OAKLAND//2014 ELECTION/MAYOR | During a long Oakland City Council budget meeting last June, Councilmember Larry Reid grew frustrated with the topic debated that night. His comments veered off course, peppered with an abnormal use of the word “freaking.” A clarion call followed. Reid added he just might run against Mayor Jean Quan next year. However, there was a caveat. Reid said it wasn’t his decision to run against the Great Satan, but one befitting a higher power.
“You know what?” said Reid in late June, “I don’t know, maybe I should freaking run for mayor of this city and the more I think about it, the more and more I’m just waiting for a signal from God.”
Well, God has spoken, or has not, at least regarding Reid’s run for Oakland mayor, but according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Reid’s daughter talked him out of mounting a campaign next year in long heart-to-heart chat.
Reid insists he could have summoned the $400,000 he said last month would be needed to run a strong campaign against Quan, according the Chronicle. In fact, every single American bank note, says the same thing, “In God We Trust.” But, in the meantime, the big guy upstairs is going with Bryan Parker, Joe Tuman, for now, and maybe some other surprising candidate, because you know, God works in mysterious ways.
ebcitizen.com 
New candidate Peter Y. Liu is running
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By MW:
In regard to the race for Oakland mayor.
On its website today, the San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com) has a column by Joe Garofoli titled “IS DOUG BOXER – SEN. BARBARA BOXER's SON – MULLING A RUN FOR MAYOR OF OAKLAND?”
I myself hope Doug Boxer runs since Bay area politics and government is so totally corrupt, that therefore the only way to look at it without constantly crying is to treat the whole thing as good for nothing but comedy and silly entertainment (for instance, think of the exploits of that circus clown and world class nitwit Nadia Lockyer), and I think Doug Boxer would make for one of the very “finest” clowns we could possibly get to join that sleazy and totally corrupt circus of nitwits, incompetents, jokers, parasites, and pathological liars we refer to as Bay area government.
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Schaaf's actual political birth is as authentic offspring of the corrupt and incompetent City Council culture where she worked for a decade before being elected to the Council.
Thus Schaaf minimizes putting her career at any risk by making any kind of principled effort–either proposing or supporting effective lawmaking or running against an even-more-corrupt incumbent like Quan. For Schaaf, like other Oakland Council members, careers come first and the well-being of Oakland's citizens is a distant second.
As a Council staffer Schaaf was a principal architect of the misbegotten Measure Y which, after a decade and $15 million wasted, has failed utterly to reduce violence on the streets of Oakland. Despite this blatant policy failure, Schaaf continues to say that Measure Y has worked. Thus she follows the path of failure of one of her mentors, Jean Quan.
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Schaff is not running. I know I gave birth to her. She is not running for mayor. My take who ever lands the biggest consultants will win against Quan. She is weak and beatable. Lets see who the current contenders land for the campaign managers and we will see the next mayor.
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Schaaf seems to have her true believers just like Quan does. Sorry to have to point out that Schaaf has over a decade of history as a loyal member of the same corrupt, do-nothing city hall culture of which Quan is the current emblem. If Anonymous 8/2913 at 9:11 am has had any direct experience of Schaaf, or any real knowledge of her “work” on the Council, or as a long-time Council staffer, he or she will know that Schaaf is as evasive and self-serving as Quan and equally ignorant of the important topics of public safety, urban planning and community-building. Schaaf may be more intelligent than Quan, but she's cast from the same mold.
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8;24, You may agree on some issues regarding Jean Quan's dealings with unions, but I for one think the need for unions is clear.
They just have to be kept in check in the public employee arena where there is no competition and where the paying party is the resident from whom the revenues are take under force of law (taxes).
Unions get what they can. Foolish mayors and city council members often cave in and give them more than they deserve.
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I agree. Dirty union whore town!!!
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You are right about Quan the unions.
She has rolled over on every issue for them.
She gave away everything in the recent labor settlement. No tough bargaining at all.
Then looking back on her version of pension reform.
Hers is the worst I've seen in local cities.
On the council she gave a 35% boost in pensions.
The when it came time for reform she only reduced the rate (for new hires only) down by 7.4%.
From 2.7% to 2.5%
Cities like San Leandro and Hayward took their pension reform rate back to the old standard of 2.0%, where Oakland also was prior to the giant and foolish boost to 2.7%…(which is a full 35% increase.
So yes, she pleases the city unions as she gives away the farm.
Funny, but when it comes to treating the residents equally, she is completely the opposite.
Garbage fines for late payment up from $25 to $75 over the past few years.
Garbage cans left out one day too long, a $900 fine for a woman in Montclair who went away for a few days.
Parking fines jacked up.
So when it comes to the unions, Quan gives away everything without the slightest fight, but for residents she sticks them hard.
I can't think of a mayor that has been less popular than Jean Quan in the past 20 years.
At least Dellums just stayed home and slept.
If she gets re-elected, the people of Oakland truly deserve a poorly run city.
She should be the second choice of NO ONE on their ranked choice ballot. Nor their third choice.
Other than the union vote who could want her to continue? I doubt she'll even easily win the Asian vote. They know a poor mayor when they see the mess under her leadership.
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Oakland is a union town, a progressive town, and those groups will have Quan's back.
Parker has stated in public his opposition to modifying Prop 13 to tax businesses more on their property, which will kill him with the left and labor.
Schaaf could win, but would have to give up her seat to run and she isn't willing to risk it yet.
Tuman might win, but it will be tough and he really isn't that exciting either. And there are people who do vote demographically, and we have already met our quota of straight white males in Oakland politics with Dan Kalb.
It is very hard to beat an incumbent in Oakland.
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Larry would have been a disaster. The trifecta combined with Dellums and Quan.
Hopefully if Parker and Tuman run, they can have a agreement wherein their followers all put the other as their #2 in the ranked choice voting.
There must be a anti-Quan alliance, much as there was a anti-Perata alliance.
Send Quan out via the same method she got in.
She is just horrible. At least Dellums knew he wasn't any good.
You never heard him boasting about being the first this or that.
Quan keeps telling us she is the first Asian American woman mayor of a major American city.
I'd think others would want to keep that quiet given the terrible job she is doing.
Tuman, Parker, and Libby Schaaf is she dares to run. Schaaf could beat Quan.
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Larry…the Oakland ho!
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By MW:
Concerning the issue of whether Larry Reid would have needed a considerable amount of money, and such as for instance 400K, to mount a serious challenge to Jean Quan in a race for mayor, while it is normally true that it is very hard to win a race for major elected office, and especially against an incumbent, without a large war chest, however in the case of Jean Quan, her major opponent, and the one most likely to defeat her, would not be Larry Reid and nor anybody else, but merely Jean Quan herself.
More specifically, the only real skill Jean Quan has is the “ability” to regularly and repeatedly shoot herself in the foot, so frankly I think virtually anybody could beat her, and even without much of a war chest.
Still furthermore, far and away the best and most effective advertising is free advertising. So all any candidate who wanted to defeat Jean Quan would have to do would be to pass out flyers showing her sleeping, and with those flyers also including some of her more idiotic and contradictory remarks.
And then the media and general public would start picking it up and spreading those flyers, and including by making photocopies and then passing them to their friends. Since let's be realistic, the only thing Jean Quan would be effective at would be as a circus clown whose primary act was pretending to be almost totally asleep, and while walking around in a total daze all the time and portraying a zombie.
Frankly, it is hard to imagine that for any even slightly serious candidate to cause Jean Quan to go down in defeat in a battle for re-election for mayor would be much more difficult than it would have been for Mike Tyson back when he was in his prime to have beaten an average five year old child in a boxing match.
In conclusion, while Jean Quan is totally ineffective as a mayor, however she deserves a quadruple A+ as a joke and would also make a great punchline.
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