The Coalition asked her for a Zoom meeting, but she, or her people, never bothered to reply. We’ve done Zooms with other Mayoral candidates—Loren Taylor and Treva Reid, who have announced their runs, and with Rebecca Kaplan, who hasn’t yet declared, but may. But Sheng Thao, for whatever reason, turned us down.
So what do we know about her?
The most jarring thing she’s done since getting elected in 2018 was pulling off one of the biggest political flip-flops in Oakland’s history: a 180-degree turn on funding OPD. Last June, Thao joined with five other City Council members in voting to strip the Oakland Police Department’s budget of $18 million.
With that vote, Thao—along with Kaplan, Dan Kalb, Nikki Bas, Carroll Fife and Noel Gallo—put themselves on record as being police defunders. Yet barely 2-1/2 months later, Thao reversed course and voted to fund an additional police academy. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted in reporting that story, “Thao’s changing position signals a shift among some city leaders as public safety becomes a top issue.”
“Changing positions,” or political flip-flops as they’re better known, are nothing new. One of the biggest—and in my opinion most gratifying—was when Barack Obama changed his position on gay marriage: First he was against it, then, in May, 2012, he decided he was for it.
There are different reasons why a politician flip-flops. The first is that he or she has had a genuine epiphany. In Obama’s case, he explained it this way: “At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that — for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that — I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” Of course, the fact that Obama was headed into a tough re-election campaign might have influenced his decision, but I believe he saw the light and decided to do what was right.
A more troubling reason why politicians flip-flop is because they’re following the political winds. This is the cynical explanation: it holds that some politicians have very few, if any, genuine beliefs, and are willing to say and do anything, even at the cost of embarrassing themselves, if they think it will gain them a few more votes. This is the case with today’s Republican Party: the “party of law and order” suddenly decided to support attacks on cops and a violent, armed insurrection against America, because they thought it would earn them favor in the eyes of Trump voters. There was no moral epiphany, but a massive, ignominious sellout.
Which brings us back to Sheng Thao. Why did she shift her position on police funding so radically over the summer? The only person who really knows is, of course, Thao herself. I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt—after all, she did end up voting the right way—but it is concerning that we have a person running for Mayor who appears to be so indecisive on such an important issue as public safety.
And now, as violence in Oakland spirals out of control, Thao is making increasingly nice sounds about police funding. In reporting on her mayoral run the other day, the Chronicle wrote that “she plans to…invest in more [police] officers,” which is something her hill constituents will welcome (and so do we). But then the article points out that “her plans don’t necessarily require more funds, but ‘an adjustment in strategy and priorities.’”
What on earth does this rhetorical gobbledegook mean? It actually leaves open the possibility that Thao would decrease OPD’s budget as “an adjustment.” If Thao were to come before us on Zoom—and I still hope she does--I’d ask, “Do you promise to never again take money away from OPD’s budget?” And “How do you invest in ‘more police officers’ without ‘more funds’?” I wouldn’t let her get away with the vague banality of “an adjustment in strategy and priorities.” Give us the details, Sheng Thao!
Look, for the last eight years, we’ve had, in Libby Schaaf, a good-hearted but weak mayor, who allowed Oakland to drift into its present catastrophic situation. Do we really want, can we really afford Schaaf Lite?
Steve Heimoff