That was a short campaign.
Less than a week after leaking a private poll that showed her trouncing a crowded field of Democrats in the primary for attorney general, Jackie Speier has decided to hang on to her congressional seat.
That’s bad news for the legion of Bay Area Democrats yearning for that rare chance to run for an open, non-term-limited congressional seat in a district Abe Lincoln couldn’t win for the Republicans.
“She’s going to remain in Congress where she can focus on issues that she cares about,” said Nathan Ballard, a former spokesman for S.F. Mayor Gavin Newsom who’s now working for Speier.
The decision came as a surprise to many political junkies, since officeholders who announce that they’re “considering” a run for another office typically already have the campaign signs painted.
Make no mistake, Speier was thinking long and hard about dumping her cross-country commute to DC and heading back to Sacramento, where she spent 18 years in the Legislature. She spent the money for a serious statewide poll and then made sure that the San Francisco Chronicle’s Phil Matier and Andy Ross got a copy of the results to put in their widely read column last Wednesday.
Speier spent most of last week in Sacramento, making the rounds and seeing what type of support she’d have for a run. The speculation fired up her longtime backers in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, who suggested that the only bad thing about her running for attorney general is that she wouldn’t be running for governor.
There were plenty of reasons for Speier to make the shift. Washington is a long way away from her home in Hillsborough, where she has a son in college and a daughter in high school. Seniority also rules in Congress and, at age 59, Speier was looking at the prospect of spending much of her congressional career as a backbencher.
Finally, it’s no secret that Speier would love to be California’s first female governor and the attorney general’s office has been the stepping-stone for former governors like Earl Warren, Pat Brown and George Deukmejian.
But family considerations ultimately convinced her to stay out of the race, she said Tuesday.
“I am convinced it’s the right thing to do for my family and I best believe I can serve my constituents by remaining in Congress,” Speier said in a statement.
Still, it seems that the congresswoman could have had that dining room table discussion with her family before all the furor that the “will she or won’t she?” speculation ignited.
A couple of other consideration likely played a role.
When Speier ran in the April 2008 special election to replace the late Tom Lantos in Congress, she made much of the fact that she was stepping into the seat once held by her former boss and mentor, Democratic Rep. Leo Ryan.
Ryan was murdered and Speier badly wounded during a 1978 congressional fact-finding visit to the Peoples Temple compound in Jonestown, Guyana.
“Leo taught me never to forget who I work for,” Speier said when she opened her campaign for Congress at, fittingly enough, Leo Ryan Park in Foster City back in January 2008.
To give up that oft-proclaimed dream job after little more than two years to reach for another rung on the political ladder could be awkward to explain and would give Speier the look of just another ambitious politician, a label she’s tried to avoid.
It’s also important to remember, as pollsters themselves keep saying, that a poll is a snapshot, not a prediction. While the poll Speier commissioned showed her at 23 percent and San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris a distant second at 5 percent, 62 percent of the voters aren’t paying enough attention to the race yet to support anyone.
Speier knows how fickle polls can be. A Field Poll released just days before the 2006 primary showed Speier with a growing lead over John Garamendi in the lieutenant governor’s race. But on election day, Garamendi was the winner, 42 percent to 39 percent.
Speier would have entered the Democratic primary as a favorite, but campaign finance reports released Monday show that five other Democrats have at least $1 million in campaign accounts earmarked for the attorney general contest. Add to that a strong GOP challenge in the fall and Speier is looking at a long, expensive and hard-fought campaign, with no guarantee of victory.
A re-election run in the 12th Congressional District, on the other hand, would be a low-cost, virtually unopposed affair, with an all-but-guaranteed win. In the end, Speier took the political sure thing.
But Speier does get major props for announcing her interest in a race, looking at the landscape and then making her decision, all in the course of a week.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, on the other hand, has been talking about a possible run for governor still saying she hasn’t made a decision.
Here’s a helpful reminder for the senator: The filing deadline is March 12.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.