In His Own Image : Elihu Harris Vows to Improve Perceptions--and Reality--of Life in Oakland

At the end of a long meeting and an even longer day, Elihu Harris looks around the table at a Chinese restaurant. The man who will be mayor of Oakland for the next four years asks a question that none of the experts who have been talking about the drug crisis can answer.

“Politics is perception,” Harris says, referring to that most difficult of problems in his city. “How do you get people to think that things are getting better?”

Harris wants a way to measure the success of drug treatment centers and educational efforts. Experts say it’s hard to judge success in this field. If that’s the case, the mayor-elect replies, it might be hard to get money to continue old programs.

Image and perception are important to Harris these days. In his view, they are the keys to success in a city long dismissed as a distant blue-collar cousin of the urbane and charming San Francisco. Or scorned as an industrial city turned to rust, or a place where drug dealers and criminals run amok.

“Part of it is racism,” the former state assemblyman says of the city’s image problem. Roughly two-thirds of Oakland’s 360,000 residents are minorities. Because of that, Harris says, people assume the city must be in trouble.

“We’ve got problems, and we’re going to deal with them. We’re not going to sweep them under the rug,” he says. Then, quickly, he adds that Oakland’s reality is not as bad as its reputation.

First, Harris intends to convince the people of his city. Then he’ll start working on the rest of the world.

Harris, 43, talks in rapid bursts. He’s quick-witted, a fast thinker. He also gets impatient and has a short fuse.

He looked so young when he arrived in Sacramento in 1979 as Oakland’s assemblyman that some Capitol hands assumed he was a legislative aide. But he made himself known. He launched into tirades at hearings. From the Assembly floor, he called a fellow assemblyman a racist.

Harris left a safe Democratic Assembly seat after 12 years to run for mayor. Raising and spending $1 million, five times his closest rival, he trounced Mayor Lionel Wilson, 76, who had been in office since 1977, in the primary. Then he defeated Councilman Wilson Riles Jr. in the November runoff for the $80,000-a-year job.

“People didn’t know whether to offer congratulations or condolences,” Harris quips.

When he’s sworn in Monday, Harris will take over a city that doesn’t have City Hall for him to occupy. The 1914 landmark has been shut since the Loma Prieta earthquake in October, 1989. The building needs repairs of $90 million or so. Whatever the amount, the city doesn’t have it. So Harris will move into rented offices, like the rest of the city work force.

But that may be the least of his problems. The number of murders in Oakland reached a record of 161 in 1990, breaking the previous mark of 148 the year before. Infant mortality among poor blacks hovers at near 20 per 1,000 births, more than twice the rate of non-blacks. At two of Oakland’s high schools, more than 95% of the students come from families on welfare; more than half the 50,000 students in Oakland schools score below the 50th percentile in standardized tests. And since 1978, at least 27 after-school recreation programs have been shut for lack of public money.

Readying himself for office, Harris has met with department heads, civic leaders, activists, advocates and experts of all kinds. He has proposed a health department for Oakland--usually the county runs such an agency--as well as a homeless commission. And he has confronted all the issues of urban America: homelessness, drugs, poor health care, schools that don’t make the grade, an intractable city bureaucracy, the difficulty of getting banks to finance inner-city projects.

By nightfall on one of those days last month, and with one meeting left to go, he was in some kind of mood. Why he did he enter politics?

“Stupidity.”

Harris tells of an old-time legislator in Sacramento who defined happiness as a function of distance. If you were 80 miles from your constituents, you weren’t nearly as happy as if you were 500 miles, or 3,000 miles, from the folks back home and their many problems.

If that is the case, Harris faces a lot of unhappy days.

As he walks through downtown Oakland, people nod and greet him. Only a few months back, few would have recognized him. Name and face recognition of an assemblyman is nothing compared to that of a mayor.

“When you are the mayor, you are there. You can’t hide,” Harris says.

“Oakland is a microcosm,” he says. The problems are the same as in any other big city. The difference, Harris says, is that Oakland is relatively small, so problems aren’t so big that they can’t be solved:

“It is one-tenth the size of L.A. L.A. is so big that you start wondering whether you get a handle on the problem, much less a handle on the solution. Here, people can access the mayor.”

The election campaign was an eye-opener for Harris. He had been used to running unopposed; Republicans don’t even bother to field serious candidates in his district.

But in the race for mayor, he had to fend off allegations about his integrity and charges he was ill and, maybe, even dying. Meanwhile, a group of left-wing radicals shadowed him, trying to shout him down at campaign forums.

“All of a sudden,” he recalls, “I found people who never had anything bad to say about me before saying things that were not only untrue and unkind but unnecessary.”

If anything, the radicals won him votes. But he still resents the “health thing.” And after initially refusing to submit to a physical, he relented.

“I got some privacy rights,” he says of the indignity of taking two physicals and releasing the results. “What if I had AIDS? . . . I could understand if I were running for President. But . . . the mayor of Oakland? If I died tomorrow, they’d just put somebody else in my seat.”

Then there was the matter of his wife. In August, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown appointed Kathy Neal, Harris’ wife of eight years, to the Integrated Waste Management Board, a post that pays $90,000 a year. The appointment became an issue: Could Harris be independent of Brown, a longtime friend?

Harris bristles at any suggestion that he is Brown’s proxy, or that Neal got the job because of his friendship with Brown. He points out that Neal runs her own consulting firm, has a master’s degree in public administration, has been active in Democratic party politics, was legislative analyst for the Los Angeles City Council and was on the State Bar Assn. Board of Governors.

“When Elizabeth Dole was appointed to secretary of transportation and later secretary of labor, I didn’t hear people saying she got appointed because she was Bob Dole’s wife,” Harris says.

But now that the election is over, the honeymoon of a new administration is about to begin.

Harris neutralized one potential opponent, Councilman Leo Bazile, who during the election campaign was one of his most strident critics. Harris named him vice mayor.

“The more unity we create in our city, the better off we are going to be,” says a now-amiable Bazile.

And even Harris’ chief rival, Councilman Wilson Riles Jr., says: “He’s going to be an improvement over Lionel (Wilson).”

Harris spreads out in the back seat of a friend’s cluttered sedan, heading up the Nimitz Freeway, and talks about what it was like growing up as the son of funeral home owner.

“You know what a viscera bag is?” he asks. To see a person’s vital organs stuffed inside a little plastic bag is nothing if not sobering. “You learn a whole new level of humility.”

Harris also talks of commitment: “I grew up in the ‘60s, and I thought government was the way you improved the quality of life.

“And if you are black, what other way were you going to be involved in significant allocation of resources? Where else would I have a chance to allocate $55 billion in resources in the state, or $500 million at the city level, other than elected office? I didn’t know anybody who was black who was president of General Motors.”

When he grew up in Berkeley, the white Republican Establishment firmly controlled Oakland. “Minorities weren’t even considered. At most, there was tokenism,” he says.

But since Lionel Wilson’s election 13 years ago, Oakland’s politics have been dominated by African Americans. That makes Harris’ success all the more important. By turning Oakland around, he can send a message and make this city a model for others.

Harris’ eyes are open as he takes the job.

“We’re losing the war on drugs,” he says. As far as he is willing to go on legalization is to say it should be discussed. He has proposed creating the position of city “drug czar” to coordinate various programs.

For effect, he even sometimes goes so far as to declare: “We’ve lost a generation.” But he doesn’t say it publicly. The message is wrong.

“It sounds as if there is no hope, that it is institutional, perpetual and never-ending,” says Harris, who then returns to his theme that Oakland’s problems are no worse than other urban centers.

“Murders may happen in Oakland. Both the victim and perpetrator may live in Oakland. The cause for that criminal activity could have started in L.A. with a gang. It could have started in Colombia.”

To start shaping the city’s sense of itself--and its image--Harris has planned five days of concerts, dances and exhibits leading to the inaugural ball on Monday. It’s the first such celebration to ring in a new Oakland administration in anyone’s memory.

To announce details of the events, Harris called a news conference. It was bad enough that the conference was in the Oakland Convention Center hallway, but not even the hometown daily newspaper showed up.

Still, the first speaker, a director of the Oakland Community Fund, gamely offered his remarks, thanking the mayor-elect for promising the proceeds to worthy charities.

Then there was a stir. Willie Brown, the mayor’s good friend, dropped by, and all heads turned. Harris greeted Brown with a hand slap, then remarked upon Brown’s cameo appearance in the movie “The Godfather Part III,” and how the Speaker looked the part that morning--dressed richly in an ankle-length overcoat and matching wide-brimmed hat.

Brown pronounced that Harris would “be the prototype of the modern urban mayor.”

Political writers in Sacramento often described Assemblyman Harris as a lieutenant of Brown’s. Neither politician thinks the term fits, though they say they are good friends and close political allies.

“Elihu Harris is a fellow participant with lots of us, particularly of me, but he is nobody’s lieutenant,” Brown said.

He paused for effect: “You wouldn’t want Elihu as a lieutenant. He’s too volatile.”

From the news conference, Harris makes his way to a ceremony marking the start of construction of a new federal building downtown. San Francisco wanted the building, but Oakland wanted it more and undercut its cross-bay rival by giving the federal government the city block on which the building will sit. It’s great news for the new mayor: The 3,500 workers who will fill the building will spend big money downtown.

“That’s why San Francisco was fighting so hard to get it. They only want to send homeless people to Oakland, not employees,” Harris says.

Harris has been friends with San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos for years. He and Agnos were seatmates in the Assembly. Each talks of cooperating to benefit the region.

And Harris’ views do not differ much from Wilson, his predecessor. Both are boosters of development. Their styles and energy, however, set them apart.

When the earthquake hit on Oct. 17, 1989, Agnos was everywhere speaking for San Francisco, even lashing out at Vice President Dan Quayle for showing up and not taking the time to meet with him.

Oakland was more devastated, but Wilson remained in the background. If another big one hits, Agnos predicted, Harris will be trying to “elbow” Agnos out of the limelight.

Harris is finding his power as mayor is limited. By City Charter, much of the power rests with the city manager and, therefore, the bureaucracy. He also needs a majority of five on the City Council. But as mayor, he has a “bully pulpit” and can define the debate.

As mayor, he has no authority over the school system, which is run by an elected school board and superintendent. But in his campaign, he capitalized on the failing schools and had the foresight to suggest some solutions.

In the past, most politicians kept their distance from the schools, or, worse, maintained that the problems were minor. Harris found that seemingly everyone was fed up with the cronyism, crime and abysmal test scores that characterized the schools.

“I saw education as a linchpin issue,” he says. “If we were going to be serious in addressing the social, political and economic issues, we had to prioritize education.”

In 1989, as he positioned himself to run, and as the district attorney pursued a criminal investigation of corruption at the Oakland Unified School District, Harris won legislative approval to have a state trustee appointed to oversee spending by the strapped school district.

And at Harris’ request, the state auditor general opened an investigation of the district management. The results came out in a damning report, released at a joint news conference at Harris’ district office six months before the 1990 primary. The chief auditor proclaimed the problems to be the worst ever turned up at a district in the state.

To this day, Councilman Riles, the son of the former state superintendent of schools, accuses Harris of “promoting the criminal investigation” of the schools for his own ends. It was, he said, “very nefarious.”

The Sacramento that Harris left after 12 years has a different atmosphere than when he arrived, Harris says: “The bureaucracy is bogged down. The regulatory authorities are bogged down, and the legislative process is bogged down.” And he was tired of working under Republican governors.

Worse, as the FBI expanded its investigation of corruption in the Capitol, Speaker Brown was under renewed scrutiny. The FBI apparently is investigating whether Brown helped one of his private law clients, a San Francisco-based garbage company, with legislation in Sacramento.

“They’re trying to get Willie Brown,” Harris says. “They’ve been trying to get Willie Brown for 30 years. I think Willie Brown is fundamentally too smart and too honest to ever get caught.

“A lot of it has to do with style,” Harris continues. “Willie is flamboyant. Willie is not willing to live with or put forth an image of a poor black politician. He likes being the rich, successful, political lawyer. Maybe, people say, that is the price you pay.”

The FBI also has taken an interest in a bill that Harris carried five years ago at the request of the solid waste board. It was supposed to establish criteria for locating garbage dumps.

“The FBI can look at that all they want,” Harris says. When the bill became controversial, Harris quit shepherding it and had other legislators take over.

But the result of such scrutiny is that legislators will grow paranoid, he says: “If we got to start worrying about carrying bills from public sources . . . the whole legislative process will break down.”

That is someone else’s problem now. Come Monday, Harris will have plenty to worry about in Oakland.