Poor Pam. Ingloriously fired by an overwhelming majority of the voters, she is still hurting. Like the criminal ex-president, who spent his final days in exile trying vainly to win back the affection of the American people, Price just can’t accept reality and move on. No, she’s still fighting a battle that literally no one but her cares about.
“What really happened in DA Pamela Price’s first 90 days?” she muses, in a video conversation with one of her former lackies, Ryan LaLonde.
LaLonde actually was Madame DA’s first spokeperson. His LinkedIn describes him as a “specialist” in “Branding, Packaging [and] Concept development.” He also was vice president of the Alameda [city] Unified School District’s Board of Education, making him the first openly LGBTQ person in the city’s history elected to anything. He sounds like a good guy, with a sincere concern for the underdog. But he cast his lot with a rogue politician, and ended up on the losing side.
Lalonde and Price talk about those “first 90 days” when they labored to create a positive personality for the then-little known D.A. Price was worried that there was an “disorganized” communications division in the DA’s office that failed to keep the public informed of what the DA, in her view, was actually accomplishing. LaLonde helped reform the office’s website, its publications for the public, and even its business cards.
Lalonde explains that his job was primarily to create a new brand for Price. Since the public knew so little about her, through his branding he would create for her a new identity, like a new-product launch just introduced in the stores. She would become, under his tutelage, “the drum major for justice…thepeoplesda,” as if she were a combination of Judge Judy, Joan of Arc and Rosa Parks. It was a bizarre montage that nobody bought, because it was so inconsistent with what the public were seeing on T.V. That was the image of an angry, stylishly-attired woman with a frizzy wig, who seemed less of a “drum major for justice” than a megaphone-toting agitator at a defund-the-police rally.
None of this P.R. stuff worked. Price and LaLonde soon discovered that they were not the sole proprietors of information about Madame D.A., and therefore could not totally control the message. The truth about Pamela Price soon seeped out despite their Madison Avenue attempts at control; no amount of image manipulation could fool the public for long. LaLonde lasted only a couple months at his job, and Price was quickly recalled.
The interview, rambling and tedious, goes on to include victims like Jasper Wu, the 13-year old toddler who was shot to death riding in his parents’ car on I-880, for which Price was widely criticized; she and LaLonde call the blowback “weaponizing” victims. They talk about “reporters in a frenzy” who covered Price’s breakdown and fall, as well they should have. And “editors” fueling the fire. They assign the blame for Price’s recall, in other words, to everyone except Pamela Price herself, and the feeble yes-men, like LaLonde, she surrounded herself with, who never told her the truth: that her unpopularity had exploded because of her anti-police, pro-crime, racialized ideology.
Price is apparently on the comeback trail, like Nixon was in the years before he died. She hopes to regain her old job. That’s about as likely as Nixon being re-elected president in 1980, by which time he’d become a punchline. So has Madame D.A.
Steve Heimoff