The Democratic Party establishment is losing ground with a complacent strategy: competent management of a deteriorating status quo.
San Francisco’s House race is one of the few places voters can register a verdict on this strategy because one candidate — Saikat Chakrabarti — has built his career arguing against it.
Chakrabarti ran Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign, helped draft the Green New Deal and criticized Democrats when he believed they were wrong. His critics try to frame his conflicts as a problem rather than a position. Much of the case against Chakrabarti rests on Ocasio-Cortez’s not endorsing him. This is likely the calculation of not wanting to spend political capital on another state’s primary. If she had concerns, she had seven years to voice them.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, his leading opponent, is a capable legislator from the Democratic establishment. He is not a corrective.
A party that can’t defeat Donald Trump doesn’t have the luxury of treating internal critics as the problem. San Francisco has a chance to elect a representative who will treat the next two years as an emergency rather than a procedural exercise.
When Chakrabarti was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, he co-wrote the Green New Deal and helped push it into the national spotlight with AOC joining a sit-in at Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office. That may have ruffled feathers, but it pressured then-President Joe Biden to invest billions of dollars in clean energy.
This race should be about where the candidates stand on the issues, not who has decided to endorse them.
However, there is another real progressive in the race — Supervisor Connie Chan. She has spent decades working at the grassroots, knows the people and has built relationships over decades.
Chan and Chakrabarti share many of the same progressive political positions. Only Chan has years of real political experience to back them up. She actually gets things done. My vote is for Chan.
Michael Wong, San Francisco