It’s Don Perata’s world — we just live in it. He and Mayor Jerry Brown tower over Oakland like tinpot gods, collecting votes, money, and publicity by the bushel. The state senator’s defining attribute is power — or the perception of power, which amounts to the same thing. But the Don is not the first power broker to cast his shadow over the city; in fact, the numbers of years that Oakland has been unmolested by such men is woefully small. The means by which power is accumulated and dispensed have changed over the years, but the Hobbesian reality of what is crudely called “machine politics” endures. Will Oakland ever be free of it?
Thanks to civil service protections, Oakland has never been cursed with machine politics in the classic sense, in which a Tammany-style boss hands out municipal jobs to ward heelers who get immigrant voters to the polls. But the city historically has been bifurcated into two distinct entities: the political class of elected officials, bureaucrats, union leaders, and moneyed interests who run the town; and the great mass of disinterested residents — mostly immigrants chasing industrial jobs — who rarely vote, demand better government, or even pay attention to city hall. For most of the 20th century, Oakland was ruled by an iron alliance of Kaiser Aluminum, the Clorox company, port interests, and the downtown department stores. Standing atop the food chain was Joseph Knowland, the man who turned the Oakland Tribune into what was once the state’s most prominent newspaper.
It’s hard to understand, in an age of media decentralization, the importance of the newspaper in the aggregation of power. But in its day, Knowland’s Tribune played an almost exclusive role in the shaping of public opinion. According to Gayle Montgomery, the former political editor of the Tribune who later wrote a biography of Senator Bill Knowland, the Knowlands handpicked candidates for elected office and boosted their stature in the pages of the paper. Meanwhile, a highly disciplined Republican Party organization got out the vote on election day. “Inside the club in Oakland, you pretty much had to have the approval of the Knowlands if you wanted to run for office,” Montgomery says. “You had people coming in with great hope, hoping that the Knowlands would give them, first, the go-ahead, and second, their support. … In the ’50s, you had two newspapers in town, the Hearst paper and the Knowland paper, but the Knowland paper was the power. And they joined statewide with the LA Times to elect people.”
The rise of Earl Warren perfectly illustrates how the system worked. In 1925, Knowland tapped Warren to run for district attorney of Alameda County, and his paper’s support was crucial to Warren’s campaigns to become California’s attorney general in 1938 and governor in 1942. Upon the death of Senator Hiram Johnson in 1945, Knowland asked Warren to appoint his 37-year-old son Bill Knowland as Johnson’s replacement. By 1953, Bill Knowland had become majority leader and, when a vacancy appeared on the Supreme Court, successfully pressured Dwight Eisenhower to put Warren on the highest court in the land.
The Knowland machine began to fall apart in the ’60s, as sweeping social and demographic upheavals changed the calculus of power. Thousands of white Republican residents moved into the burgeoning suburbs, and the department stores followed, taking their advertising revenue — the mainstay of the Tribune‘s bottom line — with them. In 1974, Bill Knowland, beset with gambling debts and facing his second divorce, shot himself on the bank of the Russian River. Back in Oakland, black power was rising, and a new machine was assembling. Black Panther Bobby Seale fired the first shot across the bow with his mayoral run in 1973, and in 1977, Superior Court Judge Lionel Wilson pieced together a coalition of Panthers, African-American churches, and white liberals to become the first black mayor in Oakland’s history.
The old guard soon discovered that Wilson was a man they could work with, especially after he helped kill a strong rent-control proposal in 1980. Soon, Wilson was cashing the same campaign checks that once had flowed exclusively into Republican coffers. And thanks to his close ties to the Carter administration, Wilson controlled millions of dollars in poverty programs. By playing both sides of the field, he was able to build a new coalition of moderate, urban Democrats and big business. Much of his power was concentrated at the three-thousand-strong Allen Temple Baptist Church, which boasted City Manager Henry Gardner and Councilman Leo Bazile among its members.
But despite Wilson’s liberal use of the gavel on the city council, his machine never achieved the discipline of Knowland’s. For one thing, African-American Democrats had never governed before and had to learn how. For another, Montgomery says, Democratic politics are sloppy by definition. “The Democrats have never been organized; they always go in several different directions at once,” he says. “Their goals were to give ‘power to the people,’ as the Panthers put it, and that didn’t fit in with running City Hall from the Tribune Tower. And while there was a loose-knit loyalty to the Democratic Party, there was certainly nothing lockstep about it. They were younger, they were ambitious, and they wanted to make their own marks without anyone telling them what to do.”
In the ’80s, Oakland suffered a series of social and economic catastrophes that Wilson was utterly unprepared to deal with. Already crippled by disastrous raze-and-build downtown redevelopment schemes, the slow collapse of Kaiser Aluminum’s fortunes, and the continuing exodus of manufacturing, the city was devastated by crack cocaine and an unprecedented wave of murders. But Wilson barely noticed as he offered a $15 million subsidy to keep the A’s from skipping town, spent millions in a fruitless lawsuit to keep the Raiders around, and chased the same big-ticket downtown office and retail deals that almost never materialized (and were often plagued by corruption scandals, as a new black patronage regime tried to assert itself). “I think he fell into what was the remnants of the Knowland machine,” says Wilson Riles Jr., who served on the city council and often was Wilson’s lone dissenter. “He didn’t come in with his own particular strategy for development or being the mayor, so he fell into the camp of those who were already in the camp of downtown.”
In neighborhoods around the city, the slow growth of grassroots organizations that helped bring Wilson to power now conspired to remove him. Now that African-American voters were fully enfranchised, they began to demand more of their leaders — voting them out if they didn’t deliver. Thousands of white middle-class professionals moved into North Oakland and brought with them a sense of entitlement that potholes should be filled promptly. A new unit of power — the neighborhood association — arrived on the scene, and reformers like Sheila Jordan, Elihu Harris, and Ignacio De La Fuente were swept into office.
And so for a brief period in the ’90s, Oakland enjoyed a measure of open, if often-ineffectual, government. Neighborhood commercial corridors such as Rockridge and Fruitvale began to flourish with more attention from City Hall, North Oakland activists fought to implement community policing, and the venal bureaucrats running the school district were thrown out. It’s no coincidence that around this time, Jerry Brown moved here to resurrect his political career. But by running for mayor, says one City Hall veteran, he undid the very grassroots infrastructure that had put an end to the machine politics of the past. Brown’s name recognition, overwhelming margin of victory, and assumption of “strong mayor” powers virtually eliminated all other centers of gravity in the city. He replaced organizational politics with the politics of celebrity, and rendered neighborhood associations, church groups, and democratic clubs irrelevant overnight.
Once again, the calculus of power shifted — and Don Perata was waiting to exploit it. The crude, slate-card race politics of the Wilson years had matured, and African-American voters were no longer satisfied with merely having “a black face in a high place.” Kaiser Aluminum departed for Texas in the early ’90s, and new campaign finance laws limited the maximum contribution to a political candidate to $600. Power was diffuse, but still there for the taking. You could still raise $200,000 to run for mayor or city council — you just needed a lot more friends. And no one is better at making friends than Perata.
Starting in the mid-’70s, Perata has carefully cultivated a vast number of supporters with deep pockets: big-shot developers such as Ron Cowan, Ed DeSilva, Phil Tagami, Jim Falaschi of Jack London Partners, and Michael Ghielmetti of Signature Properties; local billboard king John Foster; Bill Taylor of A&B Auto, which enjoys a monopoly towing contract with the city; and ABC Security, the company that patrols the Oakland airport. From 2000 to 2004, Perata has personally raised $3.5 million to finance his reelection campaigns. And since he has never had to spend any of that money to defeat an actual challenger, he has been free to give it to other politicians to win their allegiance. In fact, Perata has given $1.2 million in campaign funds to the state Democratic Party or other candidates and causes during the same period. More importantly, he introduced campaign contributors to candidates, and thus lent his fund-raising capacity to others. The list of candidates who have received money from Perata’s friends includes County Superintendent Sheila Jordan, County Supervisor Nate Miley, and City Councilmembers Danny Wan, Larry Reid, Jane Brunner, and Jean Quan.
The first time Ignacio De La Fuente ran for city council in 1987, he lost in a landslide. In 1992, after Perata introduced De La Fuente to his contributors and got consultant Larry Tramutola to run his campaign, he won his first election and has never looked back. Back then, De La Fuente was an idealistic young reformer, the darling of the Oakland progressives, and a two-fisted labor man. “I was part of the revolt of the early ’90s, and then I watched the process corrupt everyone,” one City Hall veteran laments. “Ignacio goes from being a factory worker and champion of the labor activists to being invited into the big parties downtown.” Now, as president of the city council, he’s the linchpin of Perata’s machine, to the dismay of many of his former friends.
“Don raises a prodigious amount of money, and he uses this ability to help people,” a longtime Perata associate says. “And he’s not shy about going back to those people he’s raised money for and having them return the favor. He’s also not shy in telling people that he controls X number of people on the city council. Whether that’s true or not, he uses that to exert influence. He’s an interesting guy in that he’s motivated on a fundamental level by a desire to do good things. On the other hand, he is as greedy as anybody I’ve seen in my career.”
Perata would have probably been the biggest player in East Bay politics thanks to his own genius, but his unquestioned dominance would have been impossible without Jerry Brown. In the absence of organizational politics — the neighborhood groups and churches that have sat idle since Brown’s ascendance — the only thing that counts is money and friends. And Perata has all the money and all the friends. “Most people are not aware that Perata has so many relationships with so many people,” Perata’s associate says. “Most people would be shocked to see that he has so much to do with handling city council races. … These are relationships that only Perata knows about, and it’s only when this unravels that everyone learns about them. … It’s like a spiderweb; one strand doesn’t know what the other is up to.”
Now, Perata’s adventures along the edge of the ethical may finally have caught up with him, as the FBI investigates allegations of bribery and influence-peddling. But it remains to be seen whether Oakland can produce any other kind of political animal. Oakland’s electorate has always been detached from politics, giving its leaders the leeway to misbehave all they want. A new influx of Asian and Latino immigrants, many of whom don’t speak English, vote, or otherwise participate in public life, is likely to continue this trend, at least in the San Antonio and Fruitvale neighborhoods.
But in other neighborhoods, times are changing. Gentrification may have ethnically cleansed whole city blocks, but it also has produced a new middle class that will demand accountability from its leaders. In areas such as Temescal, Allendale, and Maxwell Park, tens of thousands of white and second-generation Asian professionals, who intuitively expect clean streets and clean politics, will continue to settle in the old proletarian bungalows. No one will be able to replicate Jerry Brown’s celebrity any time soon, and city councilmembers will inevitably race to fill the vacuum he leaves behind. The calculus of power will change again, and the corrupt center of our era will not hold. A new, noisy constituency will produce its own noisy leaders. In time, the future face of Oakland politics may well be not Don Perata, but someone like Chris Daly.
On second thought, maybe machine politics aren’t so bad.
