It’s interesting that Sheng Thao hasn’t yet begun to fight back against her recall, the way Pamela Price has. From almost the beginning, Price has fought with the aggressiveness of a honey badger, speaking at public forums, defending herself online, and issuing misleading statements to the press. It’s clear that Price is aware of the threat the recall poses to her, and is greatly afraid it will succeed.
Thao by contrast is whistling past that particular graveyard. On her twitter feed, there’s not a word about it, just the usual self-congratulatory babble of a politician letting you know all the fabulous things she’s done for Oakland.
Thao’s self-delusion stems in part from advice she’s getting from her P.R. people: Don’t acknowledge the recall. Every time you say something about it, they tell her, you give it energy. So say nothing. Just business as usual, and hope the bogeyman will go away.
It won’t, of course. The signature gatherers are out there, and Seneca Scott says they’re well on their way to getting the required number of signatures to make it onto the ballot, like the Price recall did. Sooner or later, Thao is going to have to emerge from her ivory tower and deal with the looming reality.
She’ll borrow a page from Price’s defense by claiming that the Recall Thao movement is “trying to overturn an election.” Like Price, Thao will claim it’s funded by out-of-town billionaires. Thao may even play the race card by accusing her critics of hating her because she’s an Asian woman. That’s a total canard, of course, but it won’t stop Thao from saying it.
Still, recalling Thao will be harder than recalling Price. In the case of Price, there’s a very simple reason to recall her: she’s soft on crime. Everybody can understand that and relate to it. This is the same way the Chesa Boudin recall rolled out: a clear statement of the indictment against him, which he found impossible to rebut because it was true. But in Thao’s case, there’s no cut-and-dried, easily understood indictment. Rather, the argument against her is that she’s in over her head, lacking the will or guts or intelligence to govern a city that’s so troubled. Seneca seems to be focusing his strategy on Thao’s incompetence, by posting repeated images of filthy homeless slums. Certainly Thao is incompetent, but I’d advise Seneca to remind voters also of Thao’s repeated votes to defund the Oakland Police Department, for example in June 2021. I don’t think voters are really aware of that. Thao is extremely embarrassed by those votes and would rather pretend she didn’t make them; she certainly doesn’t want voters to be reminded of them, because she’d have an impossible time explaining them away. Seneca and his people should be out there pounding away at Thao’s anti-police history when she was on the City Council.
The goal is to make a majority of Oakland voters sufficiently angry with Thao to recall her. The building blocks for that anger are at hand: her incompetence (which is on full display every time she’s on T.V.) and the cavalier way she disrespected and put down OPD, which has led to our current predicament. Thao has no answer for either of these indictments. Voters have a right to be angry at her, very angry at her muddle headedness, her stubbornness, her inability to do what’s right, her cynicism, her dishonesty. Part of our problem, I think, is that dishonest, incompetent Oakland mayors have become normalized. Most people have never experienced a great mayor (except for Jerry Brown, and that seems like a century ago) and so when they see the dismal Thao celebrating a new ethnic restaurant or pretending she understands Passover, they know it’s a bunch of hooey, but that’s what mayors do, spout hooey. We have to show voters that an Oakland mayor can truly get things done: fight crime, support the police, get rid of filthy encampments, and still manage to pick up the garbage and put out the fires.
Steve Heimoff