Chicago’s mayoral primary has already had one good result: After prodding Congressional Democrats to oppose overriding the D.C. council’s pro-crime revision of the city’s criminal code, President Biden abruptly announced that he won’t veto the measure if, as expected, the Senate joins the House in passing it.
That’s great news for residents of D.C., but how do things look in my erstwhile home town of Chicago, where I lived for thirty-plus years before escaping to the slightly less demented Washington State?
Last Tuesday, Chicago primary voters (the 32 percent who bothered to turn out; not even the graveyards showed much enthusiasm for the choices on offer) narrowed the general election field to two candidates, conspicuously not including incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
None of the jungle primary candidates was a Republican. The closest to a conservative (and still miles away) was fifth place finisher Willie Wilson, a black businessman who started life as a sharecropper and is now best known for his weekly Gospel music program, Singsation. Paul Vallas, who headed the Chicago school system in the late 1990’s and did little to either accelerate or arrest its decline, is pegged as the “moderate” candidate, because he favors hiring more police and cracking down on criminals. Second place finisher Brandon Johnson is a Cook County commissioner who doubles as an organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union and believes that lawbreakers need only large doses of “therapy”.
Whether Vallas would be able to do much good as mayor is questionable; that Johnson would do a great deal of harm is not. One can draw hope from the primary results, where Vallas finished well ahead of anybody else, but don’t hope too confidently.
The second, third and fourth place finishers – Johnson, Lightfoot and socialist Congressman “Chuy” Garcia – are on the far left fringe of the Democratic Party, if not beyond it; together they pulled 51.1 percent of the primary vote. Vallas’s best hope is that Chicago Republicans (about 15 percent of the electorate), who have mostly given up voting in mayoral elections (I did), will drag themselves to the polls to support the lesser of two evils. His dilemma is that a message that inspires reluctant Republicans to vote may incite hard core progressives to do the same, and the latter solidly outnumber the GOP.
I’m not going to venture a prediction, but if I still lived in the Windy City, I would cast a ballot on April 4th and be ready to leave town fast on April 5th.
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