This snippet from Matt Yglesias’s Bloomberg column is thought-provoking:
I’ve spent most of the past three weeks in Chicago, and the thing I heard depressingly often from supporters of both candidates was a kind of double-negative argument: Not that their guy would be able to put his best ideas into practice, but that he wouldn’t be able to implement his worst ones. Then they made the opposite case for their opponent.
Johnson fans assured me that a relatively pro-business city council would not let him pose a new “head tax†on downtown businesses that could scare off employers and impede efforts to get companies to bring people back to work. But they warned me that a mayor squarely aligned with the police union and national conservative forces really could cover up police misconduct without improving public safety. Vallas supporters, by contrast, told me that it was absurd to imagine that the city council or the state legislature would allow conservative policy ideas to take root in Chicago. Meanwhile, they said, Johnson could easily frighten corporate leaders and induce a police pullback.
These are both pretty good arguments as far as they go — making large-scale policy change is always much harder than candidates let on — but the debate was a depressing reflection of the impoverished state of the city’s politics.
Johnson doesn’t really have much of an agenda for urban reform, just a list of things he’d like to spend money on. It’s almost as if it was copy-and-pasted from a progressive agenda developed in the pre-Covid era for a much richer coastal city.
It’s probably true that he won’t, in fact, be able to impose big new tax increases. So then what will he do? Only 20% of Chicago high school students are at grade level in reading or math proficiency. Chicago teachers walked out on the job over Covid protocols as late as January 2022, by which time schools were fully operational almost everywhere else in the US. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to further empower a union this proud of its own militance and disregard for its public responsibilities.
Contrary to what MY is suggesting it isn’t the City Council that will prove Mr. Johnson’s biggest barrier. Chicago, whether City Hall or the City Council, doesn’t have the authority to do what he proposes. He would need to roll over the City Council, Springfield, and Washington to do what he wants. I can’t see how everybody pulling in different directions can possibly be good for the country or the state let alone Chicago.
This resembles something Dave might have written before the Covid era: “almost as if it was copy-and-pasted from a progressive agenda developed in the pre-Covid era for a much richer coastal city.”
Machine politics, an off-off-year election, and the corrupting influence of power public sector unions seem like a bad recipe to me.