As the election season heats up, the Oakland mayor’s race looks like it will be one of the most interesting election in the state. 

On Wednesday, Ron Dellums made an aggressive move towards City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente’s support base by holding a rally in the Fruitvale district, a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood that De La Fuente has represented for 13 years.  Dellums was not alone.  Hispanic activist Delores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, came to Oakland to tell residents to vote for her fellow socialist, Ron Dellums.

It was no coincidence that on same day De La Fuente announced that the United Farm Workers was endorsing him in the Oakland mayor’s race. 

According to the Oakland Tribune, Huerta said, “We’re not going to vote for someone who has been there and didn’t do the job. Ron Dellums is a man of courage who gets right in the middle of difficult issues."

I have a couple of problems with this.  First, I’m betting that Huerta is actually registered to vote in her hometown of Bakersfield, not Oakland.  So she’s not going to be voting for anyone for Oakland mayor.  Nor will she be living with the outcome of the election.

Second, she’s says Ignacio De La Fuente has been here and didn’t do the job.  Dellums, on the other hand, has lived in the Bay Area full time for 35 years and has never had an executive job.  

But in a liberal city like Oakland, the union endorsements are big news. Dellums has the endorsement of the Alameda County Central Labor Council and is getting financial support from the local chapter of the SEIU

Apparently in a major urban city like Oakland, the Farm Workers endorsement is a big deal.  There are no farms in Oakland, but the UFW tried to make the connection in their endorsement statement by talking about the importance of Oakland’s ports.  The reality is that UFW endorsement means something to Democrat Hispanic voters, a De La Fuente constituency that Dellums wants to attract.

Dellums has more popular support than De La Fuente, according to a local poll.  The lefties in Oakland are excited about having “progressive” leadership in Oakland (Jerry Brown was too conservative for these folks).  As an Oakland taxpayer, I’m sure that I’ll be hit up to pay for Dellum’s “progressive” ideas when he’s elected. 

De La Fuente’s got his problems, no doubt.  But locally, people around here seem to feel that he is pretty responsive to taxpayers and neighborhood groups’ concerns.  Before Dellums jumped in the race, De La Fuente was spending a lot of time having little neighborhood coffee klatches in all neighborhoods of the city.  Dellums has not anything to reach out to the neighborhoods (his Fruitvale stunt was clearly a race-based move, not an attempt to sit down with neighborhood residents and learn about their issues).  If elected, Dellums will be more interested in creating a government-run local health care system than with minor neighborhood issues such as speed bumps and stop lights. 

Of course, with our city’s homicide rate skyrocketing, it would seem that crime should be the overriding issue of the mayor’s race.  Dellums’ sweeping comments about going  “…on a magnificent journey to bring Oakland into the 21st century" tells us nothing about what he would do to end the city’s violent crime problem. That’s probably because he has no idea how to actually solve the crime problem.  

This entry was posted on Friday, March 10th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.