Sheng Thao is not popular among her fellow East Bay mayors. It’s not so much that they dislike her personally, as the city she leads: Oakland, which is widely perceived as a seedbed of criminals and crime. If you’re the mayor of, say, San Leandro, Emeryville, Berkeley or Hayward, you know that bad people from Oakland routinely pillage your city and then return to the safety of Oakland, where they’re pretty sure they’ll be left alone by a regime sympathetic to them.
Now, Thao has given her fellow mayors even more reason to resent her: in an interview with the San Francisco Examiner, she hinted that she might begin billing those mayors if homeless people from their cities utilize Oakland social services. “[I]f new tents or new people are coming, we can figure out what city they’re coming from,” she said. “From that point, I am very open about calling out the cities and saying, ‘You need to do more for your unhoused residents. Otherwise, you can pay me, you can pay this city, the city of Oakland an impact fee because you’re impacting our city.’”
If I were one of those mayors, I’d tell Thao, “Great. Then you can pay us next time one of your criminals causes havoc in my city. You can pay us an impact fee because you can’t control your criminals and keep them within your own borders.”
Tit for tat.
It’s been educational to watch Thao struggle during her first five months in office. Suddenly, she was no longer the arch-progressive who could fight for woke values from the sidelines. Overnight, the entire city became her constituency; as the peoples’ righteous indignation mounted over crime and tents, she found herself having to move to the center, in order to govern. Thus, we now see “tough” Thao, as opposed to the previous Thao who argued that racism lay at the heart of every issue. It’s amusing, and useful, but it comes far too late. We all know who and what Sheng Thao is: the tool of the woke left, an instrument of Carroll Fife. Memories of Thao’s attacks on the police when she was a council member are too fresh, and cannot be expunged. “You can take the girl off the City Council, but you can’t take the City Council out of the girl,” to paraphrase the old saying.
I might add the same thing about Dan Kalb. He recently went to a public safety meeting at Oakland Tech and got what was undoubtedly the most negative reaction he’s ever had in his political career. Five hundred people hooted and cursed him for being so soft on crime. Mind you, Kalb is a self-righteous liberal who’s convinced himself he’s on God’s side in defending the homeless and trying to rehabilitate criminals. Kalb has navigated himself ever closer to Fife, becoming a reliable woke voice on the City Council. But with this public safety meeting, Kalb is discovering that his constituents don’t share his own sense of his virtues. Instead, they look at him and see a sniveling, frightened little politician, ambitious for higher office, caught in a dilemma of his own making. For years, he thought he was leading his people toward wokeism. Instead, as it turned out, wokeism was leading him away from his people. I doubt if Kalb could be re-elected today.
It’s gratifying to see reality catch up with these cynical politicians. Thao and Kalb are waking up to the new normal: the progressivism they embody is being eroded, and they themselves are being perceived as part of the problem. Politics is getting personal in Oakland because crime and tents are taken personally by the voters. When the voters at the public safety meeting heard Kalb say that he heard them and “will follow up on the issues raised,” there had to be laughter in that room. Bitter laughter. Kalb might as well have told them, “Here are my thoughts and prayers. As for crime, you’re on your own.”