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Page 3 of 4
And so the scene must to the battle fly... to the 25th Ward where incumbent Danny Solis is facing a host of challengers in a race that elucidates the complexities of today's unstable Latino political environment. If I previously painted a simplistic picture for you, this race will explain how things work in greater detail. The challengers include past 25th Ward Alderman Ambrosio Medrano, who is a convicted felon since his successful indictment following the "the Silver Shovel" probe; Martha Padilla, a wealthy lawyer who used to work with Alderman Solis; political ingénue Cuatemoc Morfin, a kind of local lefty self-promoter whose current power position is vice president of the unofficial Pilsen chamber of commerce; and two HDO boys-Joe Acevedo, State Representative Fast Eddie Acevedo's brother, and Aaron Del Valle, a former assistant to HDO don Al Sanchez.
Solis is an interesting character in this whole drama. He has never been an HDO insider, having himself come up as a school reformer in the 80s with the grassroots organization he claims as his own, United Neighborhood Organization (UNO). But he has in the past few years been the closest Latino alderman to Mayor Daley, serving as the City Council's President Pro Tempore. He has, over his history, played ball with HDO when called to do so, but never carried the card. He has been able to remain pretty autonomous since being appointed Medrano's successor by the Mayor, because of his close relationship with the Mayor and his strong precinct operation. But the plot thickens. Since the fall of HDO, King Richard has distanced himself from his most loyal liegeman, even after Solis swallowed whole heaps of pride (and maybe some other stuff) to publicly flip-flop on the Big Box Veto vote, seemingly at the Mayor's personal request. Clearly Daly has decided to publicly back "the independents" who are so independent they don't have an apparatus with which to pressure him, and let everyone else fight for their political lives, seeing what shakes down. It's a combination of encouraging self-determination and protecting self-interest, the type of thinking that makes you wonder whether the Mayor is a genius or just a genetically engineered political wolverine.
HDO is a wounded bear, dangerous in its suffering. In a public sign of fracture, it's running two people in the 25th Ward race. Eddie Acevedo's people see HDO's weakness as an opportunity to build up his case to overturn Sanchez and establish his own hegemony by running his little brother while claiming valuable turf in a rapidly developing and commercially well-placed ward. Meanwhile, Al Sanchez, HDO's Godfather, is reacting with "say hello to my little friend" by running a youngster with no dirt on him, Aaron Del Valle (no relation to Miguel), to stabilize his operation's fall. Or maybe both HDO factions have just agreed to attack Solis for distancing himself from them. Who knows?
The other characters-Medrano, Padilla, and Morfin-are most interesting as case studies for the eternal question: what sort of person wants to run for local office? Medrano was the alderman and took bribes to look the other way as businesses illegally violated environmental regulations by dumping waste wherever they felt like it. He is running on the "I'm actually a nice guy" ticket and relying on his massive extended family and past affiliations to carry him. He ran secong to Solis in the 2003 election.
Padilla apparently has a personal vendetta against her former mentor. She's also a lawyer with a rich developer husband, so she has deep pockets. She's just taking her chances at finding her way in from the new and relatively clean Latino upper middle.
And Morfin is the local entrepeneur who shows up anywhere and everywhere to spout his "power to the people" mantra. I would root for him if I hadn't worked as a community organizer around him. He looks like a crowd favorite from the outside, but he's just not really that coherent about anything and kind of relies on the fact that he's the only one of these candidates who still mostly speaks Spanish. His contact list increased a thousand fold as a result of his work with the 10 de Marzo committee, but when he was there he never represented anybody and then took credit for being one of its supreme leaders. I could forgive that, even, since that's just politics, if he could ever convince me he knew what he was talking about, something that is most evident at Benito Juarez Local School Council meetings, which he often chairs as vice-president. The most rankling thing to me about him as that he takes personal credit for the renovation of Benito Juarez, a $36 million project that has been in the works for over fifteen years and is only happening now because of the $12 million in TIF funds allocated to it. I worked as an organizer in Juarez, and it's a nightmare of a high school in desperate need of big changes. The Local School Council is composed of the stilted children of local ex-activists and it fires its principal every year, blaming whoever it happens to be for the massive failures taking place everyday.
The political pundits believe that the 25th Ward race will end up going to a run-off in April, with the incumbent Solis running against one of the HDO guys, probably Acevedo. One of the fascinating things about this race is that two years ago Solis looked invincible in this spot and most of the talk was about whether he or Rick Munoz from Little Village would succeed Luis Gutierrez in Congress. Now, post hired-truck, post March 10, he's fighting to keep his job again.
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