Discussion for article #228786
Rahm is very unpopular here in Chicago, but Lewis was always gonna be a long shot. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle was the best shot at dethroning the little despot, but she declined.
Unfortunate. And now our perennial local gadfly, conservative activist William Kelly, has donated $100,000 to his own campaign. We have a law in Illinois that caps campaign spending so long as no-one donates over $100K to themselves. We’ll find out soon enough whether Kelly has inadvertently, or not so inadvertently, enabled Rahm to open the money floodgates; if there’s even so much as another penny lying around there somewhere, they’re opened. If so, Rahmie’s main challenger, Alderman Bob Fioretti, the progressive-leaning independent whose ward Emanuel eviscerated in the city council redistricting, is going to be skunked.
As for Emanuel himself, he’s done some good things. Street repairs for one; under Daley they were down to a once-in-60-year schedule. Emanuel is now on a once-in-15-year pace, and the change is already quite noticeable. Also noticeable is that when they’re done, they get done quickly, as opposed to “whenever”, or over a period of several months of disruption. And he’s not bowing to special interests on infrastructure like Daley did; for example the much needed lakefront trail bridge at the Chicago River is finally happening, no longer held up by a single condo owners association with friends in the mayor’s office and an excessive sense of anxiety about the proximity of the trail. But what Emanuel’s done in education policy (Chicago mayors, as of a well-intentioned but typically ill-conceived Republican state law in 1995, control the Chicago schools) has been disastrous; charters of highly variable quality all over the place, and the main system getting starved of resources and neglected when it comes to reform. That, combined with a perception that Emanuel is far too immersed in Chicago’s elite and paying insufficient attention to the general public, was inspiring both the Lewis and Fioretti candidacies. Quite honestly I think Emanuel is more responsive to the public than Daley ever was, but his schools policy failures are driving a strong belief that he isn’t.
A search of the contribution database shows another donation from Kelly for $300. So the money floodgates are officially opened.