You might think that mayor Ron Dellums’ fan base is feeling pretty lousy right now. Almost two years after Dellums took office, the 73-year-old former congressman’s desire to make Oakland a “model city” and a progressive light unto the nation remains a mostly rhetorical flourish. Oakland is struggling with shockingly high crime rates, city hall scandals, and budget woes. Critics say the mayor is fiddling—or, rather, jetting off on taxpayer-funded junkets—while Oakland burns, and that he’s an out-of-touch leader who just doesn’t have the juice to lead a place this troubled. “I’m sorry I voted for the guy,” says Damien Scogin, a 35-year-old Lake Merritt illustrator-designer who has followed Dellums’ tenure closely. “He’s been a real disappointment.” Half the population seems to be calling for the mayor’s head.

Surprisingly, though, a great many Dellums supporters, including some of the people who convinced him to run, aren’t disappointed at all. (Two-thirds of the core backers interviewed for this story still stand wholly behind him.) He drew most of his support from the academics, city employees, and grassroots-group workers of Oakland’s sizable left, and many of them insist that he’s getting things done—it’s just not the sexy stuff that makes headlines. “Ron Dellums was never the kind of politician who cut ribbons and kissed babies,” says Kimberly Mayfield, an associate professor of education at Holy Names University and one of the leaders of the movement that propelled Dellums into office in 2006. In the mayor’s defense, she cites ramped-up teacher-recruitment efforts, youth summer-job programs, and the millions of dollars that have flowed into the city for healthcare clinics in public schools. “These things are ‘soft,’ in a way,” Mayfield admits. “But they build the structure we need for lasting change.”

And that’s precisely what Dellums said he would do: not barnstorm his way through the city, à la his predecessor Jerry Brown, but tackle the “root causes” of such longstanding Oakland problems as crime and bad test scores. That kind of agenda doesn’t lend itself to quick fixes. For example, Dellums has pushed through some potentially seismic changes in the police department, reorganizing the force along more geographically efficient lines and putting real heft into its community policing program by placing dedicated officers in each neighborhood. (The city should also have a fully staffed police force by press time, a difficult feat that Brown was never able to pull off.) It’s too early to say if the strategy will work, but the plan is entirely consistent with what Dellums promised from the outset. The mayor also pledged to fight poverty by training unemployed Oaklanders for jobs in the city’s emerging green economy; it took a while, but his much hyped Green Jobs Corps finally got off the ground in October.

Both the Dellums diehards and the fed-ups do seem to agree on one thing: Image is everything when you’re a big-city mayor, and Dellums, who rarely shows his face in public and is downright hostile to the media (who have mostly hated him back), is failing abysmally on this score. A recent poll pegged the mayor’s approval rating at a mere 27 percent. As Michael Gabriel, a Dellums supporter and consultant at NeighborWorks, a housing nonprofit, puts it, “The ‘Dellums brand’ has suffered.”

An old political truism holds that we get the leaders we deserve. In this case, Oakland has gotten the mayor it was promised, and many of his most ardent supporters are still right there with him