The good news: “Big day for moderates in San Francisco” headlined the Chronicle after Tuesday’s election results were in. “Progressives feel rudderless.”
The not-so-good news: Oakland shows once again it won’t let go of progressivism without a fight. Our city (and Alameda County as a whole) largely turned to leftwing candidates and propositions, thanks for the dominance of Oakland and Berkeley.
Why Oakland is such an outlier is hardly a mystery: progressivism (or “wokeness,” as I prefer to call it, since there’s nothing progressive about policies that keep us mired in crime and homelessness) has had decades here to flourish. Woke politicians have taken over most of the government bureaus and nonprofits. They dominate the unions, which are the primary funders of campaigns. In short, the rot goes deep, and it’s going to take a revolution to clean it up.
Most of the candidates and causes we supported went down to defeat. We expected this. The Coalition for a Better Oakland favors strong policing and public safety and an end to encampments. Sadly, too many voters, particularly young ones in the flatlands and wealthy homeowners in the Hills, take the opposite view. That their position is directly counter to their own self-interest is apparent to everyone but themselves. There’s a lot of virtue-signaling among both groups who pride themselves on how “compassionate” and “progressive” they are. Of course, these same Hill homeowners wouldn’t dare venture into downtown at night for fear of being attacked or having their cars bipped, while the young students who vote progressive are now keeping a wary eye over their shoulder as they go to their clubs after dark—and hoping that when they return to their parked cars the windows aren’t smashed out. As a result, we, CBO, don’t have a very good track record of choosing winners.
But this is changing, albeit slowly. Our candidate for Supervisor in District 4, Nate Miley, won. Our candidate for Judge, Terry Wiley, won. It’s still too early to call the races for Alameda County Central Committee but at least one of our endorsees, Loren Taylor, appears to have beaten Pamela Price by an extremely narrow margin, suggesting that Price’s recall will be successful. We supported California Proposition 1, and at this moment it’s narrowly ahead. Beyond the statistical results of the election is a sense—you can feel it in the air—that the past 12 months have been a real learning curve for Oakland and Alameda County residents. They’re starting to understand the breadth of the gap between their ideals, and the distressing reality on the ground caused by the politicians they voted for. It can’t be easy for these voters to realize that their own choices are resulting in horrible results. But if the people of San Francisco finally, at long last realize it, then so can the people of Oakland.
At any rate, the Coalition for a Better Oakland takes pride in the election results. We are, if anything, the true progressives. The wokes are regressive, pushing us back into an era of divisiveness, danger and disintegration, with their obsessive-compulsive addiction to seeing everything through the distorting lens of race and ethnicity.
Tonight, at the cocktail hour, I will raise a glass to the voters of San Francisco. Well done, my friends across the Bay. You’ve given a fine message to the wokes. Now, we’ll continue to fight to do the same here in Oakland!
Steve Heimoff