Axelrod’s Take

Here’s David Axelrod’s take from CNN on Lori Lightfoot’s defeat:

When she ran for mayor, her status as a crusading outsider with prosecutorial zeal was core to her appeal.

But those pugilistic qualities quickly became obstacles in a job that often requires an ability to cajole, and not simply command.

Early in her term, Lightfoot stubbornly took a teacher’s strike many deemed avoidable, and then settled on the union’s terms.

Deeply suspicious of the motives of other politicians, she systematically alienated Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the Democrat-led state legislature and the Cook County leadership, all of whom are fellow Democrats.

As a result, she lost key legislative battles, including a law that over the next three years will shift control of the Chicago public schools from mayoral appointees to an elected 21-member school board, far larger than what she had wanted and the largest by far in the country.

She ran on limiting the prerogatives of City Council members, then humiliated them in her inaugural speech and alienated them in the job, prompting one of her once-allies Alderman Susan Sadlowski-Garza to say, “I have never met anybody who has managed to piss off every single person they come in contact with. Police, fire, teachers, aldermen, businesses, manufacturing.”

The exodus of some high-profile businesses – and the likely, unthinkable departure to the suburbs of the city’s beloved Chicago Bears – contributed to a sense of a city backsliding.

By the time of the election, more than half of Chicago voters gave the mayor negative ratings.

In winning and losing, Lightfoot did it her way. Now Chicago will have a new mayor – and a race that will be the most ideologically divergent in recent history.

which I think is remarkably lacking in insight. As I have noted before she was put in office not by Lakeshore liberals or black activists but by white voters on the Northwest Side. She achieved victory because she was not Toni Preckwinkle but that alone didn’t light her path to a re-election that she lacked the political skills to bring about, especially since Toni Preckwinkle was not on the ballot.