From Congress to City Hall: Can Barbara Lee Avoid Her Mentor’s Missteps in Run for Oakland Mayor?

The premise may sound familiar: A revered progressive Congressmember puts their legacy on the line by staging a final act as mayor of Oakland.

After winning Oakland’s top job in 2006, Ron Dellums entered City Hall as a liberal icon, known for his strong opposition to the Vietnam War and leadership in the divestment movement against apartheid-era South Africa. He left office after one term, embattled by tax scandals, police layoffs and criticism over his lack of public engagement.

Now, there’s a potential sequel: Barbara Lee, who spent years working for Dellums on Capitol Hill before her trailblazing tenure in the House, announced last week that she will run for mayor in the April special election that was called after the recall of former mayor Sheng Thao.

Dellums’ shadow looms large over Lee’s entrance into the race. Like her former boss, she returns to local politics with impeccable progressive credentials. Lee was mentored by Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress. She organized for Black Panthers founder Bobby Seale during his run for mayor, and she pushed former President George W. Bush to fund global AIDS relief. Most notably, she cast the lone vote against military force in Afghanistan in 2001.

However, governing Oakland will require Lee to oversee a city administrator and police chief, negotiate development deals and craft a budget that will necessitate hard cuts affecting traditional allies in labor — all at the age of 78.

“It’s a totally different ballgame when you’re one of 400-plus people in Congress,” said Ignacio De La Fuente, a former Oakland City Council president. “When you’re in Oakland, especially Oakland, where the unions are so powerful, you have to be able to manage the realities, especially your financial realities. She is going to have to be very, very willing to piss people off.”

In addition to rising homelessness and the highest rates of crime in the Bay Area, Lee would face an estimated structural shortfall of $280 million in the upcoming budget cycle, a deficit so severe that Dan Lindheim, Dellums’ former city administrator, was left to offer this diagnosis on KQED’s Forum: “The next mayor has to be certifiable to really want to be mayor because balancing the budget [in 2025] is going to be virtually impossible.”

Lee’s supporters said she is more than up to the task, arguing that she understands the mechanics of city government and is well-positioned to unite a city facing a leadership vacuum in the wake of the recall. Lee also appears to relish the challenge.

“Believe you me, if I make a decision to run, it’s going to be because I want to do it, and I think I can help make life better for everyone,” Lee told KQED’s Political Breakdown last week before announcing her campaign.

Compare that to Dellums, coaxed into the campaign by adoring supporters who chanted “Run, Ron, run!” at a rally at Laney College in late 2005. By the end of his term, Dellums seemed to regret having taken the crowd up on their offer.

“It’s not something that I wanted to do,” Dellums told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “It has been painful. It has been perhaps the most difficult thing that I’ve ever done in my life.”

Dellums’ 2006 mayoral campaign was heavy on nostalgia, reminding voters of his family’s history in West Oakland, his uncle C.L. Dellums’ leadership in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and his own legacy in Congress, said Greg Hodge, a former Oakland school board member.

“The quintessential moment where I knew he didn’t quite get it was when people in the candidate forums asked him about potholes,” Hodge recalled. “And he would pooh-pooh it like, ‘Well, why are you asking me about potholes? I’ve dealt with the multibillion-dollar foreign relations budget in Congress.’ And then, people go like, ‘Yeah, but what about the potholes?’”

Sandré Swanson, a former state Assemblymember who worked for both Dellums and Lee, said Lee has plenty of Oakland-based accomplishments to highlight, such as the federal funding she secured to extend BART to Oakland International Airport and deepen the harbor at the Port of Oakland.

“I think during the course of the campaign, many of these things are going to come out,” Swanson said. “People [will] say, ‘Well, I didn’t know that she actually helped the expansion of the airport or that she helped the port success or that she dealt with environmental grants that helped with the quality of air in the neighborhood.’”

Like any mayor, Lee’s campaign and potential tenure will be shaped by events out of her control. Dellums faced the fallout from the Great Recession, as well as protests following the killing of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer.

Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, a group dedicated to building political power for women of color, said those events overshadowed Dellums’ accomplishments, such as attracting investment from foundations and nonprofits, steering the development of the Oakland Army Base and overseeing a decline in violent crimes and homicides.

Allison said a better parallel for Lee is Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, another former Congressmember who, before getting criticized for being out of the country when the ongoing wildfires erupted, received praise for leading a reduction in homelessness and winning support from voters on a sales tax to fund shelters and services.

“In my conversations with [Lee] it was pretty clear that … she understands the difference between her years of legislation and leadership at the federal level to being an executive here in Oakland,” Allison said. “I think she is well-positioned to leverage her long relationships and her experience to bring in the A-Team and to understand, have clear eyes about what’s happening.”

Hodge agreed that it would be crucial for Lee to hire experienced staff with a deep understanding of Oakland to avoid a repeat of Dellums, whose rotating door of chiefs of staff included advisers from Berkeley, San Francisco and even his own executive assistant.

Allison said the lesson from the Dellums era is that Lee’s political ideology will not be the dividing line between her success and failure as mayor, if she is elected.

“The lines are, are we going to have a functioning city, and do we have a mayor that’s willing to make the hard decisions?” Allison said.