Doug Wilder, the former governor of Virginia, helped change the governance structure of Richmond and now is running the place. Colorado Governor Roy Romer is in charge ron-dellums.jpg of the school district in Los Angeles. Longtime California Assembly kingpin Willie Brown found a post-term limits life as mayor of San Francisco, just across the bay from "cousin" Jerry Brown, the former governor who has been serving as Oakland's mayor the past seven years.
With Jerry Brown set to return to state politics--he plans to run for state attorney general next year--seven candidates lined up to replace him. Two have just packed it in, another plans to, and all the rest might as well, too. The job will almost certainly go to Ron Dellums, who entered the race last week.
Dellums, pictured above, represented Oakland in Congress for 27 years before retiring in 1998. He's been a lobbyist since then. Dellums entered the U.S. House as an anti-Vietnam War firebrand but quietly took on greater stature, briefly serving as the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
"I did not join the Armed Services Committee to learn about missiles, planes and ships," he once said. "I joined because I knew I would need to become an expert in this field in order to argue successfully for military spending reductions that would free up resources for the desperate human needs that I see every day in my community."
That brand of liberalism never hurt Dellums in his district. His successor and former aide, Barbara Lee, was the only member of Congress to vote against giving President Bush carte blanche to kick some Taliban butt after September 11. Dellums routinely won re-election with more than 70 percent of the vote.
His candidacy is something of a fluke. After electrifying a crowd at an urban affairs conference in June, someone threw out the idea of his running for mayor. A petition drive quickly garnered 8,000 signatures. Dellums announced that he would run at another public event on Friday, telling reporters afterwards that he'd made up his mind on the spot in reaction to the crowd's reception.
Dellums is already talking a good game about pursuing ambitious progressive goals and making Oakland a model city. Willie Brown isn't so sure, warning his former fraternity brother that executives are expected to deliver more tangible results than legislators are.
Jerry Brown, who is sticking to his earlier endorsement of City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, told the San Francisco Chronicle that being mayor is a "much more in-your-face, concrete, down-to-earth reality than what you're faced with at the level of governor or congressman, where you're dealing with the great issues of the day, but dealing with them at a higher level of abstraction."
That may be why so many former high-fliers choose to return home to the local level--to stop holding lofty policy discussions and get on with the more immediate chores of keeping the streets clean, coping with the homeless and attracting jobs.
That doesn't seem to be what's motivating Dellums, however. "Potholes are important, but that's not why people asked Ron Dellums to run," Ron Dellums said.
