It was interesting to see how the story of Matt Gonzalez not running unfolded.

When Gonzalez ran for Mayor in 2003, he announced it to the SF Examiner who had the story as the lead story.

When Gonzalez decided to step down from electoral office in 2004, he announced it to the SF Examiner six days before his biggest fundraiser to pay off his mayoral election debt and during the state national Green Party convention in San Francisco. Many within the Green Party felt betrayed when they read the news in the Examiner rather than hearing it from Gonzalez himself that weekend.

Yesterday, Gonzalez noted the news that he was not running in an editorial meeting of the Chronicle. And the Chronicle posted the story under the death of Bill Walsh and other news in the lower front page of their website and then the story has slipped to the bottom of the page of their website. SF Chronicle’s Story on Matt Gonzalez Not Running for Mayor In other words, the story has lost its impact over the last four years.

Gonzalez made rumblings that he was going to run for Mayor in the early spring. He had his posse organized meetings of the loyalists to see if he should run for Mayor. The answer as you suspect from loyalists was an overwhelming yes. But Gonzalez did another thing that surprise those who knew him-he did or look at a poll. Gonzalez’s usual method of operation was to dive into something with just a few calls rather than wait for a poll.

And those who are supposedly nearest and dearest to him reported that Gonzalez had trouble raising money. The capital that Gonzalez had found easily at the beginning of his first race had evaporated.

As the FogCity Journal pointed out in a blind item about Gonzalez, this is 2007 and lots of things have changed.

In 2004, there was a cadre of rich, young people who had made money on the dot boom. They had time on their hands-either being between job or having lots of vacation time accrued for hours that they spent in front of a computer.

The headquarters for the Gonzalez campaign during the runoff became a place for young people to hang out with other like-minded young people-a MySpace in actual reality.

But it’s 2007. Those young people have moved on to another job or have gotten responsibilities such as a spouse and/or family. Those who were young and single have found it difficulty to find housing within their budget in San Francisco.

And Gonzalez for the most part, has dropped out of the political scene. Oh, he has had art shows of his collages-but he collected all of the funds and didn’t use it for any type of fundraising or community building.

He helped the campaigns of Chris Daly and Jane Kim.

But the list of the events that he didn’t showed up for and the campaigns that he didn’t work on for the last three years is a lot longer. For example, Gonzalez didn’t bother to show up to the Harvey Milk Memorial celebration which he had helped to reignite and then Gonzelez walked away from. Gonzalez didn’t bother to attend any of the peace rallies, the rallies for affordable housing, the meetings on public safety or all of the other “must do, must be seen” events that is needed to keep yourself in the public eye in terms of poltiics.

Gonzalez even avoided the meetings where he would have been surrounded by friends and supporters. Gonzalez has only gone to one Green Party meeting in the last three years (and the topic of that meeting was solely about Matt and what Matt wanted to do)-and he only briefly showed up at the state Green Party convention that was held in San Francisco-in part because that’s where two of the state party’s brightest stars, Ross Mirkarimi and Matt Gonzalez live.

It doesn’t mean that Gonzalez can’t run for another office. But it does mean that by staying out of the public eye and not working on political causes or community issues, Gonzalez will have rebuild his support base and recarve himself in the miinds of voters in order to become viable as a candidate for a future race.

UPDATE (by Sasha): I am closing comments on this post. While we encourage free discussion in our comments, this thread has left the topic too far behind, as well as getting overly personal.