We are in a very grim place in the Windy City. One election will not fix that, but ousting Lori Lightfoot will have been worth it nevertheless.
A word in response to Jim Geraghty’s post yesterday afternoon about the state of the Chicago mayoral race (the vote is set for the end of the month). He titled his piece “Chicago Hope” and it made me sigh; as the Corner’s informal Windy City correspondent, I am reminded of La Rochefoucauld’s famous maxim:
“Hope is the last thing that dies in man; and though it be exceedingly deceitful, yet it is of this good use to us, that while we are traveling through life it conducts us in an easier and more pleasant way to our journey’s end.”
So perhaps it is good to dream of a better tomorrow, to dream that the city can be saved from its numerous political, infrastructural, societal, and economic woes by a change of hands at the top. I have my doubts, as a longtime resident.
This much can be said upfront: Mayor Lori Lightfoot is unacceptable, and not just to me as a conservative Republican (there are dozens of us, dozens) but to the city at large. She currently sports an approval rating ranging from 25–29 percent. The reasons for her stunning unpopularity deserve a much longer piece; suffice it to say that the disastrous incompetence of Lightfoot’s mayoralty springs not just from her terrible instincts and ill-conceived policy ideas, but also from her notorious unlikability. She is impossible to work with on a personal level (in a town where personal relationships grease every axle of local government), and has managed to alienate nearly every important constituency in the city: teacher’s unions, public– and private-sector unions, police, firefighters, homeowners, parents, African Americans, Latinos, NPR, and the dead (a decisive voter demographic in Chicago).
It is possible she may win regardless, should she squeeze through to a runoff with Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. (That is her one potential victory scenario.) And that is because some people like me (and those well to my left for that matter) might be tempted to retain the incompetent devil we know over someone likely to be even worse. Garcia, a Chicago political lifer currently holding down the city’s “Hispanic” majority-minority seat in Congress, is known to all (charitably) as an intellectual lightweight who would be immediately overwhelmed by the job and steamrolled by the city’s various warring interests. The film Bambi vs. Godzilla lasted only one minute and 32 seconds; I suspect Chuy vs. the Chicago Teachers Union will require one-third that running time.
That leaves us with Paul Vallas, former head of Chicago Public Schools from 1995–2001 (and who went on to several other school-reform postings elsewhere, notably in Philadelphia). Clearly, he is the sanest choice of the three candidates vying neck and neck in the current polling, and if I bother to cast a vote, it will be for him. But Vallas, should he make it to the runoff, will face a brutally polarizing campaign against him by either Lightfoot or Garcia. The playbook is already being written: Vallas is painted by his enemies (hilariously and implausibly) as the closest Chicago has to a “this is MAGA Country” candidate. Even should he overcome this onslaught against common sense and win, the intractable problems of the city will remain.
We are in a very grim place in the Windy City, hanging over a collective civic precipice. One election will not fix that. But ousting Lightfoot will have been worth it nevertheless.