Altered consciousness in the city by the bay

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Altered consciousness in the city by the bay
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By Matt Rosenberg
Special to The Times

Conservatives can't cry in their Beaujolais Nouveau any longer. Cherished bastions of liberalism are under attack. Next Tuesday, San Francisco voters could elect as mayor a young hospitality industry executive, Gavin Newsom, pilloried by critics as a heartless, Establishment standard-bearer.

Newsom's sensible sin: As a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, he successfully championed voter approval of Measure N. It aimed to reduce local government cash payments to the homeless, and to boost funding for food, shelter, counseling and treatment services. Though implementation of the "care not cash" initiative has been sidetracked by supervisors and the courts, many campaign volunteers backed Newsom's current mayoral run.

Recent polls show he may yet lose to his hard-line liberal opponent, Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzales. But just the passage of Measure N last year and Newsom's emergence as a finalist last month from a large field of mayoral candidates hint San Francisco has neared a tipping point.

The city's altered consciousness is emphasized by regular commentary from a number of conservative columnists in the San Francisco Chronicle, including San Francisco writer Adam Sparks. These observations by Sparks could just as well have been about Seattle.

You really know you're in San Francisco, Sparks writes, when:

• "Your kids find not only old toys in playground sandboxes, but also used needles and condoms";

• "Here it's OK for Rover to (defile) the Little League field's first base (and) second, and dig up the pitching mound because, after all, dogs are people, too";

• "You think that the rest of America is replete with a bunch of screwed-up hillbillies, factory workers, farmers, hunters and veterans — and that their only redeeming quality is that they pay taxes for the many social programs you, an unemployed artist, can enjoy."