There’s only one week to go before Election Day. Many if not most Oakland voters have already voted by mail. So who knows if the allegation that Sheng Thao broke election laws will have any impact on the vote?
But it should. As I wrote yesterday, Thao is an unscrupulous politician. If she broke the law, she has no right to be Mayor—and, if found guilty, she should be made to pay the full penalty.
Maybe her supporters don’t care. Maybe they think, “Hey, all politicians cut corners here and there. Give Thao a break.” But this tu quoque excuse doesn’t really cut it. For one thing, it indicates either a shocking ignorance of something as basic as election law. It also shows breathtaking arrogance—and arrogance is something Thao (and Nikki Bas) have been accused of in the past.
For these reasons, Thao’s violation must be hammered home to voters. The election seems to be very close, with Loren Taylor hanging on to the tiniest of leads over Thao. Voters should know that the stakes are high. I’m not saying that the Oakland Mayor’s race is the most important in our city’s history, but it’s pretty close. Thao represents a woke, or progressive, political philosophy that has brought Oakland to the brink of ruin. More than that, she shows no shame, no reflective afterthought about whether she was wrong. If anything, Thao is doubling down on her wokeness. It’s the only thing she has to differentiate herself from the other candidates. Aware that her brand of wokism is no longer popular, Thao recently tweeted, “It’s NOT the time to slow down—it’s time to keep moving forward.” In this, Thao is taking the same approach as her friend and mentor Cat Brooks, who (as I posted yesterday) said, “The[defund the police] movement is nowhere near dead — nor are we done.” Both women know how much animosity they’ve aroused among the electorate. Both of them know that the walls are closing in on their failed progressive policies. Both know that Oaklanders are fed up with the crime, filth and encampments their approach has inflicted upon Oakland. But both are simply incapable of self-correcting their course.
Lately, Thao has rolled out Jane Fonda’s endorsement, to persuade undecided voters to go her way. It won’t work. For one thing, few people under the age of 50 even know who Jane Fonda is, beyond being a rich, white celebrity. Fonda, whose net worth is $200 million, wouldn’t get caught dead in Oakland. She has mansions all over the place, and while she meant a lot to my generation, she’s hopelessly out of touch with today’s. Fonda’s prepared endorsement speech is hard to watch—she’s reading off the teleprompter, and you have to wonder if she’s even ever been here. When Fonda claims Thao is “fighting back against special interests,” I had to laugh. What are SEIU, the Building and Construction Trades Council, the Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Food and Commercial Workers Union, if not special interests? It would not be true to say that their actual hard-working members are united in supporting Thao. No, the members pay their dues to the Big Union Bosses, who then bundle the money and strike secret deals with Thao in smoke-filled rooms—deals you and I will never know about.
Therefore, what’s so important about this election is that we finally have a chance to hobble the far-left of the City Council and return governance of Oakland to sanity. It looks like Kaplan won’t be back next year (hallelujah!). Fife will still be there, but a moderate Council can isolate her, so that she can yell and scream all she wants about being disrespected, but no one will be listening.
Here’s the bottom line: If you like the way Oakland has been going for the past twenty years, vote for Sheng Thao. If you’re embarrassed, discouraged and angered by the mess she and her allies have got us into, DON’T vote for Thao! It’s that simple.
Steve Heimoff