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.