My T.V. viewing last night consisted of flipping back and forth between the Emmies and the Iowa Caucuses. The Emmies were more entertaining, but I forced myself to watch the Iowa circus, i.e. caucus. This Trump thing is like an ongoing television series, in its own way curiously addictive, like the O.J. slow-Bronco chase. You have to keep watching in order to find out how it ends. Will O.J. kill himself? Will the Bronco crash? More, after this brief commercial interruption.
Oakland politics is like that. All kinds of questions: Will we recall Price? Will we recall Thao? In Price’s case, she’s fighting back with carefully-scripted public appearances designed to make her look like a crime-fighter. I especially liked her allegedly “anti-trafficking” stunt the other day, in which she and her bodyguards walked around just outside Brenda Grisham’s office. Grisham, a leader of the Recall Price movement, naturally interpreted this as intimidation: “I took it as it looked with her armed goons,” Grisham said. Price, naturally, denied that she was stalking Grisham, on a post on X. It was simply, she explained, “a safety walk through Oakland's San Antonio Neighborhood.” Well, if you believe that, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.
Look, Pamela Price is a vengeful thug. Always has been, and so, increasingly, is Sheng Thao, who is learning evasion and obfuscation from her mentors Price and Carroll Fife. Both Price and Thao are realizing how deep the doodoo is into which they’ve stepped. They thought they could outrun recall, but the reality is setting in. “Perhaps,” wrote the respected local reporter Steven Tavares on his East Bay Insiders newsletter, “it’s beginning to set in that Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price will be recalled and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao is next.”
Let it set in! It gives lots of us great pleasure to think that the Recall is the first thing on Price’s mind in the morning and the last thing before she drifts off to sleep. Pleasure, too, in knowing that Thao—not the brightest bulb in the chandelier—has realized that her political rise has been kneecapped. People correctly see her as not up to the job. Obsessed with fashion, wasting her time at parties and unimportant little events like the opening of a new ethnic restaurant instead of doing the real work of a mayor like fighting crime and supporting the police, Thao everyday gives voters more reasons to sign a Recall petition.
I saw on Price’s Facebook page where someone commented, “The D.A. has massive support in Oakland hoods which have been crushed by the curse of mass incarceration.” Might I respectfully suggest that is not a true statement. It’s an insult to Black people to assume that they support Price just because she’s Black. That sort of identity politics no longer works. Black people, more than most other communities, suffer from crime and violence; they, more than most other communities, have a favorable view of the police, whom they know are out there busting their butts to keep us all safe. I feel confident in predicting that Black support for recalling Madame D.A. will be overwhelming throughout Alameda County. Also, that the clock is ticking on the Thao mayoralty, where, just in the wings, Loren Taylor is waiting patiently.
Steve Heimoff