The Oakland mayor race increased by one Wednesday morning, after Trestle Glen resident Joe Tuman announced that he wanted the top job at City Hall.

For those of you that haven’t seen or heard Tuman talking politics on various TV and radio stations, he’s a political and legal communications professor at San Francisco State University. As a candidate, he’ll have an opportunity to apply some of the rhetorical techniques he wrote about in his 2007 book “Political Communications in American Campaigns.”

Tuman is a Cal grad and has lived in Oakland for 25 years. He says he was “pushed off his perch” and into the race by frustration at the lack of leadership in the city for the past eight years. You can read more about his positions here. It has absolutely no bearing on his potential performance as Oakland’s chief executive, but Tuman’s students at SF State give him pretty high marks on the anonymous Rate My Professor website.

We’ll be talking to Tuman and the other candidates in more depth in coming months, meantime you can see Tuman and the other candidates at a public safety forum Thursday night at the Lakeshore Baptist Church