Missing Him Already

Ed Lee with former mayors Willie Brown, Dianne Feinstein, and Gavin Newsom (Chronicle photo)

"You won't miss him till he's gone" is a cliché that happens to be true in the case of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, who died earlier today of a heart attack.

Lee was city administrator in January 2011 when the Board of Supervisors appointed him to replace Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had been elected the state’s lieutenant governor...

Lee initially said he wasn’t interested in being mayor, but relented and took the job after a public campaign led by Chinese American civic leaders — the slogan was “Run, Ed, Run!” He said he wasn’t interested in a full term, but after solid job reviews and months of urging from former Mayor Willie Brown, now a Chronicle columnist, the late Chinatown power broker Rose Pak and, ultimately, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Lee changed his mind...

Lee won election to a full term in November 2011 and was re-elected in 2015. An early accomplishments was 2011’s “Twitter tax,” which cut payroll taxes for six years on a sketchy stretch of Market Street and lured thousands of tech jobs and workers to the city. While Mid-Market has since been partially redeveloped with new offices and hotels, the overarching effect of the tax cut was to draw startups and established tech companies to the city, which now has one of the lower unemployment rates in the country.

City administrator Lee's appointment to interim Mayor in 2011 might well have caused a lesser man to kick back and enjoy the perks of office; instead he worked much harder. He brought tech companies--and jobs--into the City, then worked to mitigate prosperity's adverse consequences (congestion, high housing prices, and homelessness).

Many people liked him, recalling another cliché: he could "disagree without being disagreeable". He was nice to everyone and apparently didn't play "dirty politics." Although spending long hours, Mayor Lee displayed publicly a "friendly and often jokey personality" that showed that work for him wasn't everything. His lack of ambition helped to make him popular: not only did he not seek higher office, he didn't even want to be mayor.

Note to Republicans: whoever the Mayor is, he or she will never agree with your position on sanctuary cities, climate change, tax cuts, or social spending. Given that premise, Mayor Lee, who advocated business-friendly policies, was the best that you could have hoped for. Wait till you see who comes after, and, yes, you'll miss him now that he's gone.

[Update - 12/13: Ed Lee's obituary in the Chronicle.

And when starting a speech, he often began, to the chagrin of his staffers, “I’m going to keep this short, because I am short.”

The most disarming humor is the self-deprecating kind.]