I am grateful to the voters of Oakland, who frequently vote for stupid things, for having the intelligence to reject Measure E. It used to be said that Oaklanders never saw a new tax they didn’t approve. Well, now they have. With 100% of votes counted, E went down by 46% to 54%. The radical redistributionists have been given a resounding punch in the gut. It was meant to hurt, and I hope it does.
Rejecting a parcel tax is so out of character for Oaklanders that you have to ask, why? For one thing, the campaign against E was adroit. All the major media were against E, and those of us here on the ground from our own little perches did our best to sound the alarm and urge a big NO ON E campaign. We pointed out the graft and corruption that have always accompanied how these parcel taxes are handled. The news that three of the last four Oakland parcel taxes didn’t even end up spending their money on the things they advertised was fatal. Voters looked at Barbara Lee and saw nothing but an old, tax-and-spend communist who’s been stealing money from hard-working Oaklanders for the last thirty years. Voters love their firefighters, but they assumed, correctly, that Measure E funds would get diverted to the usual racist schemes and union oinkers. Oaklanders understand that their city is governed by ne’er-do-wells who lack the competence needed to run a complicated city and whose ideology is unsuited for high office. Even renters understood that parcel taxes will inevitably get passed on to them. In short, for Measure E to fail in Oakland is an historic event: even progressives are tired of woke. It’s just another sign that the Democratic Party overreached yet again. The party—my party—has failed to read the signs. Voters are sick and tired of high taxes being used as a socialist ploy to take money from the working classes and give it to the lazy indigent. Let this be a lesson to Lee and the rest of the City Council: don’t raise our taxes or we’ll do to you what we did to Pamela Price and Sheng Thao.
And while we’re on the subject of election results, how about a huge shoutout for Ursula Jones Dickson, who last time I checked had gathered a super-majority of votes in her race against the racist former District Attorney, Price. We kicked Price out of office in a landslide and she was so stupid, so vain and low I.Q. that she actually thought she had a chance of being re-elected. No way. Can Pamela Price, now twice humiliated, finally pack her bags and get the hell out of Oakland?
As for the Governor’s race, I voted for Becerra because he can win. I don’t need a Hollywood-handsome, charismatic Governor after eight years of Gavin. Don’t get me wrong, I love Newsom and I hope he’ll be President (although I love Buttigieg too), but it will be nice to have a regular guy as Governor—and Gavin Newsom has never been a “regular” guy. Becerra will grow into the job. It will be a heavy lift, but Becerra is a quiet, intelligent and deeply moral man and he can do it. As for Hilton—sorry, you Republicans out there, but you have another MAGA loser on your hands. And he has a poofy accent.
So where does Oakland go now? As we look across the Bay to our sister, San Francisco, we see renewed growth and civic pride. San Francisco feels like it’s embarking on a new, exciting era. Not so Oakland. When we elected the anachronism, Barbara Lee, we went backwards, and promoted a tired, bitter old Black Panther. Why did anyone expect her to represent change? She’s been stuck in her thinking for sixty years, and is more heavily in debt to the unions than ever. What a horrible contrast she makes to Daniel Lurie, who is bringing his city forward while Lee keeps trying to drag Oakland backwards to the bad old days of race wars, taxation and patronizing the people.
Steve Heimoff