Posted on 01/16/2009 7:45:04 AM PST by SmithL
The contradictions between Ron Dellums' storybook congressional career on Capitol Hill and his rocky performance as a big-city mayor are too stark to ignore.
He left Washington after 27 years in office as the liberal lion in the House of Representatives, a staunch opponent of the war, a champion in the fight against AIDS and an architect for social change.
But unless he can navigate a steep 180-degree turnaround in his final two years in the Oakland mayor's office, he will end his political career more like the little lamb that lost its way.
Some of the findings in a long-awaited report commissioned by the city that was released earlier this week by the PFM Group, a government consulting firm owned by former City Manager Robert Bobb, confirmed the critical situation within city government.
The report underscored what Oakland residents have long feared: Government operations are a jumbled, dysfunctional mess, the mayor needs to show up for work every Monday at 9 a.m., follow a schedule and communicate with the City Council, department heads and policy experts on a regular basis.
In essence, the PFM report reads like "An Idiot's Guide to Being Mayor" or, as one council member called it, "City Management 101."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
i think this exposes the fact that when you are a congressman, you really don’t do a whole lot other than vote where to waste tax payer money and enjoy the good life in DC. As a mayor, you actually have to show leadership. You don’t as a congressman. Dellums proves this point. I am glad to see he’s an inept loser. Oakland residents probably will never learn and continue to vote in radicals. History keeps repeating itself because we never learn.
Wow, Oakland kinda sounds like a west coast version of Detroit.
A VERY important difference between congressman and mayor is that a congressman can avoid personal responsibility for his actions. After all, he’s just one of 435. A congressman can bloviate all he wants and it won’t make a dime’s worth of difference. A mayor on the other hand has executive responsibility for municipal services (e.g. police, fire, parks and some school services) and is quite rightly held responsible for how these services are performed.
Just proves that virtually any mayor of a city more than 40K people or any governor has far more useful “experience” than any Congress Critter (who went straight to Congress).
Palin vs. Biden, McCain and Obama in experience. No contest.
Got it right. Congressman are one of a large crowd and it’s hard to pin the blame on any one person. When you are mayor it’s a lot different.
“Shocked,shocked, I say.”
Marxist Dellums is totally destroying Oakland, rendering it unfit for human habitation. I mean that literally.
A foretaste of things to come on a national level, I’m afraid.
The author, in excoriating Dellums, still praises him too much. To call this doofus the former liberal lion of the House is absurd beyond understanding.
He was a community organizer, of sorts, never anything else. And he is a perfect embodiment of the truth in Sarah Palin’s description of a (vice-president) senior elected executive: Sort of like a community organizer, except you have to produce results.
Dellums has not gone downhill since leaving congress. He was never much of anything.
I agree. He was always an idiot. It just shows how much you can get away with in Congress, though, where nobody even expects you to come in to work. That’s where he learned all his current behavior.
9 am? 9am? By 9 this morning I'd been at work for almost 3 hours already.
I swear to every God living, dead, or yet to be born that 75% of the politicians in America could turn into dust tomorrow morning and the result would be a HUGE net improvement.
L
Aren't doofus and “liberal lion of the House” the same thing. We are talking about liberal Democrats in the House of Representatives. They are all slimy, lying thieves. For them doofus is the most positive description you can give.
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