There’s a new reason why northern California’s Bay Area should be sawed off and allowed to drift out to sea.
That part of the state already has two cities that, to quote Reagan administration official Dick Darman’s description of the Democrats in 1984, have moved so far left they’ve left America. Now that former radical leftist Congressman Ron Dellums has been confirmed as the new mayor of Oakland, the city will join Berkeley and San Francisco in the loony left camp.
Last October, Dellums entered the race unexpectedly. He quickly became the favorite, though it was unclear whether he would be able to win more than 50 percent of the votes, thus avoiding a runoff in November. It was not until last Friday, a week and a half after the election was held, that the official tally revealed he had won 50.18 percent of the votes.
Dellums represented California’s 9th district in Congress, which includes both Berkeley and Oakland, from 1971 to 1998, winning his last election with 77 percent of the vote. While his mayor’s race turned out to be a lot closer than observers expected, a runoff would merely have postponed the inevitable. Bay Area voters can’t resist blame-America-first candidates.
Since Fidel Castro is not eligible to run for public office in the U.S., Dellums is probably the next closest thing. A socialist darling all his public life, the radical left-wing movements he has embraced include the Community for New Politics in Berkeley, the National Peace Action Coalition, and Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda’s Campaign for Economic Democracy.
In 1977, referring to Dellums joining the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, the magazine Mother Jones wrote, “For the first time in more than a century, a dues-paying socialist is also a member of the U.S. Congress.”
In 1982, when the communist island of Grenada was building an airport believed by the Reagan White House to be for the purpose of accommodating Soviet military aircraft, Dellums visited the Caribbean country on a “fact-finding” mission. In a subsequent report to Congress he said it was absurd to believe the airport was for any purpose other than economic development, despite the fact the runway capacity was far beyond anything necessary for civilian use.
Following the U.S invasion of Grenada in 1983, a letter from Dellums’s chief of staff Carlottia Scott to Grenadian dictator Maurice Bishop was discovered in which she had written that “Ron” did not want anything to jeopardize the building of the “Revolution.” She conveyed the congressman’s admiration for Bishop, adding, “The only other person that I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel.”
In addition to his support of Bishop, he voted in 1980 to send $75 million in U.S. aid to Nicaragua’s Communist Sandinista regime. No wonder his nickname is “Red Ron.”
And if Will Rogers never met a man he didn’t like, Dellums never met a U.S. weapons system he could support, opposing both the MX and Pershing missiles and other national defense initiatives.
Dellums suddenly bailed out of Congress in February 1998, and although he said it was to concentrate on his personal life, it probably had more to do with frustration over the GOP takeover four years earlier and the loss of his position — won by seniority — as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. (He was probably miffed that the committee’s name couldn’t be changed to “Unarmed.”)
An economically struggling city like Oakland needs a socialist mayor like New Orleans needs another hurricane, but that’s what it now has. If I owned a business there I’d be planning to get out, fast; Dellums makes former leftist mayors of San Francisco look like Ronald Reagan.
Oakland’s voters, though narrowly, have said “Viva Ron,” and the city will soon earn the name “Havana North.”
–California-based Doug Gamble, a former writer for Presidents Reagan and Bush 41, writes for various politicians and corporate executives.