Libby Schaaf will soon be history, thank God. She was the worst Mayor Oakland has had in the 35 years I’ve lived here—and we’ve had some horrible ones. Before Schaaf, we had the inconsequential Jean Quan, a one-term embarrassment who once led an anti-police march downtown. Prior to that was Sleepy Ron Dellums, another one-termer, whose idea of a productive day was jogging around Lake Merritt. Before him was the only great mayor of the modern era, Jerry Brown, who for eight years led the effort to revitalize downtown and restore Oakland’s good name. For twenty years before that we had a pair of non-entities, Lionel Wilson and Elihu Harris. And now, of course, we’re about to have another non-entity imposed upon us named Sheng Thao.
Schaaf’s legacy undoubtedly will be the encampments she both encouraged and refused to deal with. From her early invitations to homeless people to “come to Oakland, we love you,” she displayed a short-sightedness so colossal that it takes your breath away. When she suggested in 2017 that all Oaklanders “open your house to a homeless person” (herself notably excluded), she was widely ridiculed. But homeless people heard her, and came to the not unnatural conclusion that if they came to Oakland they’d find shelter, food, good weather, soft treatment by the cops—and all the drugs they wanted. So they came.
Which makes her statement over the weekend all the more insane. Asked by the Chronicle if she could go back in time to 2015, when she first took office, Schaaf said she wishes she’d known “That homelessness would explode the way it did. When I became the mayor, it wasn’t a top concern.”
Well, that is sheer nonsense. Homelessness and encampments were already a major problem in 2015, if not even earlier. Lots of people, including me, warned Schaaf that her blanket invitation to her “unhoused sisters and brothers” to move to Oakland would lead to an unsolvable crisis. But Schaaf wouldn’t listen. By the time the crisis got out of control, Schaaf was on cruise control, smiling her way through public events, posing for every camera, bragging about minor accomplishments and waiting for Dianne Feinstein to drop dead or resign in the hope that Gov. Newsom would make her a United States Senator.
Schaaf could not or would not stand up to a woke City Council that was taking a wrecking ball to Oakland. Without any guiding vision, she stood idly by while the Council treated criminals as working-class heroes and tried to defund the police by painting them as racist thugs. She could have led a citizen movement to stand up to the wokes, using her bully pulpit to warn the public. But, never an inspiring public speaker, instead she drifted aimlessly, an irresolute and impotent politician, until it was too late and Oakland had passed the point of no return. She refused to do anything about encampments for fear of offending the progressives. She tried to stay in the middle of the road but ended up getting run over by the progressive big rig that squashed her like a bug. She never understood that moderation doesn’t mean standing for nothing. All she earned was the contempt of the left and the indifference of everyone else.
Schaaf remained AWOL from governance until her final day in office, allowing the Bas-Thao-Fife-Kaplan far left cabal to step into the breach. When you look at the state of the city today, you might well say, “This is what Libby Schaaf hath wrought.”
We will not miss her.
Steve Heimoff