U.S. House years defined Dellums as a gentleman
Ron Dellums was a gentleman.
A fiery orator against the Vietnam War. A leader of the fight against South African apartheid. An opponent of U.S. military expansion. The plaintiff in the legal battle to stop this country’s military buildup in the Middle East before the first Iraq war.
Yet, when he left the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998, it was Rep. Tom DeLay, the Republican Revolution leader from Texas, who lauded him as “one of the finest members,” someone “who always did his homework, was so articulate and eloquent on this floor.”
Dellums “would stop every member in their tracks to hear what he had to say,” DeLay said, “and there are very few members that have served in this body that can claim the respect that both sides of the aisle had for the gentleman from California.”
The gentleman from California, from the Bay Area, from Berkeley, from Oakland, the city where he was born, died Sunday after battling prostate cancer. He was 82.
He leaves behind not only his liberal legacy but a reminder of a different time in Washington, when opponents could battle vociferously but still respect opposing positions.
As he served as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, during two brief years before Democrats lost their majority in the 1994 elections, Dellums was known for giving Republicans their full time to be heard.
Through his 27 years in Congress, from 1971-98, Dellums clung to his liberal politics and in some cases — Vietnam, apartheid, gays in the military — he proved to be ahead of his time.
In other cases, he was just too far left for his congressional colleagues and the nation. But through it all he earned their respect.
Sadly, he did not engender the same admiration for his later term as mayor of Oakland. Drafted to run in 2006, he never really seemed to want the job. Although he had launched his political career four decades earlier as a member of the Berkeley City Council, he didn’t fully engage during his four years as Oakland’s leader.
The election pulled him away from the job he had taken as a lobbyist in Washington after he resigned his House seat. His heart never seemed in it as he served his mayoral term, often absent at critical times as the Great Recession dragged the city into deep financial debt from which it still has not recovered.
While he deserved credit for helping steer federal funds to Oakland, his use of the mayoral expense account to pay for lavish travel expenses and his failure to pay back taxes to the IRS were major embarrassments for the city’s top elected official. His mayoral term, which began with so much promise, was in the end a bitter disappointment that tarnished an otherwise great legacy.
Dellums’ true home was clearly in the House — and it’s those years for which he will be most positively remembered. As Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf put it, “Ron Dellums governed from a place of morality and compassion, and his political activism shed light on injustices within our country and all over the world.”