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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Trounces Challenger In Runoff

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Trounces Challenger In Runoff

By Bill Ruthhart and Rick Pearson, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

CHICAGO — Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel soundly defeated challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia on Tuesday, capturing a second term in Chicago’s first-ever runoff election and striking a note of humility by thanking voters for “a second term and a second chance.”

The win followed six weeks of a hard-fought, nationally watched second round in which Garcia tried to cast the contest as the latest proxy battle between establishment Democrats and the party’s progressive wing. Emanuel’s overwhelming financial advantage ultimately helped save the mayor as he fought for his political life.

“To all the voters, I want to thank you for putting me through my paces,” Emanuel said after springing to the stage as U2’s “Beautiful Day” blared at the plumbers union hall. “I will be a better mayor because of that. I will carry your voices, your concerns into…the mayor’s office.”

With 98 percent of the city’s precincts reporting, Emanuel had 55.7 percent of the unofficial vote to 44.3 percent for Garcia.

Emanuel congratulated the Cook County commissioner on running an “excellent campaign” and said a contest that featured an immigrant and the grandson of an immigrant showed why Chicago “is the greatest city in America.”

Garcia spoke to a raucous crowd at the UIC Forum about his journey from humble beginnings as a five-year-old who came to the U.S. from Durango, Mexico, to eventually run for mayor of the nation’s third-largest city.

“To all the little boys and girls watching: We didn’t lose today. We tried today. We fought hard for what we believe in,” Garcia said. “You don’t succeed at this or anything else unless you try. So keep trying. Keep standing up for yourselves and what you believe in.”

Emanuel portrayed the win as allowing him to continue a public life that has included senior roles for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and leading the 2006 Democratic takeover of the U.S. House while serving in Congress.

“While a lot of people describe Chicago in a lot of ways, all of us describe it as home. To the Second City that voted for a second term and a second chance: I have had the good fortune to serve two presidents. I have had the good fortune of being elected to Congress,” said a hoarse Emanuel, who soon after received a congratulatory call from Obama. “Being elected mayor of the city of Chicago is the greatest job I’ve ever had and the greatest job in the world. I’m humbled by the opportunity to serve you.”

Elections traditionally serve as a referendum on the officeholder, but Emanuel was effective at turning the tables on Garcia. The mayor painted the challenger as making costly promises and questioned whether Garcia had the credentials to lead a city facing enormous financial problems. The tactic also was a way to deflect attention from Emanuel’s own controversial decisions and abrasive style that marked his first term.

Left unsaid by the mayor was that his financial plans count on quick help from Springfield, an approach that has proved politically difficult in the past. That reliance on a state government bailout is likely to be even more problematic, given the state’s own financial challenges and Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s focus on cutting aid to cities.

For an election that followed a weekend of religious holidays and fell during a week when most of the city’s schools are out on spring break, turnout approached 40 percent. That exceeded the near-record low of 34 percent in February’s first round. Four years ago, turnout was 42 percent for the open-seat contest after the retirement of former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Emanuel suffered the national political embarrassment of being forced into the runoff after failing to eclipse 50 percent of the vote against a far lesser known field of four candidates in February. In that race, Emanuel garnered 45.6 percent, while Garcia finished second with 33.5 percent.

After the February election, Emanuel aides privately acknowledged they were not happy with the campaign’s ground game. The mayor largely relied on the ward organizations of supportive aldermen and a host of trade unions, including plumbers, pipe fitters, laborers, painters, and operating engineers as well as the hospitality workers and firefighters unions.

Garcia leaned heavily on the Chicago Teachers Union and the Service Employees International Union to turn out the vote. His goal was to win over those who voted for someone other than Emanuel in February.

But after spending weeks courting the city’s black voters, Garcia had trouble connecting well enough to make a difference. Emanuel held a lead in all of the city’s 18 black-majority wards and in all but one of the majority-white wards.

Garcia maintained a lead in 12 of the city’s 13 majority-Latino wards, the exception being the Southwest Side 13th Ward run by powerful Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, where Emanuel racked up a big margin.

Tuesday’s balloting came after Emanuel spent the runoff campaign doubling down on his strategy to soften his image with Chicago’s voters.

In his first commercial of the runoff, Emanuel offered an apology of sorts to voters, saying he heard their message but stopping short of saying what he did wrong.

“They say your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness. I’m living proof of that. I can rub people the wrong way or talk when I should listen. I own that,” Emanuel said in the ad.

In the closing TV spot of his campaign, Emanuel was even more direct.

“Chicago’s a great city, but we can do even better,” the mayor said in the ad, before pointing a finger at his chest. “And yeah, I hear ya. So can I.”

All told, Emanuel raised about $23.6 million compared with a little more than six million dollars for Garcia. That allowed Emanuel to get on the air quickly after the first round of balloting to define Garcia for voters before the challenger had a chance to define himself and capitalize on the momentum generated by forcing the mayor into a runoff.

About an hour after Emanuel wrapped up his victory speech, his campaign reported another $800,000 in contributions, including $300,000 from close confidant and wealthy finance executive Michael Sacks and his wife, Cari. In addition, the Emanuel-aligned Chicago Forward super political action committee reported another $200,000 from the couple Tuesday, increasing their total contribution to $1.9 million to that committee alone. The super PAC spent $2.6 million on the mayor’s race.

The mayor ran a nonstop stream of TV ads since November, more than 20 different spots that aired more than 7,000 times. For the runoff, Emanuel ran more than two thousand ads on Chicago TV stations, double Garcia’s total.

“How much did he spend? Do the math. How much per vote?” said 22nd Ward Alderman Ric Munoz, one of just two of the city’s 50 aldermen to publicly back Garcia. “With unlimited resources like that, it’s almost impossible.”

Garcia aired ads in which he criticized Emanuel for his decision to close 50 neighborhood schools and for presiding over a spike in shootings and homicides. The challenger closed his campaign with an ad that sought to convey an air of excitement around his candidacy.

“People aren’t asking for much. Just a little. For our families to be a little more secure, our streets a little safer, our schools a little better. It’s not too much to ask, but nobody’s listening,” Garcia said in the commercial. “It’s like there’s one Chicago for the powerful and another one for the rest of us. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can change Chicago.”

Garcia also received an assist from the SEIU, which aired an attack ad against Emanuel that slammed the mayor for what it contended was looking out for the city’s downtown and the wealthy at expense of the city’s neighborhoods. Chicago Forward, the Emanuel-aligned super PAC, aired attack ads against Garcia that alleged the challenger would raise taxes dramatically if elected, citing the various promises he’d made on the campaign trail.

Photo: Rahm Emanuel via Facebook

Emanuel Makes Nice As Chicago Election Bypasses Pension Morass

Emanuel Makes Nice As Chicago Election Bypasses Pension Morass

By Tim Jones and Elizabeth Campbell, Bloomberg News (TNS)

CHICAGO — Chicagoans could be forgiven if they found the humble man in the V-neck sweater unfamiliar.

“I can rub people the wrong way, or talk when I should listen,” a contrite Mayor Rahm Emanuel says in a television ad aimed at soothing a restive electorate.

The former White House and congressional political enforcer has been thrust back on his heels in his bid for a second term. Voters in this city of 2.7 million are witnessing a rarity: a competitive mayoral election.

Three weeks remain before the April 7 runoff between Emanuel and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a Cook County commissioner and fellow Democrat whose candidacy is the vehicle for grievances against the mayor and his efforts to steer the city away from insolvency. Chicago has $20 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, a school system deep in deficit and a credit rating dropping toward junk. It’s in danger of being overwhelmed by debt unless it embraces onerous solutions that probably would include retirement benefit cuts and tax increases.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen such financial uncertainty and so many moving parts all going on at once, and no one wanting to blink first by saying what he’s going to do about it,” said Donald Haider, a former Chicago finance director who ran for mayor in 1987.

The last time Chicago went through such electoral suspense was 1983, when Harold Washington won a racially charged contest to become the city’s first black mayor. This election is more defined by ideology, pitting the union-backed Garcia, 58, against Emanuel, 55, who has close ties to the corporate elite and a reputation for aggression.

The mayor’s supporters include business executives such as Ken Griffin, chief executive officer of the hedge fund Citadel LLC, and Michael Sacks, chairman and CEO of Grosvenor Capital Management. Griffin contributed $250,000, and Sacks and his wife Cari combined gave $250,000, according to a recent campaign filing.

Garcia, who last week reported a $350,000 contribution from the American Federation of Teachers, has drawn endorsements from Democratic progressives including civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson, former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, and Emil Jones Jr., the one-time president of the Illinois Senate who is known as President Barack Obama’s mentor. Obama has endorsed Emanuel.

Emanuel held a 51 percent to 37 percent lead over Garcia in a poll taken March 6-11 that was published in the Chicago Tribune. The survey of 712 registered voters has a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points. Garcia shrugged off the findings.

“This is a dead heat,” Garcia said March 13. “I have the greatest confidence that I will win.”

While crushing debt bears down, including an additional $600 million pension payment the city must make next year, daily campaign discourse has focused elsewhere.

Emanuel, who was forced into a runoff Feb. 24 when he failed to win a majority against Garcia and three other challengers in the nonpartisan election, announced March 8 that the city would remove 50 red-light cameras, partly reversing his defense of a program that has come under loud criticism. Three days later, he proposed creating tax-free zones in impoverished neighborhoods, where his support was weakest in the February vote.

Garcia is backed by the Chicago Teachers Union, a vociferous critic of Emanuel’s 2013 closing of 50 public schools. He proposed an 18-page financial-recovery plan March 13, saying he wouldn’t support pension-benefit cuts unless they were negotiated. He said he would wait to decide on tax increases until after taking office.

“On April 8th, I will appoint a committee of experts to help us look at all the revenue options,” Garcia said during a press conference. “It is too early to tell residents of the city of Chicago that we’re going to give them that medicine.”

Others say it’s none too soon. Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the city’s credit rating Feb. 27, citing “highly elevated unfunded pension liabilities and continued growth in costs to service those liabilities.” The cut, to Baa2, or two levels above junk, underscored the peril that has Chicago the lowest-rated among the 90 biggest U.S. cities, excluding Detroit, which is fresh from a record $18 billion bankruptcy.

Despite the visual contrasts of Chicago, a gleaming lakefront metropolis on Lake Michigan, to Detroit, a shrinking, post-industrial city on a river, the former’s financial morass draws parallels to the latter.

Detroit, a city of about 700,000, had unfunded pension liabilities of about $3.5 billion. Chicago has roughly four times the population and a retirement shortfall of $20 billion.

“People will say Detroit and Chicago aren’t alike, that they’re night and day, but if you burrow underneath the finances, I don’t think that’s true,” said Frank Shafroth, director of George Mason University’s Center for State and Local Government Leadership in Arlington, Va. “There’s a lot at stake here.”

For the city’s next leader, fixing the fiscal disrepair won’t be as simple as merely summoning courage. Illinois’s own financial stress will complicate the task. The state has $111 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and about $6.4 billion in unpaid bills.

Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, Emanuel’s friend and former business associate, has proposed cutting more than $300 million in income-tax, transit and pension assistance to Chicago and its schools. Nor can the city ease retirement costs without legislative approval.

Lawmakers restructured two of Chicago’s four pensions in June, affecting about 60,000 employees, who will pay more and get fewer benefits. The progress, touted by Emanuel’s administration, is tenuous; unions have sued.

“It’s a three-ring circus,” Haider said. “The courts with pensions, Rauner with the budget and the city with its back against the wall.”

Photo: ctaweb via Flickr

Chicago Mayoral Race Mirrors Schism Challenging Democratic Party

Chicago Mayoral Race Mirrors Schism Challenging Democratic Party

By Tim Jones and Elizabeth Campbell, Bloomberg News (TNS)

CHICAGO — The Democratic Party is riven over how loud a voice to give its progressive wing. Chicago is that struggle’s new frontline.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has dared to anger his party’s organized-labor allies, is being challenged in the city’s first mayoral runoff by Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a Cook County commissioner who forced it with backing from the Chicago Teachers Union.

“This is a fight about the soul of Chicago and whether Chicago is going to be a city for working people,” Garcia said in an interview.

On April 7, voters may make Garcia the next Bill de Blasio, the New York mayor who vanquished establishment favorite Christine Quinn in 2013. Another possible analogue: Zephyr Teachout, the law professor who forced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to steer left before she won just a third of the vote in September’s Democratic primary.

For Emanuel, it’s an awkward time to be an Illinois Democrat with enemies in labor. Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, a friend and former business associate, is attacking unions as a catalyst of the state’s financial crisis. The governor wants to let municipalities create zones in which union membership is optional in businesses or public jobs with collective-bargaining agreements.

In neighboring Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker, a potential presidential candidate, is expected to sign legislation letting employees in union workplaces opt out of membership and dues.

Emanuel’s dilemma echoes that of Hillary Clinton, widely expected to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. She met in December with the darling of the party’s left wing, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, The New York Times reported. She was soliciting policy ideas and possibly co-opting a potential challenger.

“These are the tensions that exist between the progressives and the centrists in the Democratic Party,” said Alan Gitelson, a political scientist at Loyola University Chicago.

Emanuel’s tense relations with elements of his own party date to his days as a White House aide helping President Bill Clinton pass the North American Free Trade Agreement, which unions opposed.

Two decades later, Emanuel has been unafraid to challenge organized labor as mayor of a debt-ridden city. He pushed pension-benefit cuts on employees, fought 30,000 unionized teachers in a rancorous strike and, in 2013, closed 50 schools.

Chicago’s election, while nonpartisan, is fought between Democrats in a place that the party has dominated for decades.

Labor is split. The teachers union, whose 30,000 members must live in the city, backed Garcia after its president, Karen Lewis, a fierce Emanuel critic, decided not to run after a cancer diagnosis.

Bricklayers, plumbers and electricians are among the unions backing Emanuel. Don Finn, business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 134, called him “the construction mayor.” Still, those workers aren’t required to live in the city, so their impact is harder to measure.

Emanuel’s critics have portrayed the campaign as a referendum on “two Chicagos” — a prosperous downtown where corporate leaders support the mayor, and minority neighborhoods that bore the brunt of the school closings and a 12 percent increase in shooting incidents last year.

Emanuel rejects the argument and notes the passage of a $13 minimum-wage measure during his first term. He also defends closing what he called underperforming and underused schools.

“I didn’t make the tough decisions just because I enjoy it,” Emanuel said at a South Side senior center the day after the Feb. 24 election. “I made the tough decisions because I wanted to see jobs come back.’

The struggle’s backdrop is financial stress. Moody’s Investors Service underscored the threat of insolvency when on Feb. 27 it cut Chicago’s credit rating to within two steps of junk because of mounting pension liabilities. The Baa2 rating is the lowest among the 90 biggest U.S cities, excluding Detroit.

“It takes away the idea that you’ll be able to wait to get into office to come up with a plan,” said Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a nonprofit government- finance research group.

The third-most-populous U.S. city has $20 billion in unfunded retirement obligations and must pay $600 million into its retirement funds next year. Chicago can’t alter pensions without state legislative approval.

When asked Feb. 25 about the crisis, Emanuel pointed to agreements he had already brokered for two of the four funds. Lawmakers in June approved the restructuring for about 60,000 municipal employees, who will pay more and get fewer benefits.

Other unions sued, and the litigation was put on hold until the Illinois Supreme Court rules on a separate challenge to a state pension overhaul.

Last week, Emanuel said he would use the pact with laborers and municipal employees as a model for police and fire funds.

During a Feb. 25 interview on a public-affairs television program, Garcia wouldn’t commit to tax increases to resolve the pension crisis. He has criticized the school closings, saying in December that he’s considering whether some can be reopened. Last week, he softened that position.

“We’re strapped for resources,” Garcia said. “I don’t want to get into making commitments that will be very difficult to honor.”

Neither campaign is taking labor for granted. Emanuel made sure to greet neon-vested water-department workers across the street from the senior center he visited.

Less than 24 hours after polls closed, Garcia’s campaign issued its first news release, condemning what it called discrimination against pregnant teachers.

Photo: ctaweb via Flickr

Chicago’s Rahm-Chuy Show

Chicago’s Rahm-Chuy Show

CHICAGO — The mayor is proud to tout his work expanding access to pre-kindergarten programs, raising the minimum wage, and making two years of community college available to everybody. He talks admiringly about his city’s ethnic diversity and stresses his commitment to making it a place where “every resident in every neighborhood has a fair shot at success.”

This is not a preview of the re-election campaign of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, a hero to progressives around the country. It’s the actual platform of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. So it’s mildly ironic that the very sorts of left-of-center voters who elected de Blasio and other mayors blocked Emanuel’s re-election on Tuesday and forced him into a runoff campaign that will not be settled until April 7.

The champion of change was Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a county commissioner who quickly made himself a counter-brand. If everyone here calls their chief executive “Rahm,” everyone now refers to Garcia by his nickname, “Chuy.” The Rahm-Chuy Show promises to be another storied encounter staged by a city that knows how to turn politics into drama — in this case, a production that could draw a class line across Chicago.

Garcia is unabashed in making this contest an ideological struggle. He has cast Emanuel — who received an endorsement from his old boss, President Obama, and vastly outspent his opponent — as a local reincarnation of Mitt Romney, “Mayor 1 percent.”

“Today, we the people have spoken,” Garcia declared on election night after his showing far surpassed his standing in pre-election polls. “Not the people with the money and the power and the connections, not the giant corporations, the big-money special interests, the hedge funds and Hollywood celebrities who poured tens of millions of dollars into the mayor’s campaign. They all had their say. They’ve had their say for too long.”

In this round, Emanuel received 45.4 percent of the vote, well short of the 50 percent plus one that he needed to avoid a runoff, to 33.9 percent for Garcia. Willie Wilson, a self-financed African-American businessman, received 10.6 percent and two other candidates split the rest.

The ideological frame on the race is an important part of the story, and it’s reinforced by the victories of several anti-Emanuel members of the City Council whom the mayor’s supporters tried to oust. Nationally, the race has been characterized as a shadow battle between the Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren wings of the Democratic Party. Garcia is clearly embracing the Warren role.

But this take oversimplifies the dynamics here because politics is also local, and personal. Emanuel is, you might say, unabashedly unabashed. The words “aggressive,” “blunt” and “bullying” attach to him, and he has an urban poet’s affection for expletives.

Some of the Garcia voters I spoke with saw their first-round votes as a chance to force a runoff and thereby bring Emanuel down a peg. Emanuel’s second-round strategy will focus on asking such voters — and the roughly two-thirds of the electorate that didn’t vote on Tuesday: Now that you’ve registered your displeasure, do you want Chuy or Rahm running your city?

There were a lot of accumulated grievances against the mayor that at one point brought his approval rating down to 29 percent: His closing of 50 schools, his protracted fight with Chicago’s teachers’ union, and the high crime rates in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Like many mayors before him, he was accused of focusing primarily on downtown development, and the taxi drivers sure don’t like his friendly attitude toward Uber.

Wilson, who spent about $2 million of his own money, also hurt Emanuel. The mayor carried most of the city’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, but as Fran Spielman noted in the Chicago Sun-Times, his share there typically dropped from around 60 percent in his election four years ago to about 40 percent on Tuesday. Wilson, a very religious man whose television ads included scenes in churches, appears from private polling to have done especially well with older African-American women, even as Garcia expanded turnout in Latino areas.

Emanuel is one of the most complicated, and thus most interesting, characters in American politics. An unapologetically pro-business Democrat, his legendary feuds with liberals, often carried out at high decibel levels, created a legion of enemies who cheered his humbling. He also has a fondness for policies — on education, pre-kindergarten and community colleges — that reflect his passion for widespread upward mobility. The denouement of the Rahm-Chuy Show could depend on whether the second Rahm can save the first.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: ctaweb via Flickr