Stromata Blog

Chicago Drinks the Hemlock

Bobby Rush co-founded the Illinois Black Panther Party, represented a majority black Congressional district for 30 years and is the only man who ever defeated Barack Obama in an election (when Obama ran against him in the Congressional primary in 2000). Whom did he endorse in yesterday’s Chicago mayoral election?

Paul Vallas.

So did some other black politicians: former Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, former State Senate President Emil Jones, seven black members of the Chicago City Council.

I mention these to show that opposition to municipal suicide crossed racial and ideological boundaries. So did support. The ward where I lived when I was a Chicagoan (the 44th, an upscale area that can be described as “lily-white with a splash of lavender”) voted for Brandon Johnson. So did the two similar wards to its immediate north, the 46th and the 47th. Those three wards together gave the pro-crime, anti-education candidate forty percent of his margin of victory.

Overall, Johnson didn’t win in a landslide: 51.4 to 48.6 percent. But the consequences of his victory will be like an avalanche or, rather, an acceleration of the avalanche set in motion by his predecessor, the egregious Lori Lightfoot. The electorate rendered a harsh judgment on her tenure: She was elected with 74 percent of the vote in 2019; in the 2023 mayoral primary, she got 17 percent. Unhappily, what voters disliked about Lightfoot, notably skyrocketing crime and plummeting educational quality, didn’t persuade enough of them to shun the man who promises more of the same.

Sunt lacrimae rerum. What Detroit is, Chicago will be. Out of affection for my former home city, I will not embrace despair. Still, it is difficult to hold onto hope.

Further Reading: John O. McGinnis, “Chicago’s Hard-Left Choice”

 

Chicago: Too Early to Call Off the Suicide Watch

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.

A Glimmer of Hope for Chicago – Probably Not

Since moving away from Chicago, I’ve paid little attention to its depressing political scene. The city’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931. In a handful of elections since then, Republicans have had a wisp of a chance. The last such occasion was 1983, when Bernie Epton might have defeated Harold Washington and slowed, probably only slightly, the city’s ensuing decay, had it not gone off on a Caribbean holiday over the final weekend of the campaign.

I was so inattentive this year that I hadn’t noticed that the election is scheduled for February 28th. It’s nominally the “general election” but is, in reality, the Democratic primary, since a candidate must get a majority of the votes in order to avoid a runoff (scheduled for April 4th). There are nine candidates this year. The only one you’ve heard of, unless you live within the range of Chicago political advertising or are a terminal political junkie, is incumbent Lori Lightheadfoot, a strong contender for America’s Craziest Mayor honors.

Grace Curley, who lives in Boston and therefore is familiar with dysfunctional city governments, has written an optimistic appraisal of the election, “Is the end of Lori Lightfoot?”, in which she recounts a selection of Lightfoot scandals, some of them bizarre. Here is the latest, though not the oddest:

On Thursday, news broke that the mayor’s campaign had sent an email attempting to recruit Chicago Public School students to “help” with the incumbent’s reelection effort. The students would earn class credit in exchange for their contributions.

After this unethical email made its way to the press, prompting outrage from other candidates in the race, Team Lightfoot sloppily attempted to backtrack – not once, but three times.

The first statement explained that the effort was designed “to provide young people with the opportunity to engage with our campaign, learn more about the importance of civic engagement and participate in the most American of processes.” It was for the children, don’t you see?

The following statements assured the public that Team Lightfoot would cease contact with CPS employees.

Later that day, it was revealed that recruiting emails were not just sent to CPS teachers but also to instructors at the City Colleges of Chicago. Many hands make light work!

When addressing the media, Lightfoot did what all desperate politicians do when in a bind: she blamed a young staffer for the disaster.

Maybe this will be the year that Lori’s light goes out, but that is scarcely likely to be a change for the better, for this is an election in which every contender is worse than all the rest. Of the other two leading candidates, one is running to the mayor’s left and the other got his start in politics as an organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, one of the most anti-education organizations in the country.

Whatever the outcome, I’m glad that I won’t have to live with its consequences.