QUINN IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE ELECTION: THAT WHICH I SHOULD HAVE DONE I DID NOT DO, BUT THE FUN CONTINUES

2/28/19

To call Tuesday’s election interesting is like saying Chicago is merely an interesting town.   Some thoughts on the just completed, and the now starting, scrum we call the Chicago mayoral election:

·         I should have seen the Lori Lightfoot’s getting into the run-off coming.  If I truly believe, as I did and do, that the trendier precincts on the near north side would have “a disproportionate influence in this election,” as I stated in my 2/19/19 piece on Willie Wilson, I should have seen at least some of Ms. Lightfoot’s strength.   Such “better” areas of the city are Ms. Lightfoot’s base.   When you combine that with her momentum in the final weeks of the campaign, her still being in this race should not have surprised me.  In my defense, very few people predicted that Ms. Lightfoot would light up the board, so to speak, in this election.   But that’s no excuse; I am in the business of seeing things very few other people see.

·         Speaking of Willie Wilson (CHICAGO’S 2019 MAYORAL ELECTION:   MR. WILSON!   MR. WILSON!, 2/19/19), he did better than most people other than yours truly supposed, coming in fourth right behind the much better known and financed Bill Daley.   Further, Mr. Wilson carried more predominantly black wards than any other candidate and did especially well on the south side.   You haven’t heard the last of Mr. Wilson; he may even have some influence on the run-off.

·         The speculation about Jerry Joyce’s keeping Bill Daley out of the run-off is fun but almost certainly misplaced.   At least the half-baked theories of dark, Casablancian conspiracies on the part of the Daley camp to have Mr. Joyce run interference for Bill Daley, which yours truly dismissed as silly months ago (SO WHAT IS JERRY JOYCE REALLY UP TO?   AND WHO WILL BE THE NEXT MAYOR OF CHICAGO?, 12/28/18.), have been debunked; the days of Chicago politics’ being some kind of chess board manipulated by dark forces on the Fifth Floor and in downtown (formerly) men’s clubs are long gone.   Given what some suppose Mr. Joyce did to Mr. Daley, either I am right that this whole idea was specious or Bill Daley is a hopeless incompetent.  I like the first theory more.

How about the other theory, i.e., that Mr. Joyce ran because his father is still upset about losing the O’Hare concession that made him a pile of spondulicks and consequently wanted to spoil the Daley family’s triumphant return to the Fifth Floor?   This is another theory that would have much more viability in the world of Rick Blaine and Louis Renault than it would in today’s Chicago political scene.   Further, to the extent Jerry Joyce, Sr. was wronged in the O’Hare machinations, most of the damage was done by Rahm Emanuel rather than Rich Daley.   Again, you could sink into the “dark arts of the masters of Chicago politics” abyss again if you like and claim some nefarious alliance between the actually conjoined forces of Rahm Emanuel and the Daley family who really work together despite public displays of nearly outright contempt.   Yours truly, however, prefers to stay on this planet and point out that, whatever you want to believe about Mr. Joyce’s motives, Bill Daley’s losing the election is on Bill Daley, not Jerry Joyce.   People can only take votes from a candidate who fails to win those votes himself.   Daley didn’t convince enough voters to vote for him.   Some of those went to Joyce.  Others may have gone to Paul Vallas, Garry McCarthy, or Gery Chico.   If Jerry Joyce weren’t in the race, they may have gone to Bill Daley, but might have gone to the aforementioned Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Vallas, or Mr. Chico.   We don’t know.  But we do know that Bill Daley lost the election because he couldn’t close the deal with enough voters; the election wasn’t stolen from him.

·         People of a more conservative bent, along with the “business community” (whatever that is; perhaps further discussion on this assumed monolith in Chicago, or any, politics is grist for a later mill) ought to be leery of Lori Lightfoot.  After not paying much attention to her before the first round (See my first bullet point.), my wife and I watched the third Chicago Tonight mayoral debate, the one that included the then longshot Lori Lightfoot, which I had previously DVRed.  Then we watched the interview of Ms. Lightfoot by Carol Marin in the wake of Ms. Lightfoot’s shocker in the first round.  While it’s hard to draw many conclusions based on a few appearances and snippets of opinion and vision, we got the immediate impression that Ms. Lightfoot is very bright and almost equally tough.   If she is half as whacky as many would have us believe, she could be dangerous in a city that is not in the position to be doing much social experimentation at this juncture.

However…

Maybe Ms. Lightfoot is not the wild-eyed radical that some of her detractors say she is.  Or maybe she is.    But if, as the professionals seem to suggest, Toni Preckwinkle bases at least part of her campaign on the notion that Ms. Lightfoot is not sufficiently “progressive” (“Progressive is 2018/2019’s far and away front-runner for most banal word of the year, but I digress.), Ms. Preckwinkle may be doing Ms. Lightfoot an enormous favor.   By continually suggesting that Ms. Lightfoot is not the type to join in a rousing chorus of “The Internationale,” but, rather, has spent much of her life palling around with CEOs as a corporate lawyer and accepting appointments from Rahm Emanuel and Rich Daley, Ms. Preckwinkle and the political braintrust that surrounds her may cause those of a more conservative, or at least business-oriented, bent to warm to Ms. Lightfoot.

•   All that having been said, I still think that Ms. Preckwinkle has the upper hand and that she will be Chicago’s next mayor.  See TONI PRECKWINKLE IS THE NEXT MAYOR OF CHICAGO, UNLESS…, 9/22/18 and SO WHAT IS JERRY JOYCE REALLY UP TO?   AND WHO WILL BE THE NEXT MAYOR OF CHICAGO?, 12/28/18.  Given that only a third of the eligible voters turned out in Tuesday’s preliminary round, the entire character of the run-off could be different if the turnout can be increased to, say, a 50% level.   Yours truly suspects that the run-off will thus be a turnout election, and Ms. Preckwinkle has more “get the vote out” tools at her disposal in the form of money and manpower than does Ms. Lightfoot.   If Ms. Preckwinkle can use her money, her union support, and the tiny remaining fragment of the much vaunted “Chicago machine” that is not interred in Holy Sepulcher cemetery to get her potential supporters to the polls, she wins.   But I have to hedge here for a number of reasons:

§  Ms. Lightfoot clearly has the momentum here and the run-off is barely a month away.

§  Given that momentum, Ms. Preckwinkle’s efforts at getting out the vote may, like her efforts to portray Ms. Lightfoot as not being a true believer in the dogma of “progressivism,” may backfire on Ms. Preckwinkle and redound to Ms. Lightfoot’s benefit.

§  Given the tin-ear and manifest obtuseness of Ms. Preckwinkle’s campaign machinery in the first round, she and her braintrust may not be capable of effectively using all the advantages she has in money and manpower; she nearly blew it the first time around and could easily blow it the second time around, especially given how impressive her opponent is.

• Okay, I’ll admit it:  I’m glad Ed Burke got re-elected, both for historical reasons and because it was the voters of the 14^th Ward, not those who fancy themselves the formers of more enlightened opinion who got to decide and they are happy with the services Mr. Burke provides to the ward.   You and I would be, too, if we lived there.  

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work, or used to work, in Chicago and Illinois politics. 

CHICAGO’S 2019 MAYORAL ELECTION: MR. WILSON! MR. WILSON!

2/19/19

At the end of January, Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown (See DOROTHY BROWN MAY BE IN THE MONEY, BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS, 8/28/18), after being tossed off the mayoral ballot for lack of valid petition signatures, endorsed Amara Enyia for mayor of Chicago.  Immediately, those supposedly in the know regarding Chicago politics started making some not well considered predictions.  One was that Ms. Brown’s endorsement would energize Ms. Enyias then sleepy campaign, thrusting her into the upper echelons of the contest for the two spots in the April run-off that is virtually guaranteed this year given that there are fourteen contenders in the 2/26 first round.   This line of thinking proceeded to the supposition that Ms. Brown’s endorsement would hurt front-runner Toni Preckwinkle because Ms. Brown and Ms. Preckwinkle shared certain constituencies that would gravitate toward Ms. Enyia in the wake of Ms. Brown’s endorsement.   Some went so far as to suppose that this tempest in a then becalmed teapot might somehow deny Ms. Preckwinkle her spot in the run-off.

The logic behind the aforementioned argument was somewhat strained.   First, if Ms. Preckwinkle looked like a lock for the run-off while Ms. Brown and Ms. Enyia were both on the ballot, why would combining their two rather pitiable vote totals threaten that lock?    Ms. Preckwinkle was the front-runner without the votes that went to either woman.  Second, besides their race and gender, Ms. Brown and Ms. Enyia have just about nothing in common.    Ms. Enyia is supposed to be one of the newcomers who is out to slay the dragons in City Hall, to take a stand against the “Machine” and the way things have been done in this town for ages, and   there are few people more emblematic of the way things have always been done around here than Dorothy Brown.  Ms. Brown can say she fought the “Machine”, but that’s only because her shenanigans were too much even for the Cook County Regular Democratic Organization, which thus decided to endorse her primary opponent in her last re-election campaign.   She won overwhelmingly; so much for the “Machine.” Incidentally, if anyone can find this “Machine” that everyone seems to be talking about, please let me know.   Maybe the best place to look for it would be Holy Sepulcher Cemetery and it won’t do any of its supposed denizens much good there.   But I digress.  

Simply put, it’s difficult to imagine Ms. Brown’s supporters flocking to someone who bases her campaign on getting rid of the likes of Ms. Brown.   It is easier to imagine Ms. Brown’s supporters, primarily older black women voters whose most salient common characteristic, beyond their race and gender, may be their regular attendance at, and devotion to, their church, flocking to another candidate, Willie Wilson.   Mr. Wilson is of Ms. Brown’s generation, is well liked among the churched constituencies, has been around awhile, and is not endowed with Ms. Enyia’s presupposition that he has the answer to every question by virtue of having been in “public service” for an entire brief career.  Ms. Brown’s constituencies would clearly feel more comfortable with Mr. Wilson than they would with Ms. Enyia.

Those of us who didn’t jump on the wobbly from the start “Toni Preckwinkle is in trouble now that Dorothy Brown has endorsed Amara Enyia” bandwagon seem to have had the better of the argument.   Toni Preckwinkle remains a lock, to the extent anything is a lock in this crazy election, for the run-off and, if you had to bet 1-1 on any one candidate to grab the ultimate prize, you would be taking a huge risk betting against Ms. Preckwinkle.   (See TONI PRECKWINKLE IS THE NEXT MAYOR OF CHICAGO, UNLESS…, 9/22/18,  and the last few paragraphs of SO WHAT IS JERRY JOYCE REALLY UP TO?   AND WHO WILL BE THE NEXT MAYOR OF CHICAGO?, 12/28/18)   Ms. Enyia has indeed moved up in the polls; she has moved from the low single digits to the mid-single digits in at least one poll.  If you allow for the margins of error, the crowded field, and no one currently reaching the 20% level, you could conceivably contend that Ms. Enyia is in the race to make the run-off.   This is, however, akin to a real estate agent telling you that if you stand on the very edge of your balcony and the sun sets just right and there is no further construction in the relevant sight line sliver and you crane your neck just so, you have a beach view.  That Ms. Enyia has, since the big endorsement, not covered herself in glory in the area of financial acumen has probably contributed to her not being able to take full advantage of the Brown endorsement, but that point is probably moot; there wasn’t that much to pick up in the first place.

More intriguingly, Mr. Wilson is making a move up in the polls.   While just about any poll is to be taken cum grano salis in a race with such a crowded and disjointed field, just about every poll has Mr. Wilson in the top five candidates and a few have him knocking on the door of second place, which would put him in the run-off.    What Ms. Brown’s being taken out of the race has to do with Mr. Wilson’s recently becoming more relevant is a subject of debate, but it can’t have hurt his chances.

More importantly, Mr. Wilson got the endorsement of Congressman Danny Davis last weekend.   While an endorsement by such a high-profile politician is important enough in itself in a crowded field, there is something more significant at work here.   The endorsement by west sider Danny Davis of Mr. Wilson signals to west siders that Mr. Wilson is a candidate they can support.   The west side/south side divide among black Chicago voters is an old, but largely ignored, story in the city’s politics.  (This topic is treated rather entertainingly in my second book, The Chairman’s Challenge.) In order to win the mayor’s office, any black candidate has to bridge that divide, and Mr. Davis’s endorsement of Mr. Wilson surely helps Mr. Wilson in that regard.   It also doesn’t help Ms. Enyia, a west-sider, when the most prominent black politician in her area is endorsing Mr. Wilson, who currently lives downtown but has a strong south side base.

Anecdotally, on our trip to church on Saturday, yours truly traversed the far eastern stretches of the 19^th Ward and the far western stretches of the 34^th Ward and was amazed at the proliferation of Willie Wilson yard signs in those area, far too many signs for a mere fringe candidate.  This might be inconsequential and local, but maybe not.

There are a lot of reasons to dismiss Mr. Wilson’s chances of joining Toni Preckwinkle in the run-off.  Bill Daley is enjoying a similar surge and has financial resources that exceed those of the next two most prodigious fundraisers (Gery Chico and Toni Preckwinkle) combined.  Mr. Chico is running a very effective campaign and seems to be siphoning Hispanic votes from Susana Mendoza.  Ms. Mendoza, while running a heretofore clumsy campaign and probably being the most hurt by the corruption charges and allegations against Aldermen Ed Burke (See NO DOUBT ED BURKE’S IN TROUBLE, BUT…, 1/3/19) and Danny Solis (See CHICAGO POLS BEHAVING BADLY:  THUS IT IS, HAS BEEN, IS, AND EVER SHALL BE?, 1/31/19), still runs as high as third in some polls and in the top five in most.   Mr. Wilson’s lack of facility with the English language has, unfortunately, made him something of an object of ridicule among the “better” types of people who tend to be educated, live on the near north side, and, sadly, will have a disproportionate influence in this election.   But lacking mastery of the King’s English has never been a hindrance to ascending to the Fifth Floor.   Our greatest mayor was such a poor speaker that his press secretary told the press not to write what the mayor says but, rather, what the mayor means.  His son’s complete unfamiliarity with anything resembling eloquence did not stop him from being elected mayor six times.  Even our current mayor, for all his education and worldly sophistication, didn’t achieve his level of success by being accomplished in forensics, though one suspects at times that his “gonna”s,“wanna”s, and lack of ending “g”s have their origin more in politics than in background.

The real hindrance to Mr. Wilson’s making the run-off might be that such an outcome would, in all likelihood, result in two black candidates being the finalists in a city in which blacks constitute less than a third of the population and about 40% of the electorate.   While race is not as big an issue in our politics as it used to be and as some still imagine it to be, it’s not nothing, either.  Hence, the idea that the two finalists for mayor would both be black seems unfathomable given the city’s demographics. 

While a number of factors mentioned and unmentioned in this piece make this an especially hard election to predict, it seems all but certain that Toni Preckwinkle will be in the run-off.   But the other position in the run-off is up for grabs.   While the smart money is talking about Bill Daley, Susanna Mendoza, or Gery Chico occupying that spot, don’t count out Willie Wilson, especially if one believes that Chicagoans are yearning to change the “culture of corruptions,” or however it is being currently put, that has prevailed in this town since about, oh, 1833 or so.   Mr. Wilson, though he has his quirks, is not beholden to the power brokers, financial or political, that have run Chicago forever.   That he has a habit of handing out cash to people who are down on their luck should neither disabuse one of that notion nor hurt his chances next Tuesday.  Finally, one suspects the near condescension Mr. Wilson received from his fellow first team candidates on last night’s Chicago Tonight debate may have arisen from fear of Mr. Wilson’s candidacy and/or his growing constituency.

Whatever the outcome, this election for mayor of Chicago, only the fourth in the last hundred years that did not include an incumbent, has been, other than the 1983 election that brought Harold Washington to the Fifth Floor, the most entertaining of my lifetime.        

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work, or used to work, in Chicago and Illinois politics.