A community news source for residents of the HarriOak neighborhood in Oakland, CA.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Disappointing Election Results: Nadel Ahead Thanks to Dirty Campaign

With all the precincts reported, Nancy Nadel is leading her challengers, Sean Sullivan and Greg Hodge, by 268 votes. This is especially disappointing because her campaign was so dirty. Nadel instructed volunteers to emphasis her "tough crime" credentials when people who live in her district know that her approach to fighting crime is to support social programs, regardless of whether they have proven to work. She championed Measure R, which focused on providing millions of dollars for programs, after voting to reduce the number of police officers in Oakland. Measure R lost and so she reluctantly supported Measure Y, which emphasized hiring community police officers along with also social services. Measure Y had no money for investigators, and there are is now a backlog of more than 1000 cases of sexual assault involving children.

Nancy went as far as putting out a COPS voter guide to give the impression that she is supported by the police. The COPS guide was not supported by law enforcement. The Oakland police officers endorsed Sean Sullivan. Nadel's flyer was a deliberate attempt to deceive voters. Too bad it worked.

Another tactic Nancy used was to lie about Sean Sullivan's ties to developers. Both she and Sean took roughly the same amount of money from developers, but Sean focused on developers who do infill development in the inner cities. These are developers who invest in healthy communities. If only Nancy shared their philosophy.

On a recent flier she accused her opponents of being backed by "multi-national finance corporation, corporate media conglomerates, anti-labor garbage companies, absentee landlords and land speculators."

It was a fantasy.

In fact Nadel is the candidate endorsed by MediaNews, the Bay Area newspaper conglomerate that is partly owned by Hearst (the other Bay Area media conglomerate). Meanwhile, it is hard to figure out who would be dumb enough to speculate in Nadel's district, given her disastrous approach to crime and development.


The total count as of this morning was 3576 for Nancy Nadel; 1873 for Sean Sullivan
1435 for Greg Hodge. Nadel needed more than 50 percent of the vote to win and so far it looks like she has squeaked by with 51.6 percent.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This election gives me no faith in the Oakland electorate, not that I had much to begin with. What a bunch of stupid uninformed slobs who just don't vote. Nadel did not run a dirty tricks campaign- If anybody believes or relies on mailers for their information well they are too stupid to vote.

It just shows how hard it is to unseat an incumbent, one that has done virtually nothing for 12 years. I was at the Scottish Rite where out of her own mouth Nadel said what an ordeal it was to get a traffic light on Harrison near WF, and touted it as her great achievement, if you're that gullible then you get what you deserve.
Oak voters got Dellums- a man who spent the last x number of years as a lobbyist, and before that never ran anything in his whole life, a man who said he was going to produce studies of what type of programming (read social services at taxpayers expense) will turn OAK around. He said it, you believed it. (Does anybody see the similarity between Obama) My lord you've all been drinking Kool Aid (not to malign an innocent drink.)

You are absolutely right it will not be a pretty 4 years in OAK, it will not be a pretty 1 yr. in OAK.

Anonymous said...

While challengers fought an uphill struggle to oust incumbents, the City rigged a mail vote that increases homeowners' LLAD tax. See www.orpn.org/LLAD_B05.htm
Incidentally, both Kaplan and Hamill supported the tax increase.