Lee faces lots of questions about whether her time in Congress makes her a good fit for a city facing budget troubles and a loss of confidence in City Hall.
by Ashley McBride March 25, 2025 (Oaklandside.com)
Throughout the 20th century, the principal job of Oakland’s mayor was to mediate among different and often competing interests in the city — business leaders, industry bosses, unions, Black migrants, landlords, renters, neighborhood groups, even the Ku Klux Klan. The factional conflicts shifted as the makeup of the city changed, but the essential role of the mayor remained more or less the same: to broker among power blocs in a growing Oakland.
This is not the job that former U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee and eight other candidates are vying for in next month’s special election.
Deindustrialization, disinvestment, and a shrinking tax base starting in the 1970s changed the way mayoral politics are conducted. Industries aren’t locally owned anymore, “so across the country, mayors are put in the position of being salespersons for their cities to try to attract investments,” said Chris Rhomberg, a sociologist at Fordham University and author of No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland. “It has changed the function of local government to be more entrepreneurial while at the same time trying to protect quality of life for local residents.”
In the words of Marcia Fudge, one of Lee’s colleagues in the House of Representatives, “You have to be a cheerleader for your city,” to be an effective mayor.
You also have to understand the minutiae of city government, how it works, and how it’s broken. And you have to focus on solving the most hyper-local kinds of problems — think potholes, crime, illegal dumping, and homeless camps.
In her campaign to replace recalled Mayor Sheng Thao, Lee, 78 years old, has faced lots of questions — particularly from her main rival, former councilmember Loren Taylor — about whether her time in Congress is relevant to the work of running a city. The next mayor will have to pull Oakland out of a massive budget deficit and restore confidence in a local government that seems to have spent much of the past year in a hail of subpoenas and never quite sealed deals to bail out the city’s finances.
What’s more, Lee’s attempt to trade a congressional seat for the mayor’s office has evoked some unflattering comparisons to Lee’s own mentor, Ron Dellums, the former member of Congress who was elected mayor in 2006. Dellums was viewed by many Oaklanders as a heroic statesman on foreign policy and domestic issues like poverty and health care, though according to some accounts, he struggled to get a handle on Oakland’s most basic problems.
But the evolution of the mayor’s role in recent decades suggests a different question about Lee’s experience: Did her time as a legislator prepare her to be the city’s cheerleader-in-chief?
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‘Being the only one’
Barbara Jean Tutt ran her first political campaign as a 15-year-old at San Fernando High School — to become an actual cheerleader. No Black student had ever been chosen, so she turned to the NAACP for help in changing the selection rules to allow the entire student body to vote for the squad. Lee was selected and became the school’s first Black cheerleader. It wouldn’t be the last time she blazed a trail and faced a backlash for it.
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While Lee spent the majority of her political career in Congress, she got her start working for Shirley Chisholm’s presidential campaign in the early 1970s while a student at Mills College. Lee, who at the time was a leader of the Black Student Union and a volunteer with the Black Panther Party, has referred to Chisholm as her mentor.
Lee went on to intern for Dellums on the Hill, eventually becoming his chief of staff. In 1990, she entered the California State Assembly, becoming the first African American woman to be elected to the state legislature from Northern California. That experience of being “the only one” meant she had to become more savvy in bridging differences, Lee said.
“I had to make sure that my perspective was understood by people who did not look like me or had the same kind of history and experience, in order to represent everyone,” she told The Oaklandside. “Being the only one required me to be able to respect everyone else’s point of view, but to also bring people together to support what I needed them to support.”
During her time with the Chisholm campaign, she met Sandre Swanson, a political consultant. Swanson also worked for Ron Dellums and served as Lee’s chief of staff for the first five years she was in Congress. Swanson was also a state assemblymember from 2006 to 2012.
Responding to constituents and solving their problems was a big focus of her time in Congress, Swanson said. During the housing crisis in the mid to late-2000s, residents would come to her office asking for help negotiating with banks attempting to foreclose on their homes.
“We weren’t lawyers, but we were able to call the bank directly and talk to government affairs people, let them know we were looking over their shoulders, and got them to reconsider foreclosure on some properties in Oakland,” Swanson told The Oaklandside. “Years later, people would walk up to her in Oakland and say, ‘You helped save my house.’”
Her office would get involved with Social Security disputes and missing disability payments. Even when someone showed up who didn’t live in her district, staff had a policy of never turning anyone away, Swanson said, an attitude he thinks she would bring to the mayor’s office.
Lee served in Congress for 27 years, stepping down this January. She introduced more than 600 pieces of legislation, but only 33 made it out of the House and only 3 became law. This record has led some to criticize Lee, saying she’s shown moral leadership but has rarely been the author of major bills that have improved the lives of Americans.
However, she was a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which holds the government’s purse strings, allowing her to influence legislation and federal spending, and she chaired the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. According to GovTrack, an independent analyst of congressional activity, Lee consistently ranked high among members of the House in cosponsoring bills, gaining cosponsors, and working to reach agreements with the Senate.
Most famously, in 2001, she cast the lone vote in either chamber of Congress against giving the Bush administration broad authorization to wage war in Afghanistan. It was, Lee wrote in 2021, “the most difficult vote I’ve cast in my career in Congress.” For her troubles, she got insults and death threats and required a 24-hour security detail. But it established her reputation as one of the most courageous politicians on the Hill, said U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, who represents Kansas City.
“There is nobody in Congress whose spine is as steely as Barbara Lee’s,” Cleaver told The Oaklandside.
Cleaver was elected mayor of Kansas City prior to his time in the House of Representatives and served as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus immediately following Lee’s term. When Lee mentioned to him that she was considering running for mayor of Oakland, he encouraged her, he told The Oaklandside.
“She’s not going to be afraid to get into some of the most controversial but significant issues in the community,” Cleaver said. “She’s been in the position of having to convince others and bring people along who were just mildly in support of something she wanted. That’s why she kept getting position after position in the Democratic caucus in Washington. Everybody wanted to have a piece of Barbara Lee because of her ability to follow through and work hard.”
Lee was elected unanimously as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Cleaver noted. There weren’t many issues that split the caucus during her term, he recalled. “That, in and of itself, is major,” he said.
Lee’s time as chair coincided with the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency — when he was facing vehement and at times racist opposition from Republicans. She made sure to gin up support for Obama’s policies among the caucus at the time, Lee said in a 2019 talk. During the fight for the Affordable Care Act, one of the most consequential bills in recent decades, she helped form the Quad Caucus, which included the Black, Hispanic, Asia-Pacific American, and progressive caucuses, to drive support for the health care act and ensure their priorities, like addressing racial health disparities and providing a public option, were included. Lee went to meet with the president at the White House to discuss the bill.
“[I said] ‘We have over 110 votes, Mr. President. We want it all.’ And he said, ‘You bring me the votes, you got it all,’” Lee recalled in 2019.
Two years after Lee’s vote dissenting against the invasion of Afghanistan, Lee worked with President George Bush on the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which she coauthored. The initiative funds research, treatment, and prevention of HIV/AIDS. To date, it has saved more than 25 million lives, largely in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s one of Lee’s proudest accomplishments. Continuation of the program could be at risk under the Trump Administration.
“George Bush didn’t agree with me and I didn’t agree with him on much of anything. But we found a way to work together,” Lee said. “There are many examples of that throughout my work both legislatively and as a member of the Appropriations Committee.”
Advocacy versus leadership
During her mayoral campaign, Lee has touted her record of bringing in billions of dollars to Oakland in federal funding for expanding the Port of Oakland, supporting clean air initiatives in West Oakland, programs with the city’s Department of Violence Prevention, assistance aid during COVID, investments in transit upgrades, parks, and arts and community organizations. Elihu Harris, a former mayor of Oakland, told The Oaklandside, “Her focus has always been on bringing resources back to Oakland.”
In forums and other public talks, Lee has pointed to her relationships with other legislators and committed to working with other institutions and private funding streams to bring more investments and philanthropy to Oakland.
While those skills are useful for Congress, being a mayor is a bit different, said Jim Ross, an Oakland-based political consultant who is not involved in Lee’s campaign.
“When you’re a member of Congress, you take what your constituents are worried about and go advocate for that in Congress. In a city like Oakland, something we’re desperate for is someone to lead the city toward solving problems,” he said. “The skillset of a member of Congress can easily translate. It’s just a matter of recognizing that the job of the mayor is to lead, where the job of a member of Congress is to represent.”
But as Ross also pointed out, the mayor’s ability to lead is circumscribed in Oakland — not just by the tightening economic conditions of the city but also by its own charter. Under the Town’s unique form of governance, the mayor has some influence but doesn’t run city departments (the city administrator does that) or have final say on the budget (that’s the City Council’s role). The result is that the mayor, in addition to being a cheerleader who encourages outside investment, has to be something of a legislator, too, persuading councilmembers to get on board.
“In Oakland, you have to persuade a majority of the City Council to go along with you to get anything done. That’s what legislators do,” Ross said. “In Oakland, it’s really much more of a legislative and persuasive role, being mayor, than you would find in some other cities which are much more administrative and executive.”
Marcia Fudge knows all about that. Before representing Cleveland in Congress, she served as mayor of Warrensville Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. From 2021 to 2024, Fudge was secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. One of the more essential functions of a mayor, she said, is making people feel good about living in their city.
“You have to…promote the city so people understand why it’s a great place to be,” Fudge said. “That, [Lee] is very good at. She’s one of the best cheerleaders I know. And you have to make sure you’re leading in a way that makes people want to follow. And she is very good at that.”
Lee’s campaign, coming as it has in the aftermath of a mayoral recall and the reelection of President Trump, has not gone in for a lot of the rah-rah stuff. But sometimes the old cheerleader in her makes an appearance. At The Oaklandside’s Feb. 26 mayoral forum, candidates were asked why they wanted such an impossible and thankless job. Others spoke darkly of the present crisis in Oakland, of being “fed up with the situation in the city,” of watching “the sanctity of human life be destroyed.”
Lee was sunnier. “I don’t think that being mayor of Oakland is an impossible thankless job,” she said. “I recognize the challenges, but I also recognize the opportunities.”
ASHLEY MCBRIDE
Ashley McBride writes about education equity for The Oaklandside. Her work covers Oakland’s public district and charter schools. Before joining The Oaklandside in 2020, Ashley was a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News and the San Francisco Chronicle as a Hearst Journalism Fellow. In 2024, Ashley received the California School Board Association’s Golden Quill Award, which recognizes fair, accurate, and insightful reporting on public schools. Ashley earned her master’s degree in journalism from Syracuse University and holds a certificate in education finance from Georgetown University.More by Ashley McBride
