Mayor Daniel Lurie faces a choice. He can continue to embrace the doom loop narrative instrumental to his election victory, or declare victory it and take on the hard work of governance. The doom loop narrative reframed how much of the country and world viewed San Francisco politics, and sought, with limited success, to reshuffle the political deck in the city. But now it’s well past time to move on. 

In the recent mayoral election, the purest doom loop candidate was Mark Farrell. But Lurie was its biggest beneficiary, winning the race while Farrell finished a dismal fourth. Lurie’s calm noblesse oblige was more appealing to voters than Farrell as angry dad. The problem Lurie now faces is that the doom loop was always a triumph of oversimplified conservative agendas over political reality; of kvetching over mature governance.

An additional challenge for Lurie, one that his predecessor never fully understood, is that San Francisco competes with every American city — and increasingly cities around the world — for tourists, conventions, businesses and the like. To attract people and organizations, the city must be made to seem as safe and appealing as possible. That requires cheerleading. 

People all over the world should know that San Francisco is a great city that, like all big cities, has problems, but is beautiful, fun and exciting. When the mayor does not believe that, neither will the rest of the world.

Any San Franciscan who has traveled in recent years has had to defend the city  against misinformation spread by doom loop proselytizers. One of the tasks facing Lurie is to change the narrative.

If the ratio of “I hear things are terrible there” to “what a beautiful city” comments switch from two to one in favor of the former to the same ratio in favor of the latter. That will make the rest of his job much easier.

A related mistake that Lurie must avoid is to assume his victory was a call to shift the city rightward. Lurie’s victory was due to two major factors: First the enormous amount of money he spent on the campaign, and second, from running against an unpopular incumbent. Only a quarter of San Franciscans voted for Breed in the first round, while in the final round, Lurie outpaced her by 10 points. Not since Frank Jordan lost to Willie Brown in 1995 has an incumbent mayor fared so poorly in the final round.

Breed was a victim of the doom loop narrative she embraced, but Lurie’s victory was not particularly ideological in nature. Some in the national media, embracing a lazy and somewhat offensive analysis that the rich Jewish guy must be more conservative than an African-American woman, tried to fit the square peg of dissatisfaction with the incumbent into the round hole of ideological shift, but that is a false framework.

From an ideological perspective, Lurie is much like Breed. They share a hybrid approach to San Francisco that combines a belief in diversity and tolerance with economic policies that favor business interests. This is the position that all mayors since Dianne Feinstein, with the usual caveat about the lone progressive mayor during the last 40 years, Art Agnos, have taken.

Lurie is not likely to distinguish himself from Breed with regards to big picture ideological differences, but he can nonetheless lead San Francisco in a better direction if he abandons the doom loop narrative and refuses to attack the city for short-term political gain as the incumbent did repeatedly and ultimately at a high political cost to herself.

The doom loop has been good to Lurie. Had it not emerged Lurie probably would not have run and would very likely not have won even if he had. However, that does not mean Lurie needs to stay tied to it. 

Now, his responsibility is to remind the rest of the country — and the world — what a great city San Francisco continues to be. The new mayor must also focus on real problems of affordability, climate change and, yes, homelessness and crime, while eschewing the exaggerated negative images about the city created by real estate speculators and tech libertarian populists in service of nefarious right-wing agenda.