Early last week 12th Ward alderman Ray Frias was riding high. A poll conducted by his campaign showed his name recognition in the ward was 57 points higher than that of his toughest challenger, political neophyte George Cardenas. He posed for campaign photos with John Daley, the powerful brother of the mayor. He said what any watcher of Chicago politics would assume: that he had the support of a pack of Mexican-American elected officials–all regular Democrats like himself–including state senators Tony Munoz and Martin Sandoval, state representative Eddie Acevedo, and 25th Ward alderman Danny Solis. He didn’t even seem too upset that his own brother, Fernando Frias, was running Cardenas’s campaign. “Hey, you can choose your friends,” he said, “but you can’t choose your family.”
George Cardenas is a political unknown, but HDO has shown before that it has the money and manpower to get a no-name elected. In 1998 it helped Munoz, then a Chicago police officer and political nobody, trounce popular state senator Jesus Garcia. But 38-year-old Cardenas is not only new to politics as a candidate, he’s new to voting. Chicago Board of Elections records show that he’s never voted in the city. Records also show that he changed his voter registration to an address in the 12th Ward just days before he filed as a candidate for alderman there–he’d been registered to vote on the northwest side.
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Curiously, Cardenas and Frias are both still scrambling for Daley’s coattails, though about the only thing that could make this race any weirder would be Daley throwing his support to Frias. HDO has essentially functioned as the Latino arm of Daley’s political organization, and if the two supported different candidates in this race it would signal that HDO is, at least occasionally, willing to walk off the reservation.
One community group, the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, started mailing the alderman complaints and meeting invitations when he wouldn’t return phone calls or show up for community meetings. But Frias won’t open mail from the group; BPNC has some 40 letters that were sent certified mail and returned, all stamped Refused. He says he won’t deal with the group because its organizers “are from the north side–they don’t live here.” He says he attended one meeting four years ago where “they treated me worse than the dog. They said some pretty nasty things to me. And you know what? I grew up in a tough part of town, and I’m gonna treat you the way you treat me.”
Frias isn’t too sure about taking on this new role. “An independent? Independent of what?” he asks. “Independent of HDO? Absolutely. Independent of the mayor? No way!”
