Will Tramutola Throw Perata Under the Bus After the Oakland Election Loss?

I did a bit of research on political consultant Larry Tramutola after finding out he was campaign manager for Don Perata’s failing 2010 bid for Oakland Mayor.

Interestingly enough, what popped up first was a Bay Citizen article with the headline “Strategist: SunCal Ignored My Advice.” It was a surprisingly candid article with Tramutola where he said, in so many words, that the failure of the Alameda project was due to the client. These days, I don’t know of many consulting firms that would blast their clients like this in the media. I wonder how many more contracts that article got the firm…

I dug a bit further, and Tramutola’s track record didn’t improve. Perata, Tramutola’s client, was quoted on the campaign trail as saying that he didn't really understand ranked-choice voting.
Well, either Perata was playing dumb because he knew ranked-choice voting would hurt him or his campaign manager Tramutola was sleeping on the job. The East Bay Express covered some of Tramutola’s early campaign mailers for Perata, which were “full of ridiculous errors that raise serious doubts about the intellectual capacity of Perata’s close associates.”

As campaign manager, Tramutola should have been prepared for the new ranked-choice voting system. Even following the campaign peripherally, it was easy to see that ranked-choice voting would be a force to be reckoned with in the Oakland mayoral election… also because it was all over the news. A hard one to miss, especially for someone as involved as a campaign manager.

Now the million dollar question: will Tramutola come out and say that Perata “ignored his advice” and blame Perata?