RUN, JERRY, RUN

In the wake of Jerry Brown’s re-election as Mayor of Oakland, several local media outlets are reviving the charge that Brown is gearing up for a run for something else (most likely U.S. Senator) sometime during his second term. They are citing, in part, the fact that the day before the mayoral election voting, Brown put an American and California State flag up on his jerrybrown.org campaign website.

I’m still trying to figure out why this would be a bad thing for Oakland.

First, it’s difficult to see how Jerry Brown could spend less time in his duties as mayor. His strong-mayor ordinance actually only give him two legal responsibilities: hiring the City Manager and breaking tie votes in City Council. The City Manager was already hired when Brown got here, and Brown has managed to miss about half of the tie votes. We keep hearing that the Mayor spends his day on the phone talking to potential developers, but since he doesn’t get paid by piece-rate, we don’t require him to turn in his phone records at the end of the day (now there’s about the one place where that phrase is appropriate), so we don’t really know how much time that actually takes. And re: the Mayor’s continuing assertion that he is putting Oakland on the map, how many times do you have to call the folks at Rand-McNally before they get the message? So if Brown were to slip down to Modesto or Merced two or three days a week to campaign for the Senate, would we really miss him?

[Note to people who spent so much time last year speculating on how Mayor Brown would be succeeded if he resigned mid-term to run for another office: Mayor Brown certainly may run for another office mid-term, but why on earth would he resign in order to do so? That don’t compute.]

Second reason why Brown’s possible run for another office might not be such a bad thing for Oakland: The one time it is guaranteed that you can get a politician’s attention is when he (or she) is running for office. We certainly got more attention from the Mayor these past three months—during the Mayoral campaign—than we got in the entire three years preceding, combined. So a Senate-campaigning Jerry would have to do a little Oakland stuff now and again, if only to keep up appearances that he has a day job.

So on the theory that it’s got to get better because it can’t possibly get any worse: Run, Jerry, run.

And while we’re talking elections…

Last week, the voters in District 6 decided to pick a new member of City Council. So who will be representing District 6 this week and for the next ten months? Moses Mayne, the Councilmember who the voters in District 6 decided that we did not want. How can that be?

It be’s because we hold Council elections in March, almost a year before the new Council terms begin. We hold Council elections in March because they are tied in with the state primary elections. We don’t have to hold them during the state primary elections if we don’t want to, I suppose, but then we’d have to pay the cost for the extra election day. So we’re tied in with the state primaries. And the state primary elections got moved to March…from June, where they used to be…in order to give California a bigger clout in the Presidential nominating process. That ended up not working, but that’s another story.

We could hold the Council elections in November, when we hold the general elections. That would increase turnout, since there are usually more people voting in November than there are in the primaries. A Councilmember elected in November would take office a couple of months later, exactly the time frame we use for our Presidents and Governors. But, then, how would we handle runoffs, such as we now have in District 4?

In South Carolina, where I used to live, they have a simple solution. Runoffs are held two weeks after the elections.

Sure, there would be the extra expense of a special runoff. But the alternative is for the voters of District 6 to be represented for close to a year by someone whom we’ve decided we don’t want to represent us. Somehow, that doesn’t seem very democratic.