https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/us/chicago-election.html
The two remaining candidates are both Chicago graduates. Lori Lightfoot went to Chicago Law, and Toni Preckwinkle has a BA and MA from Chicago.
Always nice to see Chicago grads in the public spotlight - and vying for such an important position.
Cue7 - Thanks for the information. It is interesting news. As someone with a son who is a recent graduate of UChicago, I’m hoping that whoever wins the runoff is a talented and successful mayor, because I believe that the fate of the university is tied, more or less, to the fate of the City. I would guess that the Mayor of Chicago is a massively difficult job, and not just because of the typical issues associated with a city which is the 3rd most populous in the U.S. The fiscal situation in Chicago and IL makes this job especially if not uniquely difficult, I think. I wish them both well and may the best candidate win.
Sorry for the frivolousness of this observation, but can there ever have been a mayoral election in a major US city contested between two candidates with surnames as outlandish as these? The minds of Chicago voters who have not been attentive may explode when confronted in the booth with a choice between Preckwinkle and Lightfoot. Is this Chicago or Margaritaville? Yet it seems one or other of them will occupy the office of Dick Daley. Both are reformers, I believe. What would Leon Despres, the lonely political eccentric from Hyde Park doomed to be perpetually ignored by the downtown boys, make of that? It sounds like Toni, at least, may have cut some deals along the way with those boys. If she is elected we will not, however, have to deal with the given name of her former spouse, also a UChicago College grad: it was Zeus.
Preckwinkle was kicking around back when I lived in HP and attended UChicago . . .
My vote (which I don’t have since I live in the suburbs) is Anyone But Daley. Don’t we Chicagoans have enough years under a Daley administration?
^ Hey Daley made the city look more attractive. Navy Pier was rotting and falling into Lake Michigan when he took over. He planted flowers everywhere including out at O-Hare and all down Michigan Ave. The guy has a green thumb.
^ Also - let’s face it. CPS was a joke 25 - 30 years back - and long before that too. During his administration some of the public schools became top notch.
Not going into a long discussion but Daley really ruined the finance of the City of Chicago. Case in point: the infamous parking deal.
https://www.bettergov.org/news/chicagos-parking-meter-deal-a-lesson-in-worst-practices
From Wikipedia:
Daley received criticism when family, personal friends, and political allies disproportionately benefited from city contracting. He took office in a city with regular annual budget surpluses and left the city with massive structural deficits. His budgets ran up the largest deficits in Chicago history. A national leader in privatization, he temporarily reduced budgetary shortfalls by leasing and selling public assets to private corporations, but this practice removed future sources of revenue, contributing to the city’s near insolvency at the end of his tenure.
@85bears46 - Graft and corruption in da mare’s office? Shocking. :))
Zeus and I both rented a room in a house around 49th and Kimbark. I remember him as a very nice fellow who was in the track club. He ran more in a day than I ran in a year. I got around on a bike.
I wonder if there has ever been a run-off election like this for a position of this magnitude. The two top vote-getters (a) combined got less than 12% of eligible voters and barely a third of the votes actually cast, and (b) seem to have been immediately adjacent to one another on the ideological/social spectrum of 14 candidates. Their positions are almost indistinguishable, although they are from different generations and have different resumes. It’s not at all clear to what extent either naturally inherits any other candidate’s supporters.
You’d think that one would run the direction that gets the most votes.