Election 2010
Oakland mayoral candidate and local businessman Greg Harland hopes to address the majority of Oakland’s problems—high crime, unattended street maintenance, and increased parking fees and fines—using business sense.
It’s the First Friday in October, and Art Murmur is in full swing. Local ’zines, art depots and thrift shops are peddling their wares in between galleries packed with inebriated merrymakers. The atmosphere is hardly political, and yet mingling with the crowd is Don Macleay, one of Oakland’s ten mayoral candidates. “Let me tell you,” he says, thrusting fliers into the hands of passersby, “say ‘Hi, I’m a politician,’ and people will shy away from you. But say, ‘Hi, I’m with the Green Party,’ and people will take your card.”
If you had to use ranked choice voting today, would you know what to do? That’s the question Oakland North asked voters in the lobby of the Grand Lake Theater last Sunday, and even after watching a two-hour spy flick, theatergoers explained the process admirably.
“I’ve never been arrested. I never wanted to be arrested,” said Laura Wells, Green Party candidate for governor, who was taken into custody on Tuesday outside the debate between California’s leading candidates for governor, Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown.
Oakland’s Asian Cultural Center forum brought the ten mayoral candidates together to share their views on issues important to Asian American communities including equal language access, crime prevention and business revitalization.
On Monday, eight of the ten candidates running for mayor of Oakland faced the city’s progressive community in a relatively lighthearted forum at Humanist Hall in downtown Oakland. The format of the event, co-sponsored by thirteen left-leaning organizations, including the Alameda County Green Party and the Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library, broke away from standard debate protocol.
The run-off election between John Creighton and Victoria Kolakowski for a seat on the Alameda County Superior Court shows how complicated choosing a judicial candidate can be. From evaluating each candidate’s credentials to speculating about how each might act from the bench, Alameda County voters have a lot of thinking to do if they want to avoid the dartboard approach this November.
Oakland City Council members Jean Quan and Rebecca Kaplan, candidates in the mayoral race, were unable Thursday to prompt amendments to the city’s campaign finance laws before the November 2 election. The proposed changes targeted fellow candidate Don Perata, whose campaign has already exceeded the $379,000 spending cap.
Don Perata, one of 10 candidates for Oakland mayor, has had a long history of public service, having spent 16 years teaching in Alameda County and 12 years as a Sacramento politician. But his record has also been marred with controversy over issues such as campaign finances.