A former teacher is in the Mayor’s Race

Lori Lightfoot: The First Black Woman to Lead a City, and the First Lesbian to Win: A CNN Special Report on Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson

Editor’s Note: David Axelrod, a CNN senior political commentator and host of “The Axe Files,” was a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama and chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns. He was the media strategist for seven successful Chicago mayoral campaigns after working as a City Hall reporter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are not of his own. View more opinion on CNN.

The first black woman and first lesbian to lead a city, she upended the political establishment with her promises to clean up a city tired of corruption.

Paul Vallas andBrandon Johnson will now face off in a April 4th runoff after Paul Vallas failed to reach the magic number of votes cast in the general election.

“Obviously, we didn’t win the election today, but I stand here with my head held high and a heart full of gratitude,” Lightfoot told her supporters after the polls closed.

The daughter of a factory worker and health care aide, Lightfoot fought her way up to the University of Chicago Law School and onto the presidency of the Chicago Police Board, before moving to the US attorney’s office.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/01/opinions/chicago-mayor-lori-lightfoot-political-mistake-axelrod/index.html

Chicago’s Rise During the Pandemic: When Dilated and Disoriented Mayor Brown Resigned in her First Year at the Mayor’s Shift

Confronted with an unprecedented public health crisis within her first year in office, she generally won decent marks for her handling of it. The rise of rampant violence during the Pandemic contributed to her revulsion at the polls on Tuesday.

It’s Washington. The top issue was public safety and crime. Chicago’s been experiencing a surge in crime, particularly violent crime, in the last several years. And the issue is not just the fact that crime is increasing, but it is spreading throughout the city – murders, shootings, carjackings. And that has become a major issue of concern for voters.

David Brown, the police chief she recruited from Dallas, seemed overmatched in a city and a department that was not always friendly to outsiders. And Lightfoot’s unwillingness to dismiss her police chief, who often seemed isolated from his officers and the community, left voters with little hope for change. Brown resigned on Wednesday, a day after his opponent lost the election.

A more complex story lies in the way that the go-it-alone leadership of Lightfoot made it hard to build consensus, driving many who should have been her allies away.

She believed the motives of the other politicians to be dishonest, and she isolated the governor, the legislature and the Cook County leadership.

As a result, she lost key legislative battles, including a law that over the next three years will shift control of the Chicago public schools from mayoral appointees to an elected 21-member school board, far larger than what she had wanted and the largest by far in the country.

She ran on limiting the prerogatives of City Council members, then humiliated them in her inaugural speech and alienated them in the job, prompting one of her once-allies Alderman Susan Sadlowski-Garza to say, “I have never met anybody who has managed to piss off every single person they come in contact with. There are police, fire, teachers, and businesses.

A sense of a city backsliding was caused by the exodus of some high-profile businesses, likely to be a departure to the suburbs of the Chicago Bears.

Lili Foot is a character in the “Lord of the Rings.” We were fierce competitors in these last few months, but I will be rooting and praying for our next mayor to deliver for the people of this city for years to come.

Vallas, who is White and endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police, ran on public safety and the promise of more officers to fight crime. He was well ahead of the field with 34% of the vote but failed to win the election without a second round.

Before he was put forth by the Chicago Teacher’s Union, he was unknown to many of the city’s inhabitants. Johnson, one of the major candidates, has abandoned his promises of more cops despite being a vocal supporter of defunding police.

The mayor spent weeks of advertising and trying to convince the voters she was the one they wanted. Jesus ” Chuy”Garcia was the only one of the four who didn’t win a spot in the second round.

The Lightfoot Problem in Washington, the City’s Public Safety, and the State of the Police: The Case for a Change in Public Safety

CHANG: There has been an overall increase in crime during her tenure, despite the fact that the number of homicides dropped last year. Is that Lightfoot?

In Washington. I believe that it’s a very complicated issue. The city is dealing with many problems. There’s not enough of city money being devoted to anti-violence programs, to social service programs. We just went through a pandemic. We went through social unrest around the city. I think that some of it is to blame for the instability. But I think voters expect her to be able to – you know, she’s the mayor. They expect her to be able to solve the problem. There is still a lot of crime. Every day you hear about events and incidents, people point their finger at her.

Boosted by the union’s endorsement — and perhaps more critically, its money — Mr. Johnson, a paid C.T.U. organizer since 2011, faces Paul Vallas, a former public school executive who has far more conservative views on policing and education, in an April 4 runoff. With the two finalists coming from opposite ideological ends of the Democratic Party, the runoff will test whether voters prefer Mr. Vallas’s plan to crack down on crime, hire more police officers and expand charter schools, or Mr. Johnson’s call to spend more on public education and social services, add new taxes and look to neighborhood schools as an engine for broader social change.

WASHINGTON: Paul Vallas would say that he wants to address some of the inequities in the city as well, but his big argument is that we need to get our public safety situation in line first.

Washington. I will be looking at the influence the unions will have. Brandon Johnson is supported by the teachers’ union, as well as other progressive unions in the city, and they have spent more than a million dollars on his campaign. The FOP supports Paul Vallas, in spite of the fact that he is a Republican. Hopefully beyond the money and the back-and-forth finger pointing, hopefully there will be a real discussion of policy and what the future of the city looks like.

An NPR View of the Teacher’s Union as a Tool for the Democratic-Reconstruction-Major-Chicago Schools

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Loved and loathed, the teachers’ union has emerged over the last dozen years as a defining voice on Chicago’s political left, putting forth a progressive vision for the city that extends well beyond its classrooms. After highly public fights with the last two mayors that led to work stoppages, union leaders see in Mr. Johnson a chance to elect one of their own, a former teacher who shares a goal of rebuilding Chicago by spending more on schools and social programs.

“Our school communities really are a microcosm of all of the political problems that exist,” said Mr. Johnson, who taught social studies to middle schoolers in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing complex, and who frequently refers to the time a student raised her hand and told him that he should be teaching at a good school, not hers.