Chicago Can Still Replace Rahm Emanuel With A Mayor Who Cares About People

Last spring and summer there was a hopeful stir as polling showed several candidates could beat Rahm Emanuel's bid for reelection. For various reasons, none of them decided to make the run. But as of last month, another candidate has stepped up to the plate, Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. Chicago Teachers Union and other progressive groups have already endorsed him. A classic battle between reformers and good government independents and the corrupt transactional Machine is shaping up.

As state senator, Garcia represented a majority Latino district on the Southwest side with no shortage of social problems, including crime, school overcrowding and lack of access to healthcare. The same is true of the overlapping, heavily Latino 7th District he oversees as Cook County commissioner, where his job is ensuring that residents have access to county services.

Garcia supported legislation in both roles that tackled housing, healthcare and education inequities, among other areas. Most well-known was his championing, as commissioner, a successful 2011 ordinance to require Cook County’s sheriff to decline requests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain immigrants, unless the federal government would pay the detention costs.

During his time as commissioner, Garcia was also one of the sponsors of a county bill to safeguard holders of public housing vouchers from discrimination by landlords, which was signed into law in 2013.

Garcia spoke to In These Times by phone earlier this week. His proudest achievement, he says, was his work balancing Cook County’s budget. In 2010, the county was facing a revenue shortfall of more than $480 million. In response, Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle and the board of commissioners laid out a plan to lay off more than 1,000 county workers, as well as refinance the county’s debt and go after unpaid taxes. In the end, after weeks of negotiations with local unions, the number of layoffs was reduced to 500.

“I am proud of our ability to address budget deficits,” says Garcia, who was in his first year as commissioner during the budget battle. “The budget deficit we inherited was massive, and to balance it we had to lay off 500 people. That was probably the most painful decision we had to make.”

There are 5 candidates running now and it seems unlikely Rahm will get the 50% he needs to avoid a runoff-- despite the millions and millions of dollars he's raking in from enemies of working families. Emanuel has a job performance rating that is underwater with every group in the city. The first number is the percentage of Chicagoans who rate his job performance excellent or good. The second number represents Chicagoans who rate it fair or poor:

• Men- 37-61%
• Women- 31-64%
• Black- 32-62%
• White- 37- 62%
• Hispanic- 33-61%
• Democrats- 36-60%
• Independents- 27-67%
• Republicans- 27-71%

The poll was conducted by Lake Research, the most accurate firm in the business. They found that in a three-way race including Emanuel, Garcia and Alderman Bob Fioretti, Emanuel would take 33% of the vote, Garcia 18% and Fioretti 13%. In a head-to-head between Garcia and Emanuel, Emanuel led with 36% to Garcia's 31%. Undecided was huge-- 30%.

On Friday Daily Kos became the first national group to endorse Garcia. Markos:

[Emanuel] was virulently anti-immigration when running the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and was essentially the reason the issue didn't move forward during Obama's first term when he served as the president's chief of staff. He once said that liberals were "fucking retarded" for wanting to push the president to the left. He was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's biggest ally in bailing out the banks with zero reciprocity for taxpayers.

About the best thing that could be said about Rahm's mayoralship was that it got him the fuck away from D.C., and good riddance. But that still leaves the little problem of that asshole screwing up Chicago, and that's not fair to our nation's third largest city where the mayor has closed 50 public schools while focusing his efforts on the downtown business core while ignoring its vibrant neighborhoods. He truly is a mayor for the 1 percent. So how about we help boot his ass into the private sector?

...Rahm is far from the 50 percent he needs to avoid a runoff during this February primary, which is shocking given his near-universal name ID. He's sitting on $9 million, and the business community will shower him with millions more, but he's built little goodwill or core base of support during his first term. Garcia, a long-time community organizer, was a city council supporter of groundbreaking Mayor Harold Washington, later ousted by the Daley machine, the same machine now backing Rahm.

Garcia won't raise $9 million, much less whatever total Rahm ends up with by the time votes are cast. But he doesn't need to. People have either decided they want an alternative, or are open to one... Garcia's job will be to have enough money to get his message out, and to withstand the shit Rahm will throw his way.

As Markos pointed out in his endorsement, if you want a better Democratic Party, primaries are the place to fight that battle most effectively. Blue America has a brand new page for 2015 races like this one. Our first endorsed candidate: Jesus "Chuy" Garcia. Please consider making a contribution to his campaign to replace one of the worst Democrats in contemporary politics-- anywhere.

UPDATE: Can Chuy Beat Rahm's Fat Bank Account?

The Chicago Reader remarked this week that Emanuel's campaign reported the arrival of a contribution from billionaire former hedge fund manager (and charter school advocate) John D. Arnold, who lives on Lazy Lane (really) in Houston, but cares enough about the mayor's race in Chicago to put a hundred grand down on Rahm. Garcia's following among Lazy Lane billionaires is thought to be smaller."

But money doesn't always prevail, and "Chuy" Garcia is a formidable candidate. He's been an elected official at the city, county, and state levels, and been highly regarded at each.

"He's the real deal-- a true progressive and a quality human being," Gary Rivlin told me recently. Rivlin lives in New York now and is working as a reporting fellow at the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund, but he covered politics for the Reader in the 1980s, and saw the start of Garcia's political career... In 1992, Garcia became the first Mexican-American to be elected to the Illinois state senate. "He's never been a guy with a big ego, he's always willing to help other people," Cook County clerk David Orr told Linda Lutton in 1998, for a Reader story Orr, who served with Garcia on the City Council, called Garcia "one of the most outstanding elected officials in the state."

...If anyone can overcome the hurdles for a Latino mayoral candidate in Chicago, it's Garcia, Rivlin told me, "given his lifetime commitment to a multiracial coalition-- not just talking the talk, but 30 years of walking the walk."