4/4/19
As was becoming increasingly obvious as the run-off in
the Chicago mayor’s race progressed and Toni
Preckwinkle apparently intensified her efforts to destroy her own candidacy,
Lori Lightfoot will become Chicago’s
next mayor. (See QUINN
ON THE CHICAGO MAYOR’S RACE: SCOTT
STANTIS NAILED IT TODAY, 3/24/19)
Much has been made of the fact that Ms. Lightfoot will be the city’s first
black woman mayor and first gay mayor.
While those aspects of Ms. Lightfoot’s life are notable, yours truly
wishes that less were made of them and more were made of her potential to
become an effective leader of the city in what promise to be some especially
challenging times. One of the reasons
that Ms. Lightfoot won this election, in addition to having been blessed with
an opponent of the stunning incompetence of Ms. Preckwinkle, is that she was
able to convince an overwhelming majority of those who voted that she has the
ability, the courage, the intellect, and the talent to run the government of
the city of Chicago. Further, while my
musings are more about the horse race aspects of election than they are about
my personal preferences, I have to add that my enthusiasm for Ms. Lightfoot’s
candidacy increased exponentially during the second round of this
campaign. Yours truly went from
grudgingly supporting Ms. Lightfoot as the less dyspeptic of the two remaining alternatives
to, while not wild enthusiasm, at least support based on respect for her ability,
intellect, and strong will. She discoursed
convincingly, knowledgeably, and thoughtfully on the issues that she will
confront as the next mayor. She spoke
favorably of term limits and possibly reducing, or at least not expanding, the
role of the government. She cited “our
brave police” and reflected on the rewards that accrue to hard work and
familial support. All these inclinations
are music to the ears of those of us of a conservative bent. Her likeability factor, not her strong suit
in the first round, increased significantly in the second round, and not all of
that increase can be attributed to the relative nature of two-person political races;
people saw a Lori Lightfoot that transcended the near robotic technocrat that characterized
her popular persona going into the election.
Her attractive and likeable family and the clarity of the love they
share and their devotion to each other surely helped in this effort. So while I would have preferred at least one
of the other preliminary candidates to Ms. Lightfoot, after her performance in
the campaign, yours truly thinks that Chicago made the right choice even
considering all the choices available to voters in February.
Now back to the horse race….
Most of the learned observers around town are peddling the
same message. In addition to endlessly
focusing on Ms. Lightfoot’s race, gender, and sexual orientation, which does something
of a disservice to the entire Lori
Lightfoot, these notables are incessantly telling us that the election was
a thorough rejection of the establishment
and of a Chicago government characterized by corruption, insider deals, and control
by a Machine that, incidentally, has
not been in decent running order since at least the 1980s and probably long
before then. (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 insight into the demise of traditional Machine politics in Chicago.) For example, last night on Chicago
Tonight, Carol Marin, who
ought to know better, went so far as to say that the election was about Ed Burke, the 14th Ward
alderman and dean of the City Council who is currently dealing with a number of
legal and political challenges.
What Ms. Marin failed to note last night is that Alderman
Burke was easily re-elected in the first round of the city election in February. It’s something of a stretch to say that the
election was a repudiation of a guy who easily won re-election. While Mr. Burke and his brand of politics may
not be popular in the city’s newsrooms and trendier precincts on the near north
side, the voters of the 14th
Ward, who are the people who really mattered in determining Mr. Burke’s
fate in February’s election, apparently don’t have many problems with the
guy.
Yes, I do realize that Mr. Burke’s fate lies in hands transcending
the 14th Ward, namely federal law enforcement and the incoming City
Council. But rumors of Mr. Burke’s
demise may have been greatly exaggerated…again. When, and maybe if, Mr. Burke is indicted, bear
in mind that it is always difficult to determine the outcome of legal proceedings,
and the case against the Alderman is no slam dunk. After all, the Burger King on Pulaski, one of the focal points of the case against
Mr. Burke, did get the permits its owners sought and those owners didn’t hire Mr.
Burke’s firm to do any legal work. Mr.
Burke has been in legal trouble before (Remember, inter alia, Haunted Hall?),
albeit not in this much trouble, and has always managed to escape largely
unscathed.
Surely, we are told, Mr. Burke’s power will be greatly diminished
in the new “progressive” City Council,
with the likes of Pat O’Connor, Danny Solis,
and Joe Moore, the last of whom
somehow metamorphosized into some kind of establishmentarian in the brave new
world of Chicago politics, being turned out and having been replaced by those
of a more “progressive” (How self-proclaimed socialism can be considered
progressive is beyond yours truly. How
much progress has socialism provided historically? But I digress.) bent. One must concede that, for now, Mr. Burke’s
power will be diminished. But the Alderman
has not survived eight mayors by being some kind of fool. His
intellect is unchallenged and his experience nearly matches that of the entire
rest of the Council combined. You haven’t
seen the last of Ed Burke.
All that having been written, one can still see Ms. Marin’s point. While I can’t speak for her, she apparently wasn’t
speaking specifically of Mr. Burke,
but as his role as a representative of the old ways of Chicago politics, which
she, and just about every other pundit in town, claims were rejected in this
election. But, as an earlier urban
Democratic politician put it, let’s look at the record.
In the February first round, the combined vote of Ms.
Lightfoot and Amara Enyia, the clear
anti-establishment, anti-Burke candidates, got a combined 25.5% of the
vote. Add the votes that went to Willie
Wilson, who also has few ties to the city’s political establishment,
and the total goes to 32.3%. The
combined vote of those with the so-called “Burke taint,” i.e., Toni
Preckwinkle, Bill Daley, Susanna Mendoza,
and Gery Chico, was 46.1%. If you expand that vote to include that of Jerry Joyce, Paul Vallas, and Garry McCarthy, all three of whom have
close ties to the city’s political establishment, the total goes over 60%.
So the question becomes obvious: If this election were a total repudiation of Ed
Burke, the Chicago establishment,
and its corrupt ways that Mr. Burke represents, why did candidates closely
associated with Ed Burke get 46% of the vote in the preliminary elections,
trouncing the 26%, or 32%, depending on your definition of “anti-establishment,”
of the anti-establishment vote? Why did
people who can only be considered political insiders get more than 60% of the
overall vote? How upset can voters be about
the way things are in the city of Chicago if they overwhelmingly voted for
people who represent the status quo?
Sure, virtually all of the aforementioned “anti-establishment” candidates
conducted campaigns that ran away from their establishment connections, but none
of those efforts was convincing given the long insider pedigrees of all of them,
with the possible exception of Garry
McCarthy. And who in his or her right
mind believes anything a politician says, especially during a campaign?
Finally, perhaps the largest point in this campaign was
given short shrift: the miserable
turnout, a tad over 30% of the electorate.
In this (yet again) “most important mayoral election in this city’s
history,” less than a third of the city’s eligible voters turned out. So Lori Lightfoot, who clearly represented a
break from the old ways of doing things in Chicago, won the hearts and minds,
or at least the votes, of about 23% of the electorate. More importantly, if people were so upset
about the way things work in Chicago, why did so many stay home? If people were really as angry as the
newsroom types from the trendier areas of the city and its tonier suburbs seem
to think, one would guess that the turnout would be vast, overwhelming, even
pavement shaking. But it wasn’t; it was
at best a trickle, not a flood. Maybe
people aren’t all that upset about the way things are done in Chicago. Or
maybe they just don’t give a damn; with all the silly situation comedies, gormless
network dramas, dimwitted reality shows, and “really cool” YouTube videos out there demanding our attention, who has time to
read and consider the news and make a reasoned choice about something so
inconsequential and boring as a mayoral election?
Yours truly is delighted, or at least happy, that Lori Lightfoot will be Chicago’s next
mayor. It looks like she can do a good
job at a thankless job. But I’m not yet
ready to join the flock and decide that this was an election that will forever
change things in Chicago. The old guard
got the majority of the vote when people had a much wider choice and, more
importantly, people are sufficiently, er, inattentive, to be easily manipulated
and/or lulled into a sense of comatose insouciance. As H.L.
Mencken, a man way ahead of his time, is purported to have said, “The
American people get the government they deserve…and they get it good.”
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.
