LETTER FROM SAN FRANCISCO
San Francisco, the progressive capital of the country, turns to the right? In a city with only 7% Republican voters, the district attorney has been “recalled”, Tuesday, June 7, by a clear majority of voters in a referendum followed with interest throughout the country. Chesa Boudin has been a victim of rising crime – real in some categories of crime, fantasy in others. A taste of what is likely to await many Democratic candidates in the November elections, when security is shaping up to be a major campaign issue.
Since his election in 2020, Chesa Boudin, 41, has been one of the favorite targets of the Trumpist right, which has made him the standard bearer for progressive prosecutors, supporters of criminal justice reform. Head of the office of public defenders in San Francisco, judged as an outsider in the local microcosm, he was elected by a very narrow majority (2,825 votes). The Democratic establishment had not supported his candidacy for a position that aims less to defend than to repress.
The media had, on the other hand, been enthusiastic about the extraordinary career of this son of anti-system militants who had gone over to the side of the strengthening of law and order; with the exception of the conservative chain Fox News, which had mainly retained its end-of-studies internship for the Venezuelan presidency under Hugo Chavez.
Promises kept
Chesa was 14 months old when his parents left him at the babysitter one day in 1981, in New York, never to appear again. Members of the anti-imperialist group Weather Underground, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin had been arrested for a robbery which killed three people – including two police officers. The child was raised in Chicago by two other figures in the movement, academics Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
After forty years of detention, the father, David Gilbert, benefited from a remission of sentence; he was released from prison at the end of December 2021. Kathy Boudin, descendant of a long line of left-wing magistrates – her father had defended Fidel Castro – spent twenty years behind bars before being released in 2003. Chesa studied law at Yale, then was selected for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. From childhood, he had noticed that he was often the only white man in line for the prison visiting room. He vowed to himself to try to address racial injustices in the justice system, a popular theme in an archprogressive city.
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