Lori Leadfoot

The first black female and first openly homosexual mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, known nationwide for her tough love during COVID and her spot-on Marty Feldman impersonation, lost her bid for a second term in office.  She's only the second mayor of Chicago to lose her bid for another term since 1979; the first was Jane Byrne in 1983.  Byrne and Lightfoot are Chicago's only female mayors.

It wasn't race, creed or gender that got Mayor Lightfoot booted out but the rocky four years that Chicago and other major American cities have had.  The COVID pandemic was a shock to the systems of American cities as well as to those of rural and suburban America, but the cities took it especially hard on the chin.  Tourism, business, public transit ridership, and lower-middle-class and poor urban populations all suffered acutely as a result of COVID, and while the pandemic is easing it still has left some really deep scars on the body politic.

Crime is an obvious byproduct.  Urban economies got so thoroughly disrupted that poverty rates have soared, leading to more violent criminal activity.  Chicago has always been one of the more dangerous cities in America, but the murder rate there has gone through the roof.   Mayor Lightfoot has failed to deal with crime effectively, and her tough COVID policies - like closing lakefront parks and public schools - along with suspending public transit and even raising the drawbridges on the Chicago River in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, left a bad taste in people's mouths.

The runoff election resulting from the free-for-all mayoral vote this past Tuesday could present something tasting even worse - a taste suggesting what you'd get by sprinkling Frango chocolates atop a deep-dish cheese pizza.  The runoff will pit two Democrats between each other, and they both agree on crime being a proem, but hat have radically different solutions for how to lower it.  Black progressive Brandon Johnson vows to tackle poverty and unemployment to get to the root causes of crime and once advocated defunding the police as "a political goal," while his opponent, former Chicago schools superintendent Paul Vallas, who is white, would rather defend the police than defund it and vows to get tough on crime as mayor.

This could be the most disruptive and most racially charged mayoral race in the Windy City since black Democrat Harold Washington and white Republican Bernard Epton faced off against each other in 1983, (Washington was elected.)

Oh dear . . .