For Chicago: Preckwinkle For Mayor, Conyears-Ervin For Treasurer
There's truism about politics: campaigning and governing are totally different skills, and just because you're good at one, doesn't mean you're good at the other. Campaigning is packed with artificially black and white comparisons, inflated statements, and poorly declared ideas. Messaging and advertising is the messy and imprecise business of elections. But in a democratic system, we citizens have agreed that campaigning is what politicians need do to get elected, and when the votes are counted we hope the winners are just as good, or better at governing.
This is the root of my lament about Toni Preckwinkle, my preferred candidate for Chicago mayor. She's run an abysmal campaign, wasting opportunities, allowing herself to be defined by opponents, and generally seeming leadfooted. While I have no real complaints about her runoff opponent, Lori Lightfoot, Toni's thirty-year record of progressive accomplishment in government is tremendous, and something I'd like to see continued in the mayor's office.
Her work as Cook County Board President, the job she currently occupies, has been a study in the hard work of governing. After decades of mismanagement before her tenure, Preckwinkle steered county government into solvency, moved the massive county hospitals and health system into the black, enrolled 320,000 people onto a new CountyCare managed health insurance program, rebuilt the state's second-largest public housing agency and helped to push back the judicial travesty of cash bail.
These are boring, unsexy accomplishments that none-the-less affect hundreds of thousands of people in very real ways. And while Preckwinkle has earned a reputation of grinding through staff, and her demeanor is gruff and unforgiving, few statues have been erected in honor of a leader's sense of humor. We demand concrete results from our leaders, and Preckwinkle has delivered it time and again.
Yet, Preckwinkle has run a terrible campaign. She was largely invisible during the first round of elections, nursing her resources for the second round and expecting that her base of support would give her a first place finish in the first round. But because she didn't spend time and money defining herself to voters for the February election, other candidates did, setting the tone and defining what they had to offer.
Then, nine days before the February election, a hubris-filled Preckwinkle supporter crashed a Lightfoot press conference, attempting to belittle her. Instead, in an unprompted, televised argument that will go down in Chicago political history, Lightfoot directly engaged the man and earned her bonafides as the change candidate.
It was a terrible "own goal" by Team Preckwinkle, and Team Lightfoot has been matching "change" and "machine" with "Preckwinkle" at every opportunity since then. We've heard very little from Lightfoot about how her turn at the mayor's office would be substantially different from Preckwinkle's (in fact, it seems both candidates would make many of the same policy choices), but Chicagoans seem to be hungering for a break from the past. And since Preckwinkle has a 40 year history as a Chicago and Cook County elected official – no matter that almost that entire past was opposing the old machine and reforming the dreck they left behind – the zeitgeist has shifted to Lightfoot's candidacy of new, rather than Preckwinkle's history of reform.
I'll be voting for Toni Preckwinkle for mayor, but I don't have anything bad to say about Lori Lightfoot. I spent a great deal of time talking to her about police reform when I was running and reporting for The Daily Line. She is a deep, thoughtful person, genuinely interested in service – and she has a sense of humor. She can be a bit imperious at times, but so has every other person I've met that has achieved her level of success. While it doesn't serve her well, I suspect it's a habit born of being in command – I've never sensed her to foster self-doubt.
Me and State Rep. Melissa Conyears-Ervin, candidate for Chicago Treasurer.
And while so much attention has gone to the mayoral campaign, I've been spending most of my energy on the city treasurer race, volunteering for Melissa Conyears-Ervin. I've worked and volunteered for dozens of candidates over the years, and Melissa is one of the few I've known to be the "whole package". She's got a Horatio Alger story, having risen from a West Side family, raised by a single mother working a union job to become the first in her family to go to college, and then get a job working for Allstate, a Fortune 500 company. While there, she earned an MBA in finance and managed a office of hundreds. Then, sensing there was more to life than the corporate ladder, she left her corporate job to work at a West Side non-profit focusing on housing. Only after all this life experience, did she run for State Representative. And, except for when she went to college, she lived the whole time on Chicago's West Side, never leaving her roots.
Volunteering for and working with Melissa, I've found her interest in people to be genuine, her grasp of financial issues to be real (I have an M.B.A. myself) and that she reads and studies in depth to get up to speed on issues. She understands and is committed to protecting Chicago's $8 billion of cash and short-term investments. She has some genuine ideas on how to help our pensions perform better, and she is energized by the idea of forcing Chicago banks, who benefit from holding our massive cash deposits, to create programs to serve significant Chicago's unbanked population.
Melissa is deeply committed to the boring, uninteresting parts of government that create real long-term results. And for this guy with twenty-five years in and around government, her commitment to the boring, is the most exciting thing ever. If you live in Chicago, please give Melissa Conyears-Ervin your vote.
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