A new member asks: “Hi, I signed up before and I'm getting the emails and appreciate them. One question that I have (probably because I'm new to Oakland): it's clear we need to get rid of this mayor and every member of City Council. Perhaps in one of your emails you could help us understand how we do this? Or what the path looks like to getting rid of them? Thanks!”
This is a fair question and it’s one that many people ask me and my colleagues at the Coalition for a Better Oakland. Here’s my reply.
The short answer is that to “get rid of” an entire city administration in one fell swoop can be accomplished only by a revolution, and the Coalition is certainly not advocating that! When, therefore, you’ve renounced violence as a means of changing a regime, there remains only one way to do it: legally. That means through our system of elections. There are eight members of the City Council and one mayor. All their terms are staggered. Some (including the mayor and Nikki Fortunato Bas) are up for re-election in November, 2022 (Schaaf is termed out). Others, including Carroll Fife, are not due until November, 2024. As a result, the only way to “get rid of” these people is to defeat them when they run for office.
(What I just wrote isn’t strictly true. There’s another way: they can be recalled. I confess that I, personally, am not prepared to lead a recall campaign at this time. But I will support someone else who’s willing to step forward and do it.)
So, if there’s not one overarching way to “get rid of” these politicians, there is a gradualist way, which is what I think my commenter meant when he referred to “the path to getting rid of them.” That path is clear: it is electorally. It is to oppose these people when they run for re-election, and to support candidates who run against them (assuming that those candidates support our views). And this is the path that the Coalition has chosen. As I’ve pointed out before, we’ve endorsed one candidate so far, Jimmie Wilson, who’s running for Alameda County District Attorney next year. We’re looking into whom to support for Mayor (we like Loren Taylor, but aren’t prepared quite yet to formally endorse him). And you can also trust that we’ll work as hard as we can to oppose Bas. We don’t have a candidate yet to run against her. But we’re looking around.
I realize that, for people yearning to replace the current crop of deplorables who dominate city government, this answer is frustrating. But it’s true: there’s not a damned thing we can do in the short term. Here’s another truth: in politics, you have to settle for what is possible. As a smart man told me in this respect, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” We may not get the perfect mayor, the perfect District Attorney, or the perfect city council. We may have to make nice with people who agree with most, but not all, of our views. This is what is meant by “strange bedfellows.” It’s how the system works.
The specifics of “the path” are more complicated. People ask me for “a plan.” I tell them that there can be no “plan” in politics. As in a ball game, the “plan” is to win. You can have a strategy at the game’s beginning, but events may blow up your strategy; you have to be nimble and flexible and adapt. In general, our plan is to grow the Coalition for a Better Oakland in numbers. How many? As big as possible. We currently have about 220 members; I’d love to see 1,000, or 5,000—the sky’s the limit. The plan also is to encourage or inspire our members to get involved: in voting, obviously, but in stumping for our candidates, in calling in to City Council meetings, and in street actions as appropriate. This, too, is an evolutionary process. But everything worthwhile takes time. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” they say, and we won’t fix Oakland overnight.
One final thing: the victors in this fight must be patient. It’s easy to lose heart when things are as fucked up as they are now in Oakland. It can seem a Sisyphean effort to change things; you push and push that boulder up the hill and then it slides back down again. But if you look at the history of successful political movements, you note that their leaders never gave up. Nor shall we. What we fight for is worth it. Oakland is too beautiful, too valuable to lose.
Steve Heimoff