For Rose Pak, it’s another day, another mayor.
Board of Supervisors President David Chiu will run for Mayor of San Francisco in November 2011, according to Pak, the influential head of the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce.
Pak should know: the highly-connected power broker — Pak is a close friend of former mayor Willie Brown, and helped secure the Chinatown vote for Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2003 — is widely seen as chief engineer of City Administrator Ed Lee’s selection as the city’s interim mayor, and Pak was the organizer of a press conference/luncheon Thursday in which a statement from Lee — still on vacation in Taiwan, where he was when Pak “convinced” him to take the interim position — was read to a banquet hall of Chinatown luminaries and local media.
Chiu did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment. An aide for Chiu was similarly unavailable.
UPDATE. Chiu called the Appeal on Thursday evening to say that he is not at all committed to running for mayor. “I have made no decision,” he said. “Right now I’m completely focused on my work at the Board of Supervisors. There’s a lot going on at City Hall that I need to focus on.”
That Chiu is interested in becoming mayor is not news: he told Fog City Journal in December that he was considering running for the position, and mentioned the same to fellow politicos in the weeks leading up to that. But unlike Chiu, Pak did not equivocate.
“David Chiu will run for Mayor,” she told the Appeal. “I know he’s running for mayor.”
The news that Chiu will not become District Attorney was no news to Pak. “He never once expressed a desire to be DA,” Pak told the Appeal. “I asked him privately.”
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