SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
San Francisco isn't even among the top 10 list of America's most populous cities, but it has produced a number of national politicians, including Vice President Kamala Harris. Member station KQED's Scott Shafer has this look at how local San Francisco campaigns might prepare politicians for the big show.
SCOTT SHAFER, BYLINE: When Nancy Pelosi ran for an open House seat here in 1987, she faced more than a dozen sharp-elbowed opponents. They accused her of being a privileged out-of-towner who didn't understand local issues. One Democratic opponent, Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver, said Pelosi, who lives in one of San Francisco's poshest neighborhoods, was out of touch with average San Franciscans.
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CAROL RUTH SILVER: How can she relate to people like me, a single parent, working mother?
SHAFER: Pelosi came from a political family in Baltimore. Her father was mayor there and a member of Congress. She went on to win her first House race, and the no-holds-barred politics of it toughened her up. And it started her on a path to becoming the first female speaker of the House. Reflecting on that first race for Congress, Pelosi told KQED three years ago, she was surprised by all the incoming fire she got when polls showed she was the front-runner.
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NANCY PELOSI: Then I became the target by everybody, and they started saying all these things. These were people that I had had in my home, that I had helped do events for, and, all of a sudden, I was - didn't know anything about anything, right?
SHAFER: David Chiu, who is now San Francisco's city attorney, says politics here are a bare-knuckle fight.
DAVID CHIU: People are used to playing very hardball, rough-and-tumble politics. It is not genteel.
SHAFER: CHIU, who encouraged Kamala Harris to run for district attorney two decades ago, says the city's relatively small size and uniformly liberal politics mean campaigns can get nasty and personal fast.
CHIU: We're just squished up against each other in the political spectrum and trying to carve minuscule distinctions between imperceptible shades of blue.
SHAFER: Dan Schnur, who teaches political communication at UC Berkeley, says, unlike other West Coast cities, San Francisco's politics resemble the intensity of New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
DAN SCHNUR: So San Francisco never had a Tammany Hall or a Boss Curley or Mayor Daley, but it certainly put together the same type of city hall, local-politics-driven culture that we see in many of those cities.
SHAFER: Also like those cities, San Francisco has had its share of political corruption scandals. Two former city department heads recently went to prison over accepting bribes or inappropriate gifts. Political consultant Ace Smith worked on campaigns for both Harris and Governor Gavin Newsom, who became mayor and went on to be a national surrogate for President Biden and Vice President Harris. Smith says San Francisco is to politics what the Dominican Republic is to professional baseball, where a disproportionate number of people make it to the big leagues.
ACE SMITH: And guess what? A huge amount of them make them to the majors and make a huge impact in the majors. You had better be able to hit everything from the 100-mile-an-hour pitch to the nastiest curveball to the screwball and everything in between.
SHAFER: Rebecca Prozan, who worked with Harris on her early campaigns, says San Francisco politics is like an episode of "Survivor."
REBECCA PROZAN: And so when you have the kinds of competition for elections, for elective office that you have in San Francisco, that prepares you for the next level and the next level and the next level.
SHAFER: But as Harris aims for the Oval Office, she's hardly emphasizing her time in San Francisco, perhaps to avoid its image as a bastion of liberal policies that might not play so well in swing states.
SHAFER: For NPR News, I'm Scott Shafer in San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE OF MATMOS' "FOR THE TREES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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