The buzz in City Hall circles is that Libby Schaaf is “counting the days” until she can leave a job that’s become oppressive to her: Mayor of Oakland.
It can’t be an easy job, what with all the trauma Oakland experiences all the time. Crime, garbage, filth, potholes, camps, crazy people in the streets, schools melting down, downtown dying if not already dead, the budget broken, voter attitudes ranging from apathy to fury, a national reputation for violence and filth—Schaaf bears it all. She tries to hide the pain behind her public smile, but you can sense she’s feeling the weight of the world.
What her next move is, we don’t know. She is, by experience and nature, a politician. Schaaf got her start as a special assistant to Jerry Brown when he was mayor. Where she goes in politics after she’s termed out next January is anyone’s guess. There are no apparent openings at her level of politics: the governorship is taken, there are no available Senate seats, and Barbara Lee isn’t going anywhere. Schaaf’s not likely to run for some lesser office. That leaves going back to lawyering or becoming a paid lobbyist, or, maybe, a cushy executive position in Washington under President Biden. Whatever she chooses, we wish her well.
If the Mayor isn’t happy bearing all her burdens, she has herself largely to blame. The city’s biggest crisis, homelessness, is in part the fault of her inaction. The encampments started getting really bad around 2016-2017. She could and should have cracked down. The public would have supported her (except for a fringe element of whiney “progressives”). She could have declared that our parks were sacrosanct places and she would not tolerate addicts and their junk in them, nor would she tolerate the cancerous spread of tents all over the flatlands. Instead, she infamously declared her affection for “our homeless brothers and sisters” and invited them to come to Oakland if they weren’t comfortable elsewhere, because “We love you!”
Of course, they came. They were motivated not just by Oakland’s great weather, not just by Oakland’s historically lenient attitude towards lawbreakers, and not just by the range of free services the city provides to the poor. When Schaaf asked all Oaklanders to consider making room for at least one homeless person in their own homes (except for herself, of course), homeless people imagined themselves living in nice houses, and they found their way here. Thus, all the trouble Schaaf has caused Oakland, and herself, can largely be traced to her own statements.
The Mayor also cannot feel good about the fact that she’s lost two of Oakland’s three big sports teams—the Raiders and the Warriors—and she may even lose the Oakland A’s by the time she leaves office. That must weigh heavily on Schaaf and her concern for her legacy. And then there’s criminality, which has soared under Schaaf’s leadership. Of course, we can’t blame the Mayor for every robbery, auto theft and murder, but she does bear a degree of responsibility. While the Oakland Police Department was being systematically attacked over the last eight years and its morale crushed by the Defund the Police crowd, while OPD was losing Police Chief after Police Chief, while cops were quitting in record numbers, Schaaf did very little to offer support. It’s true that Schaaf showed OPD more understanding and respect than did the cop haters on the City Council, like Fife, Bas, Kaplan and Thao, but that’s not saying much. It’s also true that Oakland has a “weak mayor” system and there was little Schaaf could have done legally to provide a counterweight to the Council.
But there was one thing she could have done, and that was to use her bully pulpit to educate the public about the importance of having a police department that was strong and functional. She should have been out there on the hustings, banging her fists on podiums at Town Halls, telling us why our cops are the best in the country and deserve our respect. This, she did not do, or did only half-heartedly. It’s hard, in retrospect, to understand why she was so weak. Once she was in her second term, she had nothing to fear about supporting OPD strongly. She could have denounced the likes of Cat Brooks and Carroll Fife and called them out for what they are: fanatics and stooges of the Left, whose policies contributed to the rise of crime. But Libby Schaaf just didn’t have it in her. She fiddled while Oakland burned, and that, too, must weigh on her conscience. With her legacy now a burned-out junkyard, no wonder she’s depressed.
It will take a long time to repair the damage Schaaf and this City Council have inflicted on Oakland. We can start by electing someone to replace Schaaf who is not beholden to unions, who is not ideologically anti-cop, and who is fed up with the woke nonsense of the current Council. Seneca Scott is that individual. Sheng Thao, who talks out of both sides of her mouth on the issue of public safety, is emphatically not qualified to be Mayor; at heart, she’s a police defunder. I’m convinced that if the voters of Oakland entrust Seneca with leadership of our city, Oakland will begin to emerge from its misery. It will help if we fire Nikki Bas and replace her with Harold Lowe in District 2, giving Mayor Scott a City Council he can work with.
Steve Heimoff