The San Francisco Bay Area represents a microcosm of California’s mockable form of untethered-from-reality leftism.
That matters for America in 2024.
Not only is Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee a Californian, she’s also a product of Bay Area politics.
Now that Vice President Kamala Harris has suddenly become that presumptive nominee, it’s worth examining the kind of politics she will stand for if elected.
Harris launched her 2020 presidential campaign in her hometown of Oakland, California. So, she hasn’t exactly hidden from her ties to the Bay Area and the East Bay.
“Oakland is a place that definitely tests people,” then- Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said of Harris and her connection to the Bay Area on CNN before that rally.
“But it also has the right values, values that honor diversity… When you come up in Oakland, you’re a fighter, and you’re a fighter for the right things,” Harris’ fellow Democrat said.
Maybe Oakland does create great fighters, but are those who run the Oakland that Harris touts actually fighting for the right things?
I, too, was born in Oakland. However, unlike me, Harris was firmly enmeshed in Bay Area politics, from which she launched her national political career. She wasn’t just a bystander or passerby to the politics of the city, but an active participant in the political machine that has dominated Bay Area politics for half a century.
Elite media outlets, which have been showering endless, uncritical praise on Harris since Democrat party bosses selected her to replace President Joe Biden atop the ticket, have noted her connection to the Bay Area. They’ve unsurprisingly avoided mentioning why that’s concerning.
Axios recently published a piece that explained “how the Bay Area shaped Kamala Harris.”
The article highlighted how Harris made her way through Bay Area politics and ingratiated herself with wealthy San Francisco donors. It said little about the Bay Area’s political dysfunction.
Harris worked in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office—which handles cases in Oakland and a few other East Bay cities—before getting an appointment to the California Medical Assistance Commission that almost certainly was because of her, um, connection to Democrat Willie Brown, then speaker of the California State Assembly and a future San Francisco mayor.
Alameda County has been one of America’s bluest counties—if not the bluest one—for some time.
As notorious as San Francisco has become with its homelessness and drug problems, with the retail crime epidemic and business closures, it’s not quite as fully ensconced in a doom loop as Oakland.
Oakland has every imaginable advantage of climate and geography. The weather is immaculate—I know, I’m biased, but it is—and the city has a major port that is practically a tax gold mine. Yet, Oakland always seems to be on the verge of full-on implosion.
With the departure of the Oakland A’s, a Major League Baseball team, at the end of this season, the city will lose its third and last major sports franchise in a decade. The loss is symbolic of a city that feels like a collapsing settlement at the edge of the Roman Empire on the eve of the Dark Ages.
It’s worth noting that without the last-minute sale of the dilapidated Oakland Coliseum, the city was looking at a budget shortfall of over $100 million. The sale hardly solves the long-term problem.
Oakland is pondering doling out reparations to black residents, but a reparations panel said it needed $5 million just to draw up a plan. This is a city that’s used to treating taxpayers like a piggy bank for grifting.
Of course, Oakland has been associated with high crime rates for decades, but following the mayhem of 2020 the challenge became acute.
In 2021, the Oakland City Council in effect voted to defund its already beleaguered police department. Crime exploded. Bay Area media insists crime is down from its peak—just as the media tried denying there was any crime spike at all—but it’s pretty laughable to think that the city has overcome the problem.
One issue with looking only at the raw, official crime numbers—which have been called into question—is that many Oakland residents have given up and don’t report crimes at all.
Several high-profile incidents highlight the problem of slow police responsiveness and the feeling of general anarchy.
In early July, a mob of 80 to 100 looters barged into an Oakland gas station and convenience store and stripped the business bare.
According to the New York Post, the mob originated nearby at a so-called sideshow, which is essentially lawless street racing that’s become common in Oakland.
It was bad enough that the store was hit by looters, but what made it worse is that the police took nine hours to respond, according to the owner.
The dispatcher initially listed the looting as a Priority 2 situation and told the caller to report the crime online. Only after a video was sent to the police was the looting upgraded to a Priority 1 incident and officers dispatched, the Post reported.
This is hardly the only high-profile criminal incident or sign of out-of-control crime in the city in just the past year.
A mass shooting involving several gunmen left 14 people wounded or injured at a Juneteenth sideshow near Lake Merritt. One alleged shooter was arrested, but the others got away.
The first In-N-Out fast food restaurant to close down shuttered in March because of crime. The location was “busy” In-N-Out said, but the company feared for the safety of customers and employees.
In May, I wrote about how traffic lights at an intersection were removed and replaced by a stop sign because thieves were constantly pillaging copper wire used for the signals. A nearby homeless encampment was the likely source of the thieves, but the city apparently was unwilling to come up with a long-lasting solution.
One business owner said in an interview with a local CBS affiliate that he felt like the city was “giving up on us.”
Various road maintenance issues fester because of crime and are a common feature of Oakland. The New York Post reported in June that a road in an East Oakland neighborhood had been left unpaved for weeks because the construction crew didn’t feel safe.
Oh, and pirates—yes, pirates—are a major problem in the waters around Oakland. The pirates reportedly come from the city’s myriad homeless encampments. Police have made a few arrests, but the problem now seems endemic in Oakland’s harbors.
What have political leaders been doing to rectify these problems? Seemingly nothing.
Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, a Democrat, not only is the subject of a recall effort by voters. She’s also under investigation by the FBI, which raided her home in June.
Thao has done little to clear up questions about the raid, but she did blame “right-wing forces” in the Bay Area for targeting her.
Right-wing forces. In Oakland. Yeah, that checks out.
It’s not just Thao who has been a disaster.
Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, another Democrat, also is the target of a recall effort by voters, who say she is egregiously soft on crime. A top prosecutor quit in 2023, saying that “victims deserve better.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has accused Price of failing to use state resources to confront out-of-control crime under her jurisdiction. Newsom too is a Democrat.
Although it may be true that Thao and Price are particularly bad at their jobs, there’s a larger problem in Oakland than a few incompetents in high places. This is about the overwhelming dominance of left-wing political ideology and the long-term effects of one-party rule.
For generations, there has been no effective counterweight to the Democrat Party in the Bay Area. While leftist politicians get recalled from time to time, the general trend remains because of a lack of alternatives to what the Democrat Party is peddling.
The Oakland political environment from which Kamala Harris emerged is one in which one-party rule and left-wing ideological dominance are a given.
It’s an environment in which crime, dysfunction, and anarchy are expected while politicians play a detached game of thrones to see who will reign over the chaos.
