The Coalition made a donation to Loren Taylor’s campaign yesterday. We did this because we believe Loren is the best candidate running for mayor. He’s not perfect, but Loren is by far the best of the crop, and he has shown a capacity for growth that leads me to believe he could be a great mayor.
What Oakland needs, of course, is a complete turnaround from the political hacks that have run our city for decades. Our mayors, with the brief exception of Jerry Brown, have been uninspired nonentities, owned and operated by the unions and dominated by activists who cared only about stirring up racial resentments. Our City Council members have been even worse. I think of a long, sad chain of incompetent ideologues—Desley Brooks, Carroll Fife, Jean Quan, Nikki Bas, Sheng Thao, Rebecca Kaplan. These people, beholden to their donors, were never honest with the people of Oakland, but lied and misrepresented the truth in order to keep the campaign donations flowing. They took a perfectly fine city and crushed it into the ground, and then blamed “outside interests” and “racists” for the problems they themselves caused. They were intellectually crippled and morally compromised and they sold us down the river.
Loren Taylor is none of those things.
In the swamp that is Oakland politics, Loren has been a gentleman, without the resentments and neuroses of a Carroll Fife, without the paranoia and grift of a Desley Brooks, without the rigid ideology of a Rebecca Kaplan. He possesses that rare quality without which a person cannot be a great leader: the ability to listen. He’s relatively young (47) and his mind is active, exploratory, versatile, open to learning. He has a positive attitude towards life, which is important because so many of our past “leaders” have been sour, unhappy people; and governing requires the gift of a happy spirit. His academic credentials are impeccable: a master’s in biomedical engineering from the University of Connecticut and an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In a way, he’s a wonk, which is what Oakland needs: someone who understands the details of what works and what doesn’t. Someone smart, with a high IQ and an engineer’s ability to analyze, but also with a heart. In so many ways, Loren reminds me of John F. Kennedy. He’s cool, detached, sympathetic and intelligent, with a gleam in his eye. And he has good taste, which will prevent him from being the kind of sleazy parasite we’ve seen all too much of in the past.
On the issues, as I say, Loren has demonstrated the ability and willingness to learn. His top five priorities are public safety, budget stabilization, revitalizing downtown, anti-corruption, and housing. The other candidates say the same thing, but Loren, in my view, will be focused and smart in a way the others aren’t. In the time I’ve known him, he seems to have become more dedicated to public safety, which perhaps hasn’t endeared him to the extreme wokes. But it’s been those wokes who have conspired to ruin Oakland. This isn’t to say that Loren is the conservative candidate, only to suggest he’s a practical progressive. In comparison with his top rival, Barbara Lee, Loren is the model of a thoughtful, careful, steady man, able and willing to adapt his world view to reality. He’ll never come up with nonsense like free money for homeless people or a $50-an-hour minimum wage.
I’ve had my differences with Loren. I wish he’d borrow a page from the ancient Hebrew prophets, who never spared my own people, the Jews, from scolding when it was warranted. I’d like to see Loren more forcibly address the Black community concerning their shortcomings. To the extent he doesn’t, he tacitly permits the Big Lie to continue: that racism is the cause of their problems.
But Loren always has been impeccable, respectful, and fair in his dealings with me. Surely, those are qualities we need in a mayor. Speaking for the Coalition for a Better Oakland, I’m proud to support the practical progressive, Loren Taylor, for Mayor of the great city of Oakland.
Steve Heimoff