BUSH KEEPS S.F. AT BAY
President hasn't participated in 75-year tradition of visiting city -- and he has no plans to do so
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGA5EB32N1.DTL
(Gold9472: Coward.)
Marc Sandalow, Washington Bureau Chief
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Washington -- Presidential visits to San Francisco have been a tradition since Rutherford Hayes lunched at the Cliff House in 1880.
Presidents arrived by stagecoach and jet. One was shot at. Another died. In all, 20 presidents have visited the city, including every chief executive for the past 75 years.
Except George W. Bush.
Now in the fifth year of his presidency, Bush has yet to set a foot in the city that was home to his childhood baseball idol, Willie Mays, and shows no inclination to do so. The White House is planning a California visit by the end of the month, and San Francisco is not on the itinerary.
San Francisco, with roughly three-quarters of a million residents, is the only city among the nation's 25 largest that has not been host for a Bush presidential visit. If he avoids San Francisco for the rest of his term, he will be the first president not to visit since Calvin Coolidge, and only the second in more than a century.
The reason seems plain to even casual observers of American politics.
San Francisco is as politically, culturally and geographically distant from the president as anyplace in America. Eighty-four percent of the city's voters cast ballots against Bush in 2000, and 85 percent voted against him in 2004. The city has voted Democratic in 12 consecutive presidential elections.
"He'd be crazy to come,'' observed Gladys Hansen, curator of the Museum of the City of San Francisco, which has documented many of the city's 62 presidential visits.
Yet it says something about the evolution of San Francisco or the inclinations of the current president -- perhaps both -- that shunning a city of 744,230 residents (according to a 2004 census estimate), is regarded as common sense.
White House aides and Republican operatives say they have never heard serious discussion of a San Francisco visit. In an age when presidential travel is driven by images, the predictable pictures from San Francisco would be angry protesters, not flag-waving children. Just as the White House uses trips to stage the president's "message of the day,'' opponents are adept at using the president's presence to publicize their grievances, as anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan established during her vigil in Crawford, Texas.
"The president could announce a cure for cancer, and the pictures would be some protesters from Code Pink trying to put a pie in his face,'' said Bill Whalen, who was a speechwriter for then-President George H.W. Bush's re- election campaign and is now a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.
Whether it is San Francisco's intolerance, Bush's intransigence, or demographic factors that are to blame, much has changed from the last century, when San Francisco was the population center of the West.
"Once, San Francisco was such an attractive city, and everyone was welcome,'' Hansen said. "Today it's not as attractive, and basically you have to be on the 'right' side to be welcomed.''
Others point to successful visits by previous presidents and say Bush's absence reveals more about his own personality than the city's.
"One of the Achilles' heels of this president is his granite cool stubbornness,'' said state Sen. Carole Migden, a Democrat who represents San Francisco. "It would be gracious to visit now and then. Maybe he'd embolden the more conservative and monied interests of his party.''
As a matter of public record, the White House insists that politics is not a factor.
"He's one man, and it's a big country,'' said White House spokesman Ken Lisaius, disputing the notion that Bush is avoiding the city because of its political makeup. "While conspiracy theories never fail to astound me, suggesting that he is specifically avoiding one city is ridiculous.''
Bush has visited the Bay Area four times as president, although never in San Francisco. His travel schedule shows there are no cities of comparable size that he has not visited. The White House does not disclose Bush's itineraries, but CBS Radio White House correspondent Mark Knoller keeps what are regarded as the most meticulous records. Knoller's records, along with an Internet search of news stories, found that Bush has traveled to 43 of the nation's 50 largest cities.
The other largest cities Bush has skipped are Wichita, Kan., Tulsa, Okla., Virginia Beach, Va., Fort Worth, Texas, Long Beach and Oakland. None approaches San Francisco in population.
Bush's travel schedule, like most presidents', is closely matched to his political needs. During his first term, Bush made frequent trips to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other states that were regarded as toss-ups for his re-election. Though Bush cannot run again, he is likely to spend much of his travel time in states and congressional districts where Republican candidates are engaged in tight races, rather than in Democratic strongholds such as San Francisco.
Still, Bush has been to places that supported him even less than San Francisco. He has spoken in Detroit, where he received just 6 percent of the vote, and in Newark, N.J., where he received 13 percent.
San Francisco has not always been so lopsidedly Democratic. After World War II, San Franciscans voted narrowly for Harry Truman, a Democrat, and then twice for Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican. President Richard Nixon received 42 percent of the vote in 1972 against George McGovern, and Ronald Reagan received 38 percent of the vote in 1980. It was not until the elder Bush ran against Bill Clinton in 1992 that the GOP candidate received less than 20 percent of the vote (19.6 percent.)
Clinton visited San Francisco a record 23 times, jogging along the Embarcadero and basking in the city's adulation. Not all presidents had such pleasant stays.
Bush's father visited San Francisco five times during his presidency and was greeted by so many protesters that Migden, who at the time served on the Board of Supervisors, had City Hall send his re-election campaign a bill for $38,690 to pay for police overtime. The campaign refused to pay. President Gerald Ford was shot at by Sara Jane Moore as he left the St. Francis Hotel in September 1975. The bullet missed by a few feet.
The most historic presidential visit came in 1923, when an ailing President Warren G. Harding checked into the Palace Hotel on Market Street, where he died in an eighth-floor suite several weeks later. The official cause of death was recorded as a stroke, but there was always speculation that food poisoning, or even deliberate poisoning by the first lady, was the actual cause.
Bush last visited the Bay Area in March 2004 for a re-election fundraiser in Santa Clara. His Bay Area travel has been confined to a roughly 30-mile stretch along the Peninsula between Burlingame and San Jose, and each trip has attracted vocal protesters who were kept at a distance by the Secret Service.
The last time Bush ventured into San Francisco was to raise money at the St. Francis Hotel in June 1999, shortly after announcing his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination.
Mike DeNunzio, chairman of the San Francisco Republican Party, said he would relish a return trip.
"We are known as a left-coast city, we are known as more liberal, but I think people would be very proud to see their president. I know I would,'' DeNunzio said.
However, Democrats seem to express more enthusiasm for a Bush visit than Republicans, eyeing the president's statewide approval rating of 34 percent in the latest Field Poll and just 22 percent in the Bay Area. California Democratic Party activist Bob Mulholland suggested Bush tour the state with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, speculating the two together would doom the governor's ballot measures, if not his re-election chances.
What Bush would do were he to come to San Francisco is a matter of pure conjecture. He turned down an invitation by Mayor Gavin Newsom to get a firsthand look at the city's same-sex marriages last year, surprising no one, and turned down another invitation to speak at the 60th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations' charter.
Whalen suggested in an op-ed piece in The Chronicle two years ago that Bush come to a Giants game to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Willie Mays' famous catch during the 1954 World Series, and present his childhood idol the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
So far, none of the suggestions appears to have been taken seriously. But the White House insists there is time.
"Just because he hasn't been there yet," spokesman Lisaius said, "doesn't mean he won't be there at some point in the future.''
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