Those watching the Oakland mayor’s race should check out Chip Johnson‘s column in the San Francisco Chronicle today.  Johnson rightly points out that former Congressman Ron Dellums is long on rhetoric but short on details in his campaign for mayor.  Johnson says that Dellums offered soft-on-crime views during a recent meeting with the Chronicle’s editorial board. For example, Dellums said he doesn’t support the Oakland Unified School District‘s zero tolerance for violence or drugs because he thinks it disproportionately affects African American and Latino youth.

With the election just six weeks away, maybe Dellums will start getting a little pressure to give voters more details on how he plans to govern a city that has an out-of-control violence problem and failing schools.  As far as I can see, Dellums’ ideas include community policing instead of putting more police on the streets, abandoning zero tolerance for drugs and violence in our schools for…accepting drugs and violence in our schools?, abandoning PG&E energy service for "green energy," putting a universal health care policy in place, and having businesses and philanthropists to pay for all of these pie-in-the-sky ideas.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.