Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums may have benefited from all the media attention surrounding San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's flameout following Newsom's withdrawal from the gubernatorial race.
Dellums is scheduled to return to City Hall after having been on leave or out of town since November 10th.
The mayor's office explained that he was attending to a death in the family of his father-in-law, but that leave combined with furlough days and the Thanksgiving holiday means that he hasn't been minding the city very closely for nearly three weeks.
The death couldn't have come at a worse -- or, for the cynically minded, better -- time for the family Dellums, which owe the Internal Revenue Service hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It also comes after a summer in which Oakland found itself broke, and caught political hell for a plan to trim the budget deficit by changing parking meter hours, and continues to experience epidemic levels of violent crime.
But look on the bright side -- the Dellums Dynamites are fourth place in the Yahoo Fantasy Football Mayoral Faceoff. So that's something.
Jackson West wouldn't want to wake up in the morning if faced with Oakland's problems, either.
