiative in 1999 or in the so-far-unsuccessful effort to pass a public power measure. "I get into these causes because I care about them, and I've never made an issue of money," he says. "The problem is not with my business sense but my heart."
But for an idealist, Mirkarimi has a realistic approach to campaigns: he recognizes that it takes money and sophisticated strategy to win at the polls, and he's constantly trying to bring that sensibility to the grassroots groups he works with. That's something the left has badly needed for years.
Mirkarimi's not sure he's ever going to pursue elected office himself ("I love to be behind the scenes, shaping outcomes"), but he's cautiously optimistic about the future of electoral politics - especially when it comes to the greens. "I'm a big fan of the Green Party," he says. "I think it has a big role to play in local elections throughout the state of California."
<http://www.bestofthebay.com/2002/localheroes6.html> ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>