Oakland Mayor Jean Quan on PR blitz to obscure early failures

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan's announcement last week that her office is closer to a new stadium deal with the Oakland Raiders couldn't have come at a better time for a big-city mayor in the thick of a tough re-election race.

In recent weeks, her timing has been impeccable.

She positioned herself in the right-field bleachers during a nationally televised Sunday night A's game - where cameras, not surprisingly, caught her amidst the A's rowdiest fans. The next graduation ceremony for Oakland police recruits, which will lift the short-staffed Oakland Police Department over 700 officers, is scheduled for the weekend before the municipal election.

Like any incumbent, Quan is using the office-holder advantage in her re-election campaign - and there's no shame in it. Everyone does it, in one form or another, but in Quan's case the tactic is painfully obvious. It's not transparent government, it's transparent politicking.

Apparently the plan is to blitz the media and likely voters with good news and positive images in the final months of the mayor's race and minimize questions about the previous three years and 10 months of her term.

Quan isn't the only mayoral candidate making big, bold promises about the city's future, but as the incumbent her performance over the last four years is a better measure.

Because any way you look at it, Quan's first two years in office were an unmitigated disaster. It started with the public departure of Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts and was quickly followed by Occupy Oakland protests outside Oakland City Hall. From there, her problems shifted to a crime wave the size, breadth and width the city had never before experienced.

Along the way she lost two more police chiefs; two city administrators; and much of her own staff, including her go-to adviser Dan Siegel, who is now a candidate running against her.

Oh, and she actually implemented her own crime plan, until it was discredited and scrapped.

Missed opportunities

Under her leadership, the Oakland City Council has run amok. She has never used the power of her office - or the bully pulpit - to rein them or shame them into compliance.

She had the opportunity to be the people's champion, and enforce any findings of wrong-doing among the council with immediate action. She could have directed the city attorney's office to verify audit findings and promised to take any evidence of illegal conduct to the Alameda County district attorney's office herself - and alerted the media ahead of time.

She could have been brave and bold and independent and exhibited leadership qualities that demand our respect - and command our political loyalty.

Instead, Quan has been a weak mayor in a city with a strong mayor form of government. She's attempted to link her leadership to the market forces now driving the city's economic resurgence, but it just ain't so.

Quan spent a lot of time catering to the city's municipal unions with raises, and in at least one case handing out signing bonuses, and working twice as hard not to make enemies as she did to make alliances. In the city's last fiscal year, the raises she handed out came at the expense of police officer jobs that were budgeted for but unfilled.

"City records show we were able to pay out the raises because of the shortfall in officers," said Council member Libby Schaaf, one of Quan's opponents in the mayor's race. "It's why I brought full staffing legislation to actually hire the number of police in the budget. The idea that public safety money was going unused was just crazy."

And even Quan's good news campaign includes a disclaimer.

She has proposed helping the Raiders build a new football stadium by giving them land and taking on the $120 million in debt the Raiders still owe for the improvements to the Coliseum that lured them back to Oakland in the 1990s.

Show me the money

Problem is Quan's not saying how the city will come up with $120 million.

"That's a great question that we will probably not say anything about," the mayor's spokesman, Sean Maher, said last week.

Sounds like that piece of information may not be campaign friendly.