I got a blast email survey from Rep. Barbara Lee yesterday asking “Which issues are most important to you? Select all that apply.” There followed a list of seven items. Great, I thought, I’ll pick “crime” and “encampments,” since those are the most important issues to me, as they are to most other Oaklanders.
But then I scanned the list, and “crime” and “encampments” weren’t included! Instead, the list consisted of “pandemic recovery, affordable housing & rent, student loan debt, quality, affordable health care, climate change, racial injustice, and criminal justice reform.”
Could it really be that, in a list of all the issues that Oaklanders are concerned with, neither “crime” nor “encampments” was included?
It puzzled me, angered me, and made me wonder why this glaring omission had occurred.
I can bemoan the omissions, which seem deliberate, but I can only infer the reasoning of those who created the list. And that reasoning, I think, is deeply cynical. Surely Rep. Lee knows that her constituents are worried more about crime and encampments than about anything else. At the same time, as a progressive Democrat, Lee knows (or should know) that she is on the losing side of these issues, politically speaking. She has been a “soft on crime” Congresswoman for her entire elected career, preferring to throw money at “social justice” causes rather than at crime prevention and prosecution, and she knows that social justice is no longer popular, even among Oaklanders; the crime wave has whittled away at whatever sympathy people might have had with lawbreakers. So for Lee to have included “crime” on her list would have resulted, most likely, in “crime” being the number 1 issue most Oaklanders chose; and that would have been embarrassing for her, since she really has no ideas of how to deal with it.
It’s the same for encampments. Lee has hardly been a champion of cleaning them up, even though a majority of her voters want the camps cleared out. Lee can’t touch that issue—it’s the third rail of progressive politics—because the pro-encampment lobby would jump on her like a cat on a mouse. As with crime, Lee has no solutions for the encampments, except to treat them with a benign neglect. And so the encampments remain, getting worse every day, year after year, because Rep. Lee and her fellow progressives on the City Council refuse to deal with them, despite the Encampment Management Policy, which lied when it promised to clear the encampments.
But wait, there’s more. Look at what’s actually on the list. Let’s start with “racial injustice.” Clearly this is a pet topic of Lee’s. You might say it’s her main political issue. Now, it’s fine for Lee to be concerned with “racial injustice,” but is that really more important than crime? Clearly not. No one has “justice” if we’re all afraid to venture outside our homes, or walk around Lake Merritt, or park our cars when there are things of value inside them, or getting struck by a stray bullet fired by a maniac.
Closely connected is “criminal justice reform.” To me, that is the most egregious part of Lee’s email. To suggest that the people of Oakland are more concerned with “criminal justice reform” than they are with “crime” is simply insane. But then, Lee is obsessed with “criminal justice reform,” or her idea of it anyway, and so she supposes that “criminal justice reform” similarly preoccupies the people of Oakland.
But it doesn’t. Lee seems to be saying that alleged police misbehavior is something Oaklanders worry about every day. I don’t. Do you? I don’t think that cops misbehave to the exaggerated degree that police critics would have us believe. These critics have very little remaining in their arsenal; most Americans like and trust cops, so when the cop critics harp on about “criminal justice reform,” increasing numbers of our people tune them out. They sound desperate, deranged and out of touch with reality; people want to hear about reducing crime, not about what bad people cops are.
So this email from Rep. Lee shocked me. But I can’t say I was surprised. Lee has her progressive agenda, she’s stubborn about it, she’s running for re-election in a District populated (or so she believes) with progressives who dislike cops as much as she does, and who were happy when Libby Schaaf invited the Bay Area’s homeless population to “Come to Oakland, because we love you.” It is to this imagined voter population that Lee wrote her email. But I believe the District has changed. This isn’t 2002, or 2012 anymore; it’s 2022. Voters are more conservative than they used to be when it comes to crime and encampments, and correctly so. Sadly, though, some of our elected leaders, including Rep. Lee, seem stuck in a past that is rapidly receding.
Steve Heimoff