What’s Old is New Again?

Jerry Brown’s campaign to be the next Attorney General got a big boast today with the announcement of his replacement’s candidacy in the person of Ron Dellums. In 1926, essayist Frank Moore Colby wrote “If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.” So today, what’s old is new again and several generations of progressive political activists support 69-year old Ron Dellums, former Congressman, to be the next Mayor of Oakland. One wonders, are there valuable insights to be gained by campaigning first in 1970 and next in 2006, 36 years in between?

The last time I focused on Ron Dellums was during my first stint in graduate school. During a semester long Washington, D.C. internship program, a Mills College alum would report weekly of her wonderful experiences on Capital Hill working in the Dellums’ office: the politics, the parties, the hot tub. The rest of us eager-beaver, wet behind the ears grad-students were merely consumed with days of drudgery on the fourth floor of the Department of Energy, at the Germantown offices of the fed’s nuclear programs and as a Congressional Fellow crunching numbers for the House Appropriations Committee. Following each week’s seminar, student colleagues would roll our eyes and groan with each blustering braggadocio we heard from Ms. Mills about Oakland Ron & Company.

San Francisco’s own former mayor, Willie Brown, another who retired from public life only to return as a Big City Mayor was quoted in the Chron about Dellums’ return to the campaign trail: “If he is running, I suspect that private life has run its course for Dellums, and now he’s looking at the Oakland mayor’s job.” That’s quite a statement, and it was quite a shock for young Ms. Mills to show up for work on Capital Hill one morning welcomed by a FBI agent armed with questions about that hot tub and those parties.

Apparently, in Oakland, “there is a certain amount of disorder that has to be reorganized.” (William S. Paley, founder, CBS) 35 years past his first campaign, candidate Dellums seeks to replace Jerry Brown who in turn, is seeking to replace Bill Lockyer, who in turn seeks to return to… Oakland. Wasn’t there a movie, Escape from Oakland? Oakland, Alcatraz, whatever… It’s a little like watching the lions and tigers and bears. Ronnie and Jerry and Willie, oh my!

Jerry Brown’s support of eminent domain put a once small business known as Revelli Tires in Oakland out of business. Jerry Brown’s support of land grabs forced a first generation immigrant, Tony Fung, to give up the American Dream and close his Autohouse on 20th Street. Jerry Brown’s City of Oakland is home to crime, poverty and educational failure – just ask Ron Dellums! According to the Oakland Tribune, Ron Dellums is looking forward to being the “one person who could solve the political, moral and social crises facing Oakland.” Gee, with friends like that, Jerry, who needs enemies?