The media called the Oakland’s mayors race mid-day the day after the election, but they moved too fast.  In the following days, election officials “found” an additional 1,500 votes and the vote counting continued.  In order to prevent a run-off, one candidate needed to get more then 50 percent of the vote.  Former Congressman Ron Dellums “won” the race early on with 50.2% of the vote, but then his percentage dropped below 50% as the county continued to count absentee ballots.  Earlier this week, officials then announced that they would not know the final results of the race until the week’s end.  Today, based on “unofficial results” released by the county, Dellums’ vote percentage bounced back to 50.18%.  City Council President Ignacio DeLaFuente trails with 32.99% of the vote.  Dellums will take office in January. 

Many of my neighbors were hoping all week that DeLaFuente would be saved by Dellums’ dropping below 50%, but frankly, it didn’t matter to me.  Nancy Nadel, an extremely liberal member of the city council who also ran for mayor, garnered 13% of the vote and all of her voters would have flocked to Dellums in November if there was a run-off.  I’m sure that Dellums would have won with well over 60% of the vote in November.  This is a city full of liberals who really believe that more money and more government programs will make the world a happy, peace-loving place.  They deserve Dellums.  Dellums has pie-in-the-sky ideas about getting businesses to pay for the universal health care program he wants to implement in Oakland.  But why should businesses be interested in creating jobs in Oakland?  This is a city that has double the number of homicides we had last year and yet the big news this week was the city’s plan to ban Styrofoam containers (a subcommittee of the council passed the ban on Tuesday and the full council will vote next Tuesday).   

The bright folks of Oakland have one of the state’s worst school district which is still being run by a state administrator after local school officials ran the district in to the ground, financially speaking.  Yet the voters saw fit to throw more money at the school district by passing a bond last week. 

The only bright spot in the Dellums election is that we’ll have lots of loony stories coming out of Oakland as one of the nation’s most liberal politicians tries to put his ideas into action.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 17th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.