Every day for the past 32 months, Fred Sainz has woken up with this singular thought:
“What can I do today to make Mayor Jerry Sanders look good?”
So says Fred Sainz, the man to whom San Diegans must turn for revealing nuggets about the workings of the Sanders administration.
As mayoral press secretary, the position he'll leave next month for a job in Denver, Sainz has been the media's one-stop shop for information from City Hall – a feat he managed, in large part, by closing all other shops.
Since Sainz took charge, no city employee has been allowed to speak to a reporter without his permission. He says this policy “is much harder to implement on a daily basis than it is to describe.” But it guarantees that every comment “reflects the mayor's philosophy.”
In his role as supreme spokesman, Sainz consolidated power so adroitly that his critics dubbed him “Mayor Fred,” believing he not only articulated city policy, but often set it. Sainz would deny this even if it were true; it wouldn't make Sanders look good.
For the media, the Sainz ascendancy made for an unpopular if entertaining trade-off. Reporters lost access to dozens of knowledgeable public servants with decades of institutional memory.
But in exchange, they got huge doses of Sainz, a bright if high-strung advocate who can be witty, informative and gossipy, who relishes the hand-to-hand combat of politics, and who can speak in the calibrated language of a diplomatic communiqué or, if the mood strikes him, just let it rip.
The latter is always more interesting.
One Sainz trademark is his conviction that anyone who disagrees with Sanders is not only wrong but dead wrong. “Patently ridiculous and false,” he'll say. Or, “Baloney and a red herring.” Or, “Zero truth.” Or, “Absolute fantasy.”
He's particularly proud of his aggression when the target is City Attorney Michael Aguirre.
When, for example, Aguirre proposed that the mayor join him in a community forum on city finances, Sainz called it “the suggestion of demagogues and charlatans.”
(“It's true,” he said yesterday. “Nothing productive ever happened at a forum hosted by Mike Aguirre.”)
And when Aguirre proposed a 21-point plan to address the city's financial problems, Sainz said, “If you like tax increases and endless lawsuits, then you'll love Mike's plan.”
That last quote, he said, is his favorite.
He's less fond of his response when Aguirre sued to lower the too-tall Sunroad office building: “We don't think it sends a positive message to the development community.”
“Oh, my God, I remember that, I remember that,” Sainz told me yesterday, as we reviewed his most celebrated utterances. “Mike Aguirre, he laughed at me for the longest time. I have to say, he was right on that. I have to give the devil his due.”
My own favorite Sainz-isms include this artful sidestep after it was revealed that large numbers of city employees cheated on a test of their emergency-preparedness training:
“We believe that training is more important than test-taking.”
And I continue to admire his defense of Sanders after a 2007 radio interview when the mayor was asked a question whose correct, if politically damaging, answer was “Yes.” Sanders, however, began his response with “No.”
Sainz suggested the mayor simply got off to a bad start: “The first word he should not have used. The rest of the statement is entirely accurate.”
Sainz, who's 40, took a curious route to becoming Sanders' staunchest defender.
In the 2005 mayoral election, he supported Councilwoman Donna Frye. But when Sanders asked him to be his press secretary, Sainz jumped at the chance, taking a cut in salary from his job with the San Diego Convention Center Corp.
In Sanders, who's 17 years his senior, Sainz found a surrogate for his father, who cut off communication a decade ago, after Sainz came out of the closet. Sainz recalls his father, a Cuban immigrant, saying, “Better a dead son than a gay son.” Sainz closely observed Sanders' relationship with his lesbian daughter and saw someone who “had the qualities I wish my father had.”
“Maybe that's why I'm such a fierce protector of his,” Sainz said, though he quickly clarified that he admires the mayor's policy instincts as well.
“I'm an unabashed, unapologetic partisan on behalf of my boss because I believe he is a stud,” he said. “Not just because of my quirky, pseudo-psychological issues with parental abandonment.”
As for his absolutism, Sainz said it serves a valuable purpose.
“People are looking for certainty in an uncertain world,” he said, “and for better or worse, the mush that oftentimes comes out of government is what breeds people's mistrust of the services it provides.”
It's always better to speak with conviction than to admit weakness, he said. “Sometimes in politics, if you say something, it is.”
I reminded him of another memorable Sainz-ism, one he delivered during the height of the Sunroad debate, when the media were examining the actions of the city's development services director:
“It's largely irrelevant what Jim Waring believes or doesn't believe. The only person's opinion that really matters is Jerry Sanders'.”
He clapped his hands, applauding his own words. “That is so spot-on,” he declared.
And if Fred Sainz says it, it must be true.
