Today’s quote comes to us from Dan Lurie, the improbably elected (because he is a centrist Democrat, not a far-left looney-tune) Mayor of San Francisco.
After defeating the roundly disliked, grotesquely incompetent left wing incumbent, London Breed in a four-way “ranked voting” procedure, Lurie has tried – with limited successo far – to bring things back the sanity San Francisco once had, but had lost to the left wing insanity that has overwhelmed California in recent years. But it is not an easy task.
According to Titus Wu’s article for the New York Post:
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie blamed the city’s progressive politics for fueling its homelessness, drug overdose and business exodus crises, admitting in a new interview that the city had “lost its way.”
Lurie, who has made restoring San Francisco’s battered public image a priority since taking office, told CNN’s Dana Bash that his administration is taking a more hard-nosed approach to crime while working to make the city friendlier to businesses.
But Bash pressed the mayor on why San Francisco needed a turnaround in the first place — prompting a blunt admission about the city’s far-left reputation.
And what was Lurie’s answer? Here it is:
“We lost our way as a city. We were focused on the wrong things and today we’re focused on common sense,”
“I mean, we got so, entrapped in our progressive values and talking about progressivism that, we weren’t taking stock of what was happening on our streets,”
“We had 810 people die of overdose in San Francisco three years ago. There’s nothing progressive about that. There’s nothing progressive about 30,000 car break ins. Everyone had to deal with whether or not their car was going to be broken into.”
“Instead of talking about ideological issues and instead of talking about like, all the dysfunction, we are focused — if you asked me a question, I’m focused on how do we keep that mother walking their child to the bus stop safe and also not seeing open air drug use…
“…I’m proud of the progress we’ve made here in San Francisco.”
How much progress actually has been made? I’m not sure it’s that much. Lurie’s stated intentions notwithstanding, he still has the all-Democrat, mostly far-left, Board of Supervisors to contend with (not one Republican elected in over 30 years).
But Mayor Lurie wins Quote Of The Day honors for openly acknowledging the manifold problems San Francisco has and sounding like he’s trying to do something about them. At least that’s a start.
