Lori Lightfoot

The Democratic National Convention is set to take place in downtown Chicago in a little over three months and Democrats are hard at work scheming to prevent handing any easy political wins to their Republican opponents. It’s already a problem that Chicago is a poster child for the left’s failed gun-control policies (nearly three dozen people were shot, at least seven of whom were killed, over the weekend and gang violence prompted the city to cancel its West Side Cinco de Mayo celebrations despite the city having some of the strictest firearm regulations in the country).Chi-town is also notorious for its political seediness, and the shamelessness with which its party bosses operate is on full display in DNC preparations.

Adam Smith once wisely remarked that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” There is much less room for ruin in a city, as Portland, San Francisco and Seattle have proved in recent years, and Detroit, Memphis and Gary, did even earlier. Now, Chicago has decided to join that dismal parade. The Windy City was already marching toward the abyss under its outgoing mayor, Lori Lightfoot. She was elected four years ago with over three-quarters of the vote. This year, she got so few votes in the first primary (about one sixth) that she was eliminated from the runoff.

When Chicago went to the polls on Tuesday, the voters made one thing abundantly clear: they wanted to see the back of Lori Lightfoot, the current mayor. She had come into office on a landslide in 2019, winning some three-quarters of the vote against a well-known, well-liked opponent. Four years later, all that support was gone. She received only 17 percent in 2023, a distant third in a race where only the top two candidates enter the runoff (since none received 50 percent). The candidates going into that runoff are Paul Vallas, with about 34 percent of the vote (twice that of the incumbent), and Brandon Johnson, with about 20 percent. The rest of the vote was spread among the six other candidates, including Lightfoot.

Cockburn found himself grimacing over his Monday morning mimosa as he watched a viral video of Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot “dancing” in the snow-strewn streets of the crime-ridden city she is supposed to govern. Lightfoot is under fire for her behavior at a Lunar New Year parade, as her lighthearted attitude contrasts sharply with the recent release of somber Chicago Police Department data showing crime reports have surged 59 percent this month compared to last January. Of course Cockburn is not surprised that Lightfoot would be so nonchalant in such a moment. Her city's crime problem is, after all, nothing new. According to the Washington Examiner, “the city has experienced an overall 33 percent increase in crime since 2019, the year Lightfoot was sworn in as mayor.

As President Biden’s team tried to put out fires regarding the Curious Case of the Corvette and the FAA fiasco, one Democrat must have been grateful for the White House’s sudden maelstrom of bad news. When it rains it pours — and Joe’s torrent of bad headlines overshadowed Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s latest scandal that is brewing in the Windy City. On Thursday, news broke that the mayor’s campaign had sent an email attempting to recruit Chicago Public School students to “help” with the incumbent’s reelection effort. The students would earn class credit in exchange for their contributions.

It’s not known when Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot experienced the first stirrings of her secret GOP gland, but knowledgeable conjecture puts it perhaps two nanoseconds after taking the oath of office in 2019. It’s then that Lightfoot, buoyant after having been swept into office with 74 percent of the vote, surely had an alarming thought: ‘OMG, I’m mayor. What do I do now?’ All Democratic politicians aspiring to executive office have a secret Republican gland, although it’s vestigial till they sit behind an executive desk. When it’s dormant they can sign up for any damn fool notion. During her mayoral campaign, Lightfoot had cheerfully endorsed both an elected school board and an elected police board.

Give some credit to Lori Lightfoot. She’s really good at wrecking things. When America’s most Innsmouth-ian politician took over Chicago in spring 2019 (presumably for lack of any other volunteers), it was hard to imagine screwing up the city worse than it already was. The city was already losing population. It already had the most murders of any US city and a top-30 violent crime rate overall. But Lightfoot rose to the challenge and then some. She inherited a city with 563 murders the year before she took office. In the 365 days between George Floyd’s death and the one-year anniversary of his demise, the city clocked more than 800, including 105 in a single month and 18 in a single day.