San Francisco could use Newsom’s Twittering prowess
By: Ken Garcia
Examiner Staff Writer
April 28, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — For years now, I’ve been telling Mayor Gavin Newsom that he needs a speechwriter, someone who could steer him away, metaphorically, from his wonkish, geeky, fact-spouting ways.
But then, who knew there would come a time when a new generation wanted their policy leaders to do their “vision thing” in 140 characters or less?
That’s how crafty San Francisco’s mayor is — he knew technology would eclipse any need for old and tired gimmicks like colorful, enlightened prose, campaign bus-stop blitzes and energized public involvement. The real magic is now out there in the ether, on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and all the other fiber-optic weigh stations he’s using as his platform to run for governor of the nation’s most populous state.
So I’ve got one last gift for the mayor before he ascends from Room 200, the ultimate slogan for the time-challenged constituency he deems to represent. It’s the perfect pitch for the text-happy masses that emerged from the old-school rubble of Care Not Cash.
“Twit for Gavin.” It fits like a proverbial button.
Newsom is trying to echo the savvy online tinkerers that helped carry Barack Obama to the presidency, a behind-the-scenes mix of cell phone social networking and Internet fundraising. It’s a grand — if copied — idea, a perfect plan to pit the young mayor against more seasoned political opponents like Attorney General Jerry Brown and the nearly equally slick chief executive of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, considered Newsom’s likely rivals in the race for the state house.
Yet for all of its instant giddiness, Newsom’s flashy official entrance into the race has but one fly in the gel: Our top Tweeter runs one of the most technologically challenged cities around, an analog town in these digital times. Newsom is trying to be as cool as an iPhone while the rest of San Francisco is running on a cackling land line — and the disconnect is palpable.
Here in our tech-savvy corner of the world, police officers can barely get access to a computer to file police reports. It was only a few years ago that lawyers in the District Attorney’s Office got software so that they could e-mail — e-mail! — which might explain why the wheels of justice here grind so slowly.
The City’s Department of Technology has generally been viewed as a black hole of fiscal waste and inefficiency, an agency sorely lacking the information tools required for advancement. The department made a name for itself recently as the place where a computer engineer managed to put San Francisco’s computer network in lockdown because he became disgruntled with management and then refused to hand over the passwords to anyone except the mayor after being arrested and jailed.
Could it be that Newsom spoke Java, freeing the magic data from another Tweeter’s perspective during their cyberbonding session?
If so, it may be among the only computer networks in city government that actually do speak to each other. For more than a decade now, The City has been working on something called the “Justice Project,” an attempt to link 11 city departments dealing with the criminal justice system under one computer hub.
And in Twitter translation, I can say it’s not happening. Not after a decade and upwards of $20 million.
The project is designed to replace, and in some cases, supplement, the Court Management System in place at several departments. CMS, as it is called, has mostly outlived its usefulness, although it did have its day.
“When it came out, it was really considered cutting-edge and ground-breaking — back in the late ’60s,” said longtime Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Eileen Hirst.
Hirst pointed out, good-naturedly, that she wasn’t working for The City, since she was a teenager at the time.
So the technology comes and goes, but San Francisco remains largely the same, a city that can measure, yet still stumble, over its own carbon footprint.
It should be noted that the legions Newsom is trying to secure via his techno handshake are getting the postings in the time it takes the mayor to tic-tic-tic on his iPhone keyboard because our frenetic leader doesn’t use a computer in his office. He learned long ago from one-time mentor Willie Brown that e-mails are more traceable than even paper, so others do his typing for him.
Information may be power, but it can also snare you, which is why it is best used sparingly, one half-sentence at a time.
That’s a far cry from those heady days last year when Mr. Talking Point took to the airwaves and flooded the world with the first digital broadcast of a State of the City address, lasting nearly 10 hours. It was ambitious, inventive and sleep-inducing.
Now he’s taken the sound bite down to a bit — new, generational, fresh.
The Twits are out there — just watch.
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