Sheng Thao got elected to the City Council as a progressive. She campaigned for mayor on being a progressive and was elected. But will she govern as a progressive? It’s going to get complicated for her.
There’s someone about big-city mayors that tends to make them moderates. Look at London Breed in San Francisco and Libby Schaaf in Oakland: both well to the right of their respective Board of Supervisors and City Council. That’s not to say they’re rightwing—far from it. Both are liberal-centrists who tangled with their more leftwing legislative bodies.
Were Breed and Schaaf centrists from the beginning, or did they become more centrist when they got elected mayor? Probably a little of both. When someone represents a single district, they can have extreme positions that cater to their more radical constituents’ prejudices. But when they get elected mayor, suddenly they have to represent everyone—not just their previous district, but all districts. If they’re going to govern fairly and effectively, they can’t just stick to their campaign promises that appealed to the extremes. The old political saying, “Campaign in poetry, govern in prose” is apt here: You can bash the cops as a City Council member (for instance), but when you get elected, you find that people like and need cops. So you have to stop the rhetoric and get down to reality.
Sheng Thao has made a political career out of being tough on cops and soft on crime. We all know that, although some may refuse to admit it publicly. Those positions have done her well: she’s now the mayor. Which means she has a very different job from her previous one as council member. She can’t just tack to the left the way she always has: the people of Oakland overwhelmingly want public safety and punishment for criminals. Thao’s former colleagues—people like Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas and Rebecca Kaplan—are pretty virulently anti-cop, and the fact that the City Council has now lurched even further to the left with the election of Janani Ramachandran will embolden them to unpack their “defund” schemes and push for further assaults on the police. Which puts Mayor-elect Thao in a delicate position.
She can no longer form a leftwing block with them. She has to turn her gaze city-wide, and in so doing, she has to be accountable to everyone. That is going to require standing up to her former colleagues (as well as the unions that elected her) and resisting their leftward push. Sheng Thao is going to have to support far more police hiring than Fife, Bas and Kaplan are willing to accept. Thao may have to support the Oakland A’s Howard Terminal project, which most Oaklanders want, because it so clearly will provide the jobs and taxes Oakland needs. This, again, will be unacceptable to Fife, Bas and Kaplan. This means that Thao is going to have to butt heads with her former BFFs.
Can she do it? Will she do it? Does she have the fortitude to do it? My hunch is, no. I personally think Thao has a weak character and is not a great thinker. A quote in today’s San Francisco Chronicle shows that she believes she can continue her old alliance with the City Council’s wokes and impose a far-left agenda on Oakland, despite her paper-thin election margin (fewer than 700 votes): “We have unity at City Hall now,” she told the newspaper. “That was always a huge barrier to success. I am very optimistic about getting the real work done.” Thao no doubt meant this as a promise. To many of us, it sounds like a threat.
Anyone who reads her words should be afraid. Thao appears to have learned nothing from the election; she actually believes that the people of Oakland have given her a mandate to form an alliance with far-left radicals, when the rest of California (including San Francisco) and the country are becoming more moderate, and are punishing progressives. Nothing Thao does could possibly be more ill-informed. She has basically re-declared war on cops, on homeowners, on businesses, on White people, and on public safety; she apparently remains hell-bent on imposing an insane, woke agenda on the city she now leads. A recipe for disaster.
Steve Heimoff