The mayors of San Francisco and San Jose, respectively Daniel Lurie and Matt Mahan, have been extraordinarily active on the homelessness front. Almost every night sees one or both of them in the news, announcing a new plan or citing some new statistics. While their impact on the actual crisis is still to be determined, at the very least they’re letting voters know they’re involved and they care.
Not so the mayor of the Bay Area’s third-largest city. Oakland’s Barbara Lee has done precisely nothing about homelessness in the 2-12 months since she was sworn in. Admittedly, that’s not very long. But with homelessness the number one issue in Oakland, you’d think Lee would have developed a policy and would be out there touting it.
Instead, Lee’s presence in Oakland is more that of a ceremonial ribbon cutter than of a real leader. One day she’s dedicating a plaque to someone; the next, she’s at a restaurant opening. What she doesn’t seem to understand is that the people of Oakland voted for her to solve the homelessness and crime problems, and not for her to simply be a fleeting presence in a bright yellow suit at whatever event her managers think is most suitable.
Why is Lee so absent on the homelessness front? Simple. She has no policy. In fact, she has no beliefs upon which to build a policy. She’s never been an activist politician, but one more comfortable behind closed doors with her donors (which is why you probably can’t name one important thing she did for Oakland in her nearly 30 years in the Congress). Lee’s approach to homelessness is: don’t touch it. It’s too risky. Third-rail of politics type stuff. Anything Lee, or any other mayor for that matter, tries to do to curtail encampments will be fiercely resisted by the “progressive” homeless supporters, like Carroll Fife, who can generate mountains of media coverage with a simple tweet. Lee is fundamentally a timid, go-with-the-flow politician who dislikes fights and tries desperately to avoid them.
But that kind of politician is exactly what we don’t need. Oakland needs a fighter: someone determined to extinguish every tent, every encampment, every shanty beneath every freeway overpass, and liberate Oakland from the scourge of filth and despair that has overwhelmed it for years. Barbara Lee is not that person. She never has been and indeed cannot be, because her overlords, the powerful union bosses, won’t let her. For their own bizarre reasons, the unions—SEIU, CNA—like homeless encampments and continue to insist that homeless people have the right to live anywhere they want. I’ll let historians of the future figure out just what the union bosses think they’re getting out of this. But that’s where we are: The mayor of Oakland is little more than a goldfish swimming in a gilded bowl called City Hall, while her owners call the real shots and feed her once a day with crumbs.
When will Barbara Lee say or do anything about homelessness? Never. She’s afraid. She has no sound ideas on the subject, anyway, which would make anything she did say utterly ridiculous and absurd. The woke powers-that-be in Oakland have decided that encampments are a resource, like Lake Merritt, that must be protected. Look: we elected a feeble old lady to be mayor, and she’s doing exactly what everyone expected her to do: getting dressed up every morning, putting on her makeup, and then checking her schedule to see which tea, lunch or daytime meeting she’s expected to make a few remarks at. Not a bad job, at $216,000 a year, especially when that’s coupled with a big, fat Congressional pension.
Steve Heimoff