The City of Chicago elections take place next Tuesday and things have heated up in the Windy City. Even the most politically oblivious people cannot ignore the signage, which now hangs from every unclaimed fence, bridge, window, and wall in the city. Every sign contains a greasy candidate portrait, a name in bold print, and a punch card number. Punch card numbers are like the appendix of politics, they don't have any use but they're still included. No one votes off of cards anymore, as all voting in Chicago now takes place on computer terminals and feels a lot like taking a driver's license test.
I think the punch card number is a sign though, of how talismanic local politics can be. No one will drop the punch card number from their signs until there is irrefutable evidence that it won't destroy their campaign to do so. Meanwhile, incumbents hope election day will be bitterly cold because it keeps the numbers down, which is generally to their advantage. Challengers hope for a big snow storm that will paralyze the city and show its incompetence. Obama is backing the Mayor. The Mayor is mailing brochures to the city showing that he is a many of many hats and many faces. The South Side mailing piece says, "Raising Up," an appropriation of the African-American vernacular designed to show that Ritchie is not his father's mayor. It also contains a picture and a quote from Obama and a bunch of shots of the mayor with brown kids at a school. The only Latino presence is a small picture of Miguel Del Valle, his City Clerk. So what's up in the Latino elections?
I wrote about how the 25th Ward race has developed in my
Say no to HDO blog a few weeks back. I thought I'd give an update, a week before election day, and then reflect some on what Tip must have been getting at.
The frontrunners in the 25th are incumbent Danny Solis, former alderman and convicted felon Ambrosio Medrano, and newcomer Cuauhtemoc Morfin, who is being backed by SEIU and the Jewish Council of Urban Affairs. The HDO guys, Del Valle and Acevedo, don't really seem to be running hard in this ward, probably because it's clear they can't win. Martha Padilla, the woman attorney, has spent a lot of money but she's not really penetrating the organizational landscape of the ward so unless all the women vote for her because she's a woman, she's in trouble.
Solis has gotten all of the major endorsements, including the Chicago Tribune, the Sun Times, and the local Chicago Journal, but he doesn't have the union endorsements. That's a predictable retaliation for his vote on the Big Box ordinance and his chumminess with Mayor Daley. Medrano is a good hustler and has pulled out all of the stops in his bid to return to the office he got thrown out of for accepting bribes. He has a big family and a decent street operation, but I can't imagine he can do now what he failed to do last election, when the field is bigger and more accomplished now that it was then. Morfin, as I said before, looks more sympathetic from far away than he is from up close. Between the infusion of union money and a few other surprising sources of support, he is making a better run at things than I believed he could.
The bottom line is that Solis should win. He has all the major endorsements. He has the support of a sitting mayor. And he has the support of all of the major community organizations. The problem is, he's still not the most popular name on the street and so you just don't ever know, in an election where only 7,000 votes will be cast between seven candidates, what's going to happen.
An interesting plot twist occurred last week, when the last and biggest candidate's forum was to take place at Orozco Academy, an elementary and middle school in the Ward that was just awarded a $4 million grant for health and science education. The forum was organized by the Pilsen Planning Commission, a group of community organizations that has worked with Solis's office to put together a comprehensive development plan for Pilsen, the largest voting block in the 25th Ward. The forum was mediated by Juan Andrade, a national figure in Latino politics and the founder of the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute (USHLI). Andrade is a Texan and speaks with a long sleepy drawl. He is very smart and good at speaking off the cuff.
Everything was planned to go off at 7pm. It was a pretty well-organized forum. Each candidate got two minutes to answer five questions and the answers had been submitted in writing two days before. All of the campaign directors met at 4pm to finalize rules and agree on order of speakers etc. At five minutes to seven, all of the challenging candidates got up from their seats, gathered their supporters, and walked out of the forum. I was standing in the hallway talking to the assistant principal of the school when they went by. I'd arrived late and didn't know what was going on. Morfin winked and smiled as he passed and his people chanted his name. I thought it was a pre-forum rally for the media attention. He was next to Medrano, who was also smiling, and Padilla followed along behind.
There were 300 people left in the room who had to watch Dr. Andrade follow the format with the incumbent Solis, who kept his composure and answered the questions. That part was uneventful. What was fascinating were the reactions of the community organizations who sponsored the event, which ranged from outraged to bemused to bewildered. Some of them support Solis already, because he's listening to them, but they still need to show their independence from him. They got a punch in the nose and responded angrily. But the Green Party, who has always been at odds with Solis over the fate of Midwest Generation, the power company who operates a coal-burning plant in the ward, had already endorsed Morfin and were not in on the walk-out decision, presumable because they reasonable believed that all candidates forums are opportunities for open process and help challengers.
Who walks away, a week from an election, from a captive audience? And why? Ostensibly the explanation was that the sponsoring organizations already supported Solis. But at least two of them were undecided and one other one had already publicly endorsed Morfin.
The comment I heard most on the way out was women, talking to each other mostly, who were saying they had really wanted to hear Martha Padilla speak. Martha lost a chance that night. She had a predisposed audience who really wanted to know where she stood.
I'll tell you what I think happened with the walkout. The turnout from the organizations that supported Solis was pretty good, which meant the room was going to be in his favor. The turnout from the challengers' campaigns was not so good, so they were uncomfortable. The format was strict, so it was going to be issues based. I think that Medrano, cagey city cat that he is, convinced Morfin that it was a bad scenario and that they should blow it up. Morfin is a terrible public speaker and pretty incoherent on communicating his platform, so he was fine with a walkout. They forced Padilla into an us or him decision, and she did not, in the moment, keep her wits.
Who won? Solis and Medrano. Solis won because he got a captive audience, answered substantive questions, and looked concerned and sympathetic. Also, the organizations that sponsored the event got snubbed, and so now they kind of have to back him, since they have been painted as his flunkies.
Medrano won because his chance at winning the election rests on his ability to force a runoff with Solis and then out hustle him with his street operation. The other candidates are better on issues than he is, and he can't have one of them surge past him in the last week to get into the runoff.
Why am I telling you all this? Because if all politics is local, then we should be able to make meaning out of a scenario like this that applies to, say, the presidential election next year. Chicago will be a battleground in the presidential election because the Clinton's used it as their gold mine during Bill's runs and it is Obama's backyard.
Here are the lesson's as I ascertain them.
1) Being likeable is important. Medrano is the kind of person who always leaves you thinking he's a pretty good guy who was pretty interested in you. The fact that he's corrupt and convicted doesn't seem to matter. Solis is not that type of guy, and after ten years of doing a pretty good job, nobody trusts him.
2) Organizational support is important. Votes come in blocks that are mostly invisible. The best way to access those blocks is by winning the public support of organizations that have good membership. Choose your allies well.
3) The issues are not really that important. There will be two sets of answers, one for incumbents and one for challengers, and you never know what people will do after they win.
4) No one knows what secret lies in the hearts of men and women when they are confronted with a crowd. There are always public moments that change the whole directions of campaigns. Ask Howard Dean how that works.
Tip O'Neill, the former Speaker of the House and iconic Democratic political figure of the 1980s, said, "All politics is local." It's one of those things that you hear politicians repeat over and over again like a mantra. Everyone knows it's right, or that it's a statement with power, but what the hell does it really mean? Does it mean all politics comes down to making sure people's trash gets picked up on time? Does it mean that a Tupperware party is the best way to indoctrinate people in party ideology? Does it mean you should be a successful local politician before you graduate on to a higher calling?