KQED-FM, FORUM (SAN FRANCISCO) -- San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee died early Tuesday morning. The 65-year-old former civil-rights attorney was San Francisco’s first Asian American mayor.
Jason McDaniel, associate professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, participated in a panel discussion on Mayor Lee’s life and legacy.
“He was more comfortable thinking about budgets, behind-the-scenes stuff. And he was not as good at that public side of the job,” McDaniel said. “He was not Willie Brown. He was not Gavin Newsom. And I think that mattered when the Google bus protests, when the politics really began to turn and highlight, here in San Francisco, the inequality and the rising cost of living. This mayor was slow to react and was not always very good at crafting those public agendas that could unify the city around a common goal of how to go about dealing with some of the tradeoffs and the costs of that booming economy that he helped to engender.”