News and Features
Mike Magee: Mayor Gregor Robertson's Right Hand Man
By Frances Bula published Sep 1, 2010
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City Hall’s secret war room is tranquil this day. Here on the third floor, tucked into the back of Mayor Gregor Robertson’s compound, Mike Magee leans back in his chair and speaks in a voice appropriate to the cool-down segment of a yoga class. Even when he refers to one problem person as an “idiot” and “complete motherfucker,” his tone is gentle, reflective. Things seem under control—for the moment. Last week, he squired Robertson around San Francisco, a tour that included a Twittered and photographed meeting with his doppelgänger, good-looking, progressive mayor Gavin Newsom, whose priorities happen to be the same as Robertson’s: homelessness and making his city the greenest in the world.
Earlier today, Magee monitored a special council meeting on the dangers of oil-tanker traffic—a topic that generated a pleasing amount of media coverage—before heading off to a joint meeting to plan Robertson’s fall business trip to China. Two days hence, according to Magee’s plan, the combative head of the Vancouver athletic commission will be fired and replaced by the city’s former Olympics planner. And, as the afternoon winds down, the sun filtering onto the room’s few objects—an abstract painting of a Downtown Eastside alley, piles of paper, an empty Fresca can, a glass coffee mug with its oily dregs—city manager Penny Ballem steps in for a two-minute conference on the tactics for getting a particular motion to council before the summer break. Such strategizing happens dozens of times a month, and it always involves the man whose job it is to make sure the mayor looks good, the deals get done, and the revolution at City Hall is carried out with maximum efficiency.
Enter the Rainmaker
Chiefs of staff are stock characters in every political drama—mysterious but powerful Rasputins, alleged puppet masters of hapless politicians. There’s truth in there, for sure: they have to be the bad cops in every administration; control freaks—every bump is the end of the world; and master media wranglers, developing relationships with key reporters. They need to know what their politicians are going to think and say before those politicians know it themselves. With their bosses hindered by a time-sucking toll of meetings and ceremonial duties, the chiefs are key to the essential task of politics—turning the platform into reality—while emptying the fire extinguisher on unexpected eruptions. Magee occupies that role fully.
