Two years ago, at a crowded gathering in San Francisco, Gavin Newsom was introduced to a young, local campaign strategist. Clocking her name tag\u2014 \u201cVeronica Lempert\u201d\u2014the governor of California groaned in mock exasperation.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh my gosh! Not another one!\u201d<\/p>\n
Newsom\u2019s reaction was not rude. Your columnist has had the same feeling for years. As I make my way around California politics, I can\u2019t escape the Lemperts.<\/p>\n
The family is not a conventional American dynasty. They are nothing like the Kennedys, with their wealth, entitlement, national ambitions, and love of touch football (the Lemperts prefer tennis). They don\u2019t desire statewide office, like Pat, Jerry, and Kathleen Brown. Nor are they big-city machine types, like the Aliotos of San Francisco.<\/p>\n
Instead, the Lemperts might be California\u2019s most earnest, nerdy, and locally oriented family. That makes them a rare breed, in a cynical age dominated by national politics and flashy social media.<\/p>\n
The Lemperts have a strange, honestly acquired taste for complicated problems\u2014climate, transit, children\u2019s health and education, and municipal reorganization. When it comes to campaigning, the family clings to old-fashioned canvassing. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thing we most love to do together is knock on doors,\u201d says Ted Lempert, Veronica\u2019s father, and a former state legislator and San Mateo County supervisor.<\/p>\n
After years of running into Lemperts, I recently visited their family headquarters: the San Mateo home of materfamilias Sue Lempert, 94.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s the Lempert I trust most, because\u2014despite a long and legendary career in Bay Area local and regional government\u2014she was first and last a blunt journalist. She only gave up her must-read column in The Daily Journal last year. Our relationship is primarily online\u2014for years, she\u2019s written to me with comments on my columns, California gossip, and ideas about various local matters.<\/p>\n
Sitting at her dining room table, with her brood joining us in-person and by Zoom, I pressed her on the baffling paradox:<\/p>\n
How is it possible that a Silicon Valley family stacked with elite degrees from Stanford, Princeton, and Yale devoted itself to local governance and made no real money along the way?<\/p>\n
Sue Lempert stared at me directly and responded firmly: \u201cEvery child and grandchild is doing good. They\u2019re not making money. That\u2019s what I love about them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Born and raised in New York, Lempert recalls that when she was 8, an eccentric visiting relative made a bizarre offer. \u201cIf you ever come to California, I\u2019ll buy you a horse.\u201d In 1950, ignoring her high school counselors\u2019 advice that she go to a women\u2019s college like Smith or Holyoke, she enrolled at Stanford, though admission didn\u2019t come with a horse.<\/p>\n
Lempert was the first woman ever elected managing editor of the Stanford Daily, but she couldn\u2019t get a job in the sexist newsrooms of the day. (A Time magazine editor propositioned her during an interview.) So she took a public relations gig at General Electric and freelanced for newspapers.<\/p>\n
She returned to New York to earn a master\u2019s in international relations at Columbia. At a Stanford alumni event there, she flirted with Art Lempert, a poor Bronx kid-turned-lawyer.<\/p>\n
Her opening line: \u201cSay, are you John Maynard Keynes<\/a>?\u201d<\/p>\n She later accepted his marriage offer on one condition: They would return to California.<\/p>\n You Might Also Like<\/p>\n After a year in an ant-infested apartment in San Francisco\u2019s Richmond District, Art and Sue, pregnant with their first child, Robert, found a home in San Mateo. As their family grew\u2014Ted was the middle child and Liz the baby\u2014Sue\u2019s activism in the League of Women Voters brought her face-to-face with a deeply conservative school board that she felt ignored non-white children from less affluent families.<\/p>\n A local coalition drafted Sue to run for San Mateo\u2019s elementary school district board in 1977. To her astonishment, she faced little serious opposition\u2014a feature of all her future elections, too. During her tenure on that board and later on San Mateo\u2019s high school district board\u2014both of which she chaired\u2014she fought for greater support for the lowest-performing students and for the gifted. She expanded early childhood education workshops for parents and introduced Montessori to the district. But she often felt frustrated, as the board laid off teachers and closed schools because of the local and statewide tax limits of Prop 13.<\/p>\n So, in 1993 she won a seat on the San Mateo City Council, where she felt less inhibited. Lempert became a fierce champion for urban planning, open space (she\u2019s the mother of bay-fronting family-friendly Shoreline Parks), and transit-oriented development that made her city more prosperous and urban.<\/p>\n Lempert helped lead an epic fight against a developer\u2019s plan for a 24\/7 casino card room at the historic Bay Meadows racetrack. By attending even the smallest community meetings and building a grassroots army, she defeated the proposal and laid the groundwork for transforming the racetrack property into a large and popular mixed-use development.<\/p>\n While on the city council she was appointed to the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission and became its longest-serving member. Her relentless defense of Caltrain funding (her husband Art rode the train to work in the city every day, she notes) and the extension of BART to San Francisco International Airport earned her the nickname, \u201cThe Queen of Transit.\u201d<\/p>\n Her governance philosophy remains brilliantly simple: \u201cStop talking so much. Just get something done. If you can\u2019t look back and say, \u2018I held elected office and I did this for the people,\u2019 then what the hell were you doing there?\u201d<\/p>\n She conveyed to her children\u2014who were often by her side at meetings and campaigning\u2014that public service was a duty, not a choice. When Ted Lempert was nominated for student government at Baywood Elementary and declined out of shyness, Sue reprimanded him: \u201cYou don\u2019t decline! You get involved! When someone asks you to serve, you do it!\u201d<\/p>\n Ted got the message. He didn\u2019t just follow in his mother\u2019s footsteps\u2014he overlapped with her in office. He won his first assembly seat in 1988, in an enormous upset against a Republican incumbent, with considerable precinct walking help from his mother. In the California State Assembly and on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors and the county board of education, Ted became known for developing expertise on hard issues, including education and children\u2019s health, which he continues to advocate for as president of the nonprofit Children Now. He also teaches a class on California politics and policy at UC Berkeley, at which I\u2019m a guest speaker.<\/p>\n Ted\u2019s younger sister, Liz Lempert, took a path similar to her mother\u2019s\u2014going to Stanford and then building a journalism career as a producer at National Public Radio. When her family relocated to Princeton, New Jersey, for her husband\u2019s academic job, Liz got involved in local politics and ran the county campaign for Barack Obama.<\/p>\n Before she knew it, she had been recruited to run for local office in Princeton Township. From that perch, she helped engineer a historic and controversial merge of Princeton\u2019s two local governments, the township and the borough, in 2013. She then served eight years as the first mayor of the consolidated Princeton, cutting local administration costs significantly and championing climate resilience. While interviewing her for this column, I realized we had crossed paths in global meetings of climate-oriented mayors.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s sort of the golden age of local government,\u201d Liz Lempert told me, echoing her mother. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot you can get done at the local level.\u201d<\/p>\n Sue\u2019s oldest child, Rob Lempert, seemed to have avoided local government. He became a world-renowned climate scientist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, and worked on national and global policy with Congress, the Clinton White House, and the World Bank. I met him while looking for writers and speakers for Z\u00f3calo Public Square<\/a> (which publishes this column).<\/p>\n In January 2025, the Palisades Fire destroyed Rob\u2019s L.A. home. Since then, he\u2019s been working with his neighbors on rebuilding, including the possible creation of a local disaster recovery district<\/a>.<\/p>\n This spring, he organized civic assemblies of Palisades residents to chart their neighborhood\u2019s future, and he is examining participatory processes for deciding how to spend money to build more resilient infrastructure. His relatives are not surprised by this turn. They say Rob is the family\u2019s best political canvasser, skilled at knocking on doors and chatting people up.<\/p>\n He sees more local progress than national or international on climate, in part because \u201cyou can get the people who are involved in the solution in the same room,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n The next generation is continuing the family\u2019s civic work. Veronica and Julianne are working in politics in San Francisco. Madi is a public defender in Contra Costa County. Ben is an attorney in the natural resources division of the state attorney general\u2019s office. Ella is in medical school, and Caroline is teaching music.<\/p>\n The family still gathers every summer at Pajaro Dunes, an unpretentious coastal refuge in southern Santa Cruz County. Sue and Art, who died in 2020, first read of the area in a KQED magazine in the 1960s. There, the Lemperts eat burritos and engage in ferocious political debates, though there hasn\u2019t been a really big fight since Obama-Clinton divided the family back in 2008.<\/p>\n Sue wins most of these debates, with directness and humor on display in San Mateo, where she offers me (like her, a parent of three) some advice: Only one hour of TV for the kids a week, and that must come on the weekend. With such strong opinions, I suggest, she must have enemies.<\/p>\n \u201cJerry Hill is on the list,\u201d she says, though I\u2019m not sure if she\u2019s kidding; I\u2019d told her earlier that grandparents considered Hill, a former San Mateo mayor, a friend.<\/p>\n \u201cSpeaking of Jerrys, there\u2019s that rascal Jerry Brown,\u201d she says, adding that she still questions the wisdom of his popular pro-union legislation<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, Mom!\u201d interjects Ted. \u201cYou\u2019re wrong about that.\u201d<\/p>\n The conversation accelerates. There really is no stopping the Lemperts.<\/p>\n Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Z\u00f3calo Public Square<\/a> and is founder-columnist of Democracy Local<\/a>, a planetary publication.<\/p>\n Primary editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two years ago, at a crowded gathering in San Francisco, Gavin Newsom was introduced to a young, local…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":388941,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":["post-388940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388940\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/388941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}