The Day After the Day After
So you're Alex Tourk. Everything is fine and honky dorky until your wife, out of the blue, admits to having a fling with not only your boss but one of your best buddies. Even worse, it appears the everyone in the city (except us) knew about it but you didn't. Man, that's one hell of a bad week. Whenever we see these storylines on TV or in the movies, it always ends badly, like in people being shot and killed badly.
So where are we with all of this? Well everybody is still loving the story. It's in this week's Newsweek and Time. Wonkette finally weighed in on it (says a commentor: "Oh this is SF. They love making mountains out of mole hills at every perceived ethical lapse.") and the story even made Perez Hilton. SFGate reports they had their biggest date ever in terms of page views. When the images from SFGate linked to Drudge, the site slowed to a crawl. But with a story this juicy, how could people not be into it?
The first immediate question is what's next for the Gavster? As he tried to get back to his job, the question is just how good of a job can he do? As the Chron says, now that he's been taken down a notch or two, a lot of things he wants to work on-- homelessness, health care, the WiFi deal-- is considerably more of a challenge due to either distractions or a lot of people being even less willing to help him. Already, one fund raiser has been cancelled with the possibility of another being cancelled too. But as even Newsweek says, San Francisco is a fairly forgiving place. Says Wille Brown, a man who knows a few things or too about catting around: "being a hedonist is not a disability in San Francisco.” And God love San Francisco for that. On the other hand, some people are geting huffy over it.
Picture from SFGate
But there's more to it, of course than all of this. You can look at the story is a bunch of chickens coming home to roost and we're talking about a whole lot of chickens and a very tiny roost. Or we could describe it as an onion in which you peel one layer to get many more layers and at the end, all you can do is cry.
First there's the literal chickens, for which we take you back to Matier & Ross' column from yesterday. Gavin's pimping life style was becoming an issue and according to M&R, friends and aides of Gavin knew this shoe was going to drop at some point. Some of them were even glad it happened because it might scare Mr. Party Boy straight.
Then you look at it figuratively. A lot of things have gone wrong for the Gavin lately-- the 49ers thing, crime, etc-- and a feeling that Gavin has been sort of absent from dealing with it. Just look at the 49ers thing-- Gavin was supposedly too busy to call back John York and so York got all huffy and bailed on him. Underlying all this is the perception that Gavin was too busy boozing and whoring to do his job.
And finally, there's the credibility issue, or the perception of credibility. As our beloved ex-editor Eve wondered, are the wheels coming off the Administration? Which might explain all the stupid press tricks they've been pulling lately. If the Mayor is screwing up, wouldn't it make more sense to be antagonistic to the press than be nice to them? And if this is all a downward cycle, are things about to get worse before they get better?
Eh, who knows. We're just kind of dreading having to do this kind of post for the next couple of months or so.