PUNISHING POLITICIANS FOR DOING THE RIGHT THING
Last week’s column ended saying that Oakland
needs some straight talk and some serious, adult conversation on this recent explosion
of violence in our city, where it’s coming from, and where it may be leading.
This week, in an almost surreal reply, the president of the Oakland City Council
says that perhaps we’ve already talked too much.
In an Oakland Tribune article entitled “Gangs Tighten Grip In City—Police, Officials
Acknowledge Violent Surge,” reporters Kamika Dunlap and Harry Harris write that Council
President Ignacio De La Fuente “said he agreed that city officials had spent too
much time talking about the [gang violence] problem rather than actually working
to end it. ‘We have to get the gloves off,’ De La Fuente said.”
(It wasn’t clear who Mr. De La Fuente was agreeing with, since no one else in the
article was talking about too much talking, but perhaps that part got cut out of
the article in editing.)
In any event, if we needed any reminder that the 2006 campaign season has officially
started, this was it. As they prepare to come before voters, officeholders are often
sensitive to charges that they haven’t done something about the problems they were
supposed to fix during the period for which we elected them the last time, and are
too often quick to embrace initiatives that show that they are “taking charge” and
“doing something.” While this ends up with good one-liners on a campaign brochure
or a newspaper article (such as saying “we have to get the gloves off”), many times
it also results in bad government as officeholders scramble to pass laws or institute
policies that buck up their resumés while making the initial problem worse.
And so last year, in order for Mayor Jerry Brown to polish up his law-and-order credentials
in preparation for his run for California Attorney General, we got stuck with Mr.
Brown’s arrest-the-sideshow-spectators ordinance. The ordinance got introduced so
suddenly that originally it did not even have time to go through the normal channels
of public discussion and hearings in the City Council Public Safety Committee. Was
Mr. Brown’s arrest-the-sideshow-spectators ordinance actually needed as a police
tool? What was its immediate effect? What are its long-term implications? Who knows?
Since it has already served its actual purpose—to get Mr. Brown statewide headlines
as being tough on crime—the actual result on Oakland’s streets has gotten lost in
the bureaucratic paper shuffle.
With Mr. De La Fuente in a race to succeed Mr. Brown as mayor of Oakland—and with
the Oakland Tribune noting in its gang violence article that Mr. De La Fuente representing
the district “where most of this crime takes place”—God only knows what we’ll end
up with out of City Council before the June election.
But if you think this column is an attack on Mr. De La Fuente himself, you are mistaken.
Within reason, officeholders tend to respond to what we demand, and usually only
deliver what we accept. In most cases, the public accepts superficiality and often
punishes politicians who actually dig down, stick with it, and try to solve the problem.
Since superficiality is what we almost always reward, superficiality is what we generally
get.
Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente is the best proof of that. We
can show that by a quick test, but the results will probably not be what you are
expecting.
Think of the botched Oakland Raiders deal, in which the City of Oakland and Alameda
County wooed Al Davis and the Raiders to come back from Los Angeles, and then got
stuck with a monumental bond bill that is going to last into the generation of our
grandchildren. What politician comes immediately to mind as most closely associated
with that debacle? Most people will say Ignacio De La Fuente.
But why do we identify Ignacio De La Fuente most closely with the Raiders deal and
almost nobody else?
In the early 1990s, when the City of Oakland was wooing the Raiders back from Los
Angeles and the deal was being struck that we eventually got stuck with, Ignacio
De La Fuente was just getting on the Oakland City Council (he was originally elected
in 1992). He was not the major council power that we know today and although he certainly
supported the Raider deal—practically every Oakland official did at the time—it was
not a deal that Mr. De La Fuente put together.
Actually one of the major powers behind the Raiders deal was State Senator Don Perata.
But almost nobody today associates Mr. Perata with the Raiders deal, and the newspapers
rarely, if ever, mention his connection.
That wasn’t true when the deal itself went down. A 1996 news archive entry in a website run by one of
the Raider Nation faithful (www.vertgame.com) gives us some interesting history and
insight from a contemporary San Francisco Chronicle article: “Monday, Aug. 26, 1996—There’s
yet more bad news today about [the Oakland Football Management Association], the
incompetent organization responsible for selling [Personal Seat Licenses] to pay
off the cost of the Coliseum renovations. Former Alameda County Supervisor Don Perata,
who was instrumental in helping convince the Raiders to return to Oakland, has quit
his job as a marketing consultant to OFMA in disgust. In a resignation letter dated
Aug. 19, Perata wrote, ‘The lack of a discernible organizational structure and the
absence of a coherent marketing plan simply make it impossible to perform effectively
. . . What we have is a bureaucracy.’”
The year date of the Chronicle article and the Vertgame website entry is significant.
It was 1996, a year after the Raiders returned to Oakland. The financial structure
of the botched Raider deal was all in place—including the personal seat licenses
that never sold and the massive stadium renovations that the public has to pay for—but
in the euphoria of the Raiders’ first couple of years back in Oakland, the full implications
of how bad that deal actually was hadn’t yet sunk in with the general population.
Mr. Perata “quit his job as a marketing consultant to OFMA in disgust” after putting
the deal in place, thus jumping clear of the Raider mess before it hit the fan. His
involvement in putting together the Raider deal has long since been forgotten, and
he is rarely, if ever, mentioned when people talk these days about the Raider mess.
In the meanwhile, Mr. De La Fuente, who was a junior councilmember in the early 1990s
and only a minor player in the Raider deal, at best, spent the next decade trying
to clean up the mess. Whatever you think of Mr. De La Fuente’s politics or whether
he was right or wrong to support the original Raiders deal or what moves he has tried
to make since then to correct the Raider deal mistake, he didn’t cut and run. The
public associates Mr. De La Fuente with the Raiders mess not because he was its originator,
but because he was the janitor left with the broom trying to sweep up behind others
who have long since washed their hands and left the building.
Politicians are many things, but most of them are not dumb. They get the message.
In Oakland, politicians are not punished if they screw up and cut out. They are only
punished if they stick around and do the work required to clean up a bad situation,
whether or not they created that situation. That rewards superficiality. It leaves
us with a lot of snappy campaign rhetoric during election time—“We have to get the
gloves off”—but with a reluctance by officeholders to dig in and do the dirty work
required to actually solve the problems. If it looks like that is what we’re now
getting from officeholders like Mr. De La Fuente, we need to look to ourselves for
part of the blame.