SAN FRANCISCO—Throughout a career in which Rose Pak’s influence has steadily increased, two themes stand out: she has lobbied behind the scenes for the concerns that the Chinese Communist Party considers most important and she has patiently helped advance the career of Ed Lee. As Lee faces the voters on Tuesday, in the background is the question of what role Pak would play in a Lee administration.
While Pak has always been linked to Lee, she has been the midwife of his run for mayor.
Pak helped orchestrate Ed Lee’s rise to interim mayor, created the Astroturf movement that helped him announce he would run, and arranged the soft money that poured into the independent expenditure campaigns backing him.
Pak’s relationship with Ed Lee goes back to the mid 1970s, when he was in his first job as lawyer for the Asian Law Caucus, defending tenants facing eviction. At that time Pak was becoming a community organizer and finding her place at the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
Pak and Lee together raised two million dollars over less than two months for the Chinese Hospital, after a 1974 earthquake that damaged it severely.
Lee’s first job in the bureaucracy was as human rights commissioner, awarded by Art Agnos, for whom Pak had marshaled donations for his election bid. When Willie Brown became mayor, Lee was made Director of Purchasing, and then Director of the Department of Public Works.
While head of Public Works in 2001, Lee went to bat for a Pak friend and client. He persuaded the city architect not to fire contractor Robert Chiang, whose incompetence and waste on the Martin Luther King pool project, according to SF Weekly, cost the city over a million dollars.
