Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel stunned the city of Chicago and the entire region today by announcing he will not run for re-election.
The National Review story to which I linked above the break connects the conventional dots: this announcement is on the eve of the murder trial of Jason Van Dyke. Van Dyke is the white Chicago cop who shot African American teen Laquan McDonald 16 times in the middle of the street in October 2014. The shooting took place a few months before the 2015 mayoral election, in which Emanuel was locked in a surprisingly close race for re-election with Jesus "Chuy" Garcia. The police reports described the shooting as self-defense. Unbeknownst to the public, the shooting had been captured on video, but the video was not released to the public until November 2015, well after Emanuel's re-election. The video cast grave doubt on the official account, and it appears that the existence of the video was known to city officials prior to the 2015 election.
Emanuel would have been the favorite to be elected a third time, and this announcement throws the mayoral office up for grabs. There are at least nine other candidates among Democrats (which traditionally is the only party that matters in Chicago), most of them African Americans who most likely would have split up the black vote, to Emanuel's advantage were he still running. With today's announcement, it's possible that the next mayor of Chicago hasn't entered the race yet.
When I first saw this news item, I thought maybe Emanuel was freeing himself up to run for a higher office. But probably not with this type of albatross hanging around his neck. A lot of dead albatrosses around lately.
ReplyDeleteI wonder why Chicago is harder to run than New York. Mare Richard Daley I seemed to do it, but that was because he buried his Van Dyke cases, and no one paid attention to anyone who wanted to disinter them. Since transparency became a fad, Chicago has become unrunnable. Maybe there are more well-heeled, bright people willing to help the mayor in New York, and Chicago's well-heeled are not so bright and were raised on Midwestern Republicanism.
ReplyDeleteThe politician I would like to be is Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, reputed to be the most popular governor in the country. He has an approval rating of something like 67% among Republicans Not surprising, since he is a Republican. But his approval rating is 69% (yes) among Democrats, who are picking someone to sacrifice against him in the primary today. As far as I can tell he does it by listening, being reasonable and not saying stupid things.
Tom - when Mare Richard Daley I was mayor, Chicago was still growing. That hasn't been the case for the last 30 years or so. The steel mills are closed and a million people have left the city. It's a place of inequality now, with the elite professionals and moneyed people (mostly white) living in a narrow strip along the lakefront and the not-elites (also largely not white) pretty much everywhere else. The middle class are all my neighbors now out here in suburbia.
ReplyDeleteExcellent point.
DeleteHelp me, Chicagoans: is this the first time in history a sitting mayor of Chicago decided not to hang onto power until death or removal by all voters, living and dead?
ReplyDeleteEasy. Daley II voluntarily gave it up after six terms, making room for Rahm. He may have been only a half-step in front of the wrath of the voters, but he did go voluntarily.
DeleteIncidentally, Wiki has a footnote on its list of mayors for
"died or was killed in office." Mayor Cermak (there is a road named for him on which one of the first Chicago pizza parlors opened) was killed in Miami by an assassin aiming for FDR. Any New York mayors ever killed in office?
Emanuel should step down. From afar, he seems to have been a lousy mayor...and I am not just comparing him to the Daley's. Tell me if I'm wrong.
ReplyDeleteMaybe being the mayor of a large city isn't the great job it once was. De Blasio is tanking/ has tanked, partly due to his ineptitude and partly to Andrew Cuomo, who is a crank and a jerk...can't really work with anyone..unlike his father who was a great governor.
Cities are bigger. There is more diversity. There are more competing demands. And the Harrimans (NY) and Marshall Fields (CHGO) are long gone as arbiters of whatever competing interests there may have been back then. Not saying that was a great thing, but it helped a mayor do his job.
...and just to add..those following them in office be they Democratic Socialists, Fascists, Black, Hispanic, Chinese or Fuji are going to have to tame the same forces.
DeleteNY is bigger, but Chicago is considerably smaller (acccording to this link, Chicago's 1950 population was 3.6 million, whereas it was 2.7 million in 2017 http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/chicago-population/). That population decline is symptomatic of what a mayor of an upper-Midwest city like Chicago faces: uncompetitive wages for its workforce; a global economy that threatens to leave it behind; aging/crumbling infrastructure supported by a progressively smaller tax base; old-fashioned party discipline being superseded by social-media-enabled activism.
DeleteFWIW, I think Emanuel had his blind spots and his flaws, but Chicago can (and very possibly will, with is successor) do much worse. Emanuel is the quintessential highly competent technocrat from the Clinton and Obama administrations. He's less interested in ideology than in making things work and solving problems. He genuinely loves Chicago. He's already rich, so isn't in this to make money. He undertook this job out of a sense of public service.
His greatest issues and challenges throughout his mayoralty came from the left: the teacher's union gave him a wedgie when he tried to get them to go to longer class days in an effort to upgrade Chicago's dismal public schools; and there has been an unending string of issues with the police department and African Americans, of which the Laquan McDonald shooting is only the most famous.
Emanuel is out of step: he's not particularly ideological but Democrats and the city are becoming considerably more ideological.