January 3, 2024
2024 PROGNOSTICATIONS: EXTENDED SHELF LIVES, FEWER STEP-ASIDES

General Douglas MacArthur in his farewell address to Congress remarked that “old soldiers never die, they just slowly fade away.” Not so with politicians. They don’t fade away, except maybe cognitively. They don’t step aside, except until voters boot them out of office or they, like all humans are bound to do, they die. They think their experience makes them useful, except it just allows them to repeat their mistakes.

It’s all about the concept of being relevant, which is defined as somebody who is (or thinks they are) important, germane, necessary,  pertinent and/or indispensable. Oddly, that doesn’t define a single politician in Chicago, Cook County or Springfield. If they all vanished today, life would still go on tomorrow and nobody would notice.

What we need are bar codes for politicians. We need to set a shelf life, like any other consumer product. When they get stale, moldy or otherwise not useful, they need to get tossed into the compost pile. They need to step aside and give a new generation an opportunity to screw everything up more than they have, which is already happening in the City Council.

Politicians cling to office because (1) they have spent their entire life clawing up the political food-chain, at great expense of time and money; (2) they have no skills except for dousing a barely cognitive public with mounds of baloney.; and (3) they live in mortal fear of becoming irrelevant, reverting to being an inconsequential out-of-office nobody devoid of  respect and recognition.

It takes a lot of courage to step aside and walk away. A pension bonanza soothes the pain. A difficult re-election is a good excuse. But hanging-on to what you got for as long as you can is the norm.      

BRANDON JOHNSON: IT AIN’T OVER UNTIL IT’S OVER. And it is over. Remember all that 2023 Johnson campaign stuff about “there is more than enough for everybody” in Chicago? Like all 2,695,598 Chicagoans within a city budget of $16.7 billion. But just add 26,000-plus migrants who were bussed into the city by that evil, MAGA Texas pro-Trump Republican governor and now there ain’t enough for everybody, Johnson groans. And forget that other stuff about “not raising property taxes.”

It’s now costing Chicago taxpayers $40 million a month, or a projected $480 million in fiscal 2024 to feed, clothe and shelter the comparative trickle of immigrants, and provide schooling and medical care. There have been at least 8 million border-crossing asylum-seekers since Biden took office in 2021, close to 1 million being “getaways,” and Brandon is whining about 26,000 ending up in his city?

He wants to keep them all in Texas, which is a bit different from Trump keeping them all in Mexico until their hearing date.  Democrat Johnson is supporting Democrat Biden for a second term, which means another 8-10 million immigrants through 2028 and well over 150,000 of them around Chicago. He’s making the rounds with New York City Mayor Eric Adams begging Biden for money.

This “crisis” has blown a hole in Johnson’s progressive agenda, seriously jeopardizing his 2027 re-election. Forget about more “investment” in minority communities, more education spending, and combating homelessness. He will be spending money on non-Chicagoans who are non-citizens who don’t pay any property taxes.

A lot of the 319,481 Chicagoans who voted for Johnson in the 2023 runoff are really pissed-off. Johnson made it into the runoff because he got 122,093 Woke/Left votes, or 21.6 percent. And then won the Johnson-Vallas runoff by 26,448 votes because he was the anti-White candidate. That won’t replicate in 2027.

So what’s Johnson’s game plan? We need “better co-ordination” between the feds and the city, he said. What he really means is more federal dollars because border security is a federal issue. But he can’t say that. It would piss-off the Biden-Harris Administration. Close the border? Only electing Trump would do that. Revoke Sanctuary City status? It was done as a virtue-signal back in pre-Biden days. Now it’s a reality.

Or, best yet, just proclaim that any migrant who henceforth comes to Chicago will get NO food, clothing or shelter. If you come you will be bussed elsewhere. But that, of course, would be inhumane.  Ironically, Johnson’s 2027 re-election is dependent on Trump’s 2024 election.

Johnson recently tried to stick it to his critics that he will be mayor longer than Richard M. Daley. At least the man has a sense of humor and knows how to trigger his critics.

BLAME IT ON RICHARD BOYKIN (and Oak Park): Remember that name. His political ineptitude gave us Brandon Johnson. Boykin was appointed county commissioner in the Black-majority  West Side/Oak Park 1st District in 2016 and vociferously opposed Toni Preckinkle’s sales tax hike. Preckwinkle and the CTU then vociferously opposed Boykin’s nomination in 2018, fielding Johnson, a CPS teacher then a CTU “organizer,” as his opponent. Boykin lost by less than 200 votes. Proving anew that voters can atone for their mistakes, Boykin lost for Clerk of Court in 2020, to Preckwinkle in 2022 and managed Willie Wilson’s 2023 campaign. For Boykin it’s over in politics. 

CLERK OF CIRCUIT COURT: “PAY-TO-PLAY” IS WHAT SPYROPOULOS WILL SAY. Iris Martinez is a nice, pleasant go-along/get-along politician. The Democratic establishment (meaning guys like committeemen Joe Berrios and Dick Mell, and Senate President John Cullerton) put her in the IL Senate in 2002 and kept her there for a non-noteworthy 18 years. By 2020 that trio was gone.

So in 2020 Martinez made her breakout: She ran for Dorothy Brown’s job as Clerk and Mell’s ex-job as 33rd Ward committeeman (D), and won both. Her goal was to grab Toni Preckwinkle’s job as county party chair. But it’s been downhill since then. Brown was an icon of dubious competency, and chief judge Tim Evans seized 500 of her 2,000 office jobs because of her alleged mismanagement. But the culture of the clerk’s office is impervious to change, with a lot of political hires performing mundane tasks like filing reception, data entry, document storage and courtroom staffing.

Unlike other county offices, the clerk has no built-in fundraising spigot. Lawyers use the office but there is no quid pro quo or benefit; they just file pleadings. So Martinez had only $24,961 on-hand as of Oct. 1, But Spyropoulos had $303,000. A recent Chicago Tribune story reported that Martinez reportedly gave 2023 raises to dozens of employees who later donated to her, and had employees circulate her petitions. Spyropoulos will spend over $1 million and milk this reportedly pay-to-play event to portray Martinez as unethical.    

Martinez faced three men in the 2020 primary (D) – slated Mike Cabonargi, Jacob Meister and Boykin – and won with 36 percent. On March 19 she faces MWRD commissioner Mariyana Spyropoulos, heiress to an oil fortune, for Clerk and democratic socialist alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez for committeeperson (D) in the North Side 33rd Ward. Martinez has got real problems.

METROPOLITAN WATER RECLAMATION DISTRICT (MWRD): The average voter thinks about the MWRD momentarily many times a day, maybe more. It’s called F&F – flush and forget. The MWRD’S task is waste disposal, both solid and effluent. Just dump it in the Mississippi or truck the fertilizer southward. As for the nine $60,000-a year commissioners, 3 elected each cycle, voters don’t think at all. Gender, ballot position and slating are critical among an unknown field.

The 2024 slate consists of incumbents Kari Steele, Marcelino Garcia and Dan (Pogo) Pogorzelski for the three 6-year terms and Precious Brady-Davis for the 2-year vacancy. Sharon Waller is on the ballot against the slate. Pogo is at risk.

STATE’S ATTORNEY (R): NEVER READY FOR FIORETTI. That was ex-alderman Bob Fioretti’s slogan when he ran for Chicago mayor in 2019, leaving out that “never” stuff. I’ve known Fioretti since the late 1970s when we went to law school together. To put it into historical perspective that was BEFORE Reagan was president and WHEN Carter was president. The wheel wasn’t even invented back then. 

Fioretti was a gregarious social animal (unlike me) who was the consummate Mr. Nice Guy (definitely unlike me). He had a Loop practice, resided in the gentrifying South Loop, and ran against and beat a longtime alderwoman Madeline Haithcock in 2007. He got re-elected in 2011 but Mell and the boys remapped him out of the 2nd Ward in 2015, and he ran for mayor, then lost for state senator (D) in 2016, then lost for county board president (D) in 2018, then lost for mayor in 2019, then switched parties (R) and lost against Preckwinkle in 2022, lost for mayor again in 2023 and now for state’s attorney (R) in 2024. That’s 2 for 8

Persistence is praiseworthy. Fioretti is no quitter. But his quest for relevance has become sad.

Read more Analysis & Opinion from Russ Stewart at Russstewart.com

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