The most notable thing about Barbara Lee’s mayoralty, after six months in office, is how un-notable she’s been. We hardly see her on television, or hear her on the radio, and even when she’s on social media, she’s barely a squeak. When Her Honor does deign to make a few public remarks, they’re so bland, so puerile in bureaucratese pablum, that she might have said nothing at all.
Barbara Lee is the Do-Nothing Mayor of Oakland.
She was never particularly adept at crafting an interesting public presence. During her thirty years in the Congress, she played it safe. Not an orator, not a mover and shaker behind the scenes, Lee was above all a ribbon cutter. You could invite her to an opening or a funeral, and she’d be ceremonially appropriate. The one thing she could never be was charismatic. Her voters didn’t seem to care; she appeared to be taking care of business, she never had a strong opponent, and so they kept re-electing her. She was the devil they knew.
But being mayor of Oakland is different. Now, she works right downtown, not 3,000 miles away. Now, she’s being paid to lead a city out of the darkness, not just get funding for a foot bridge. Now, she should be an inspiring figure, not a drab G-Maw with an African necklace whose speeches are more sleep-inducing than Sominex. Now it’s a lot harder for her to make backroom deals with wheeler-dealers, like she did all those years. She has the press watching.
Or she should, at any rate. Sadly, our local press prefers to pursue sex scandals and hapless police officers, instead of keeping a close eye on politicians like Barbara Lee. So what’s going on down at City Hall? Why is Barbara Lee asleep at the wheel?
It’s not polite to say it, but Lee is too old for the job. Look, this isn’t ageism on my part. We’re exactly the same age. I could hardly hold age against her. She’s slowing down, and no doubt needs naps throughout the day. Meetings, especially long ones, exhaust her. Her stamina is lower than it’s ever been. I have no idea if she suffers from any particular medical issues, but if she doesn’t, she’s a rare 79-year old. Now, none of these things would matter if she were just a retired old lady playing bingo and watching As the World Turns and turning out a daily blog. But Barbara Lee is mayor of Oakland, and we need a full-throttle, pedal-to-the-metal worker of intellectual heft and creativity.
My biggest concern is Lee’s intellectual capacity. Coming up with forceful, innovative new ideas is hard work. True, it’s not work in the way coal mining is work. It’s mental work. But it’s hard nonetheless. Barbara Lee needs to devise brilliant new solutions to persistent old problems, like homelessness, crime, racial divisions, and the city’s finances. These are some of the toughest issues in America; generations of brilliant politicians have tried to solve them, and failed. But Lee, in her final years, doesn’t have the energy or inner resources to suss out solutions. Instead, she falls back into the cozy comfort of her 1970s socialist ideology: let career bureaucrats figure everything out, raise everybody’s taxes to pay for their schemes, and cross your fingers it all somehow works.
Well, that may have worked fifty years ago, but it sure doesn’t work now. All we get is an entrenched, smug bureaucracy run by grifters (Oakland’s anti-violence programs are the worst) who know nothing about fixing the city and who, in fact, don’t want to fix it, because if they did, they’d find themselves out of jobs. The progressive irony is that government officials who are supposed to fix our problems dare not do so because they’d make themselves redundant if they did! And so they do nothing. They report phony numbers upward to career “supervisors” (“Our MACRO crews made 10,467 client contacts in September!”), who in turn report upward to their supervisors, until this pile of junk ends up on the desk of a tired old lady who’s snoring in the back room, while her hapless PR machine tries to make the best of a bad situation.
Steve Heimoff