The pathos of the Oakland Fire Department struggling with 30-year old equipment is indeed disconcerting. Oaklanders love their fire department, and would make almost any sacrifice to help it.
But not Measure E.
The mayor, the City Council, the unions and OFD itself all thought that the public would rally to Measure E and support it handily. What they didn’t take into account—and what I and many other critics of E pointed out—was how disgusted we are by Oakland’s constant failures and lies to cover up those failures. The progressives behind E wanted us to once again fall into line and give them millions more dollars to waste. But this time, something was different: voters simply didn’t believe it. Barbara Lee told one lie too many, and the public finally realized that she’s untrustworthy. When she told us, last month, that Measure E was “the difference between maintaining the status quo and actually moving the needle,” we all went, “Yeah, Babs,” and we promptly concluded she’s either too stupid to perceive her contradictions, or blatantly lying to us.
This is a mayor who can’t balance her own budget. Who never had to deal with pothole issues during her thirty years in Congress, and now that she has to, doesn’t know how. This is a failed Sixties Black revolutionary whose decades of anti-cop venom have now caught up to her. This is an extremist who swore fealty to Huey Newton and Angela Davis, and then to her union paymasters at SEIU. Take a look at SEIU Local 1021’s officers: they look like the employees of the Department of Motor Vehicles, people of no particular skill or talent except to serve as faceless, useless bureaucrats.
Unions used to serve a vital role for American workers: they fought for responsible working conditions, fair salaries and modest benefits, such as sick leave, vacation time and lunch breaks. When I was growing up, unions had a very good reputation (except for some that were riddled with mob affiliations, like the Teamsters). Nowadays, unions are justifiably viewed with skepticism. At some point, their focus went from helping their members to advancing a leftwing political agenda that included affirmative action, racial quotas and hyper-partisan political behavior. Unions became, in other words, part of the “progressive” political machine in urban America, and this is where and when they lost their way. Once the unions saw themselves as nothing more than providing the shock troops and money for woke causes, they ceased to be employee unions and became instead political action groups, advancing causes that have become increasingly unpopular among most Americans.
That was a mistake of historic importance. You’d think that unions like SEIU would be sobered by statistics, like declining membership and anti-progressive election results (recalling Price and Thao, rejecting Measure E), and realize that they need to change course or die. Instead, like fentanyl addicts who can’t help themselves, they go on shooting up. SEIU even co-sponsored Proposition D, the Overpaid CEO Act, which would have raised taxes on billionaire corporate heads. Even in far-left San Francisco that measure went down to defeat!
The portents of doom for the Left are written everywhere you look. Progressive Democrats thought that the public’s disgust with Donald Trump gave them permission to turn even further leftward than they’d already done. This was a very big, very damaging assumption, and all the political consultants who advised it should be fired. It’s important, however, to point out that in rejecting the stupider forms of leftism, voters did not reject the progressive idealism of the Democratic Party that gave us unions, Social Security, Medicare, same-sex marriage, environmental protections, a firewall between government and religion, and a generally inclusive attitude toward human differences. The Democratic Party still covets those ideals and fights to protect them. It’s just that they decided that “peak woke” was a cancer on the body politic and had to be excised.
It must be very hard for Barbara Lee to look in a mirror and ask herself what she did wrong with Measure E, on which she placed her political reputation. The obvious answer is, she shouldn’t have backed it in the first place. She did, because she never saw a tax on the working classes she didn’t support, because her paymasters at SEIU instructed her to, and—most saliently—because she misread the voters. This is a career politician who hasn’t faced a decent opponent in thirty years and has forgotten how to campaign. Why go out on the road when the unions are there for you, guaranteeing you the money—and all you have to do is get out the kneepads and service them?
If you were Barbara Lee in Congress, all you ever asked was “What do my unions want me to do?” As long as the unions remained steadfast to their members, all was okay. Then somehow (in a tale yet to be told) the unions went woke, and suddenly Barbara Lee found herself, no longer captain of her own ship, but a slave girl on it. The real captain, she has found out, is the SEIU Executive Board. We voters know that, which is why Measure E failed. This is a personal embarrassment to the Mayor, and she should learn from it, but of course she won’t.
Steve Heimoff