With just a few days to go before Tuesday’s aldermanic election, here are some predictions and observations about various wards from a few pundits and politicos.
Fourth Ward: “You got Toni Preckwinkle, the incumbent, and Norman Bolden. Hmm. Bolden is a salesperson or something for WGCI. He should have R. Kelly as campaign manager. They’re still playing his CDs, you know. Stuff sells–why not? Preckwinkle will win.”
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21st Ward: “That’s DeVille’s ward, right? Reverend Leonard DeVille. I love Howard Brookins Jr., but of course DeVille’s gonna win ’cause we like Cadillacs and reverends. Come on, man, that’s my best line of the day. You gotta use it.”
24th Ward: “Where’s that? West side? Forget it. I don’t know the west side. I’m a south-sider. I don’t care if black folks out there get mad at me– the whole west side doesn’t matter. The only politician I love on the west side is Danny K. Davis.”
Ninth Ward: “[Anthony] Beale’s gonna win, much as I hate to say.”
32nd Ward: “I’m for Stone’s son, Jay, or whatever his name is. I like Berny Stone. Always got along with him. Who’s the incumbent? Oh, yeah, [Ted] Matlak. Another Daley puppet. We got enough of them.”
“How about voting all of them out? The City Council’s become such a rubber stamp, what’s the point of having aldermen? Say what you will about them, we used to have Eddie Vrdolyak, Anna Langford, Cliff Kelley, Dick Simpson, Leon Despres. These people were smart, these people had intelligence, these people weren’t afraid to speak up–even if some of them were regulars. And now what do we have? There’s not one independent voice in the City Council. The only occasional independent voices are the white conservative ethnics–they’ll break from Daley if he’s pushing some sort of gay rights thing. See, Chicago’s not a liberal town in terms of social issues. Daley just went to the left because that’s where the money is. But even the white ethnics are on the plantation. Everything’s top down, no bottom up. Term limits would shake it up. And reduce the council. Cut it in half. Minorities will say, ‘But you’ll decrease representation.’ I’m a minority, but if I have one Daley-controlled Hispanic or two does it make a difference? It’s a charade of democracy. It’s a false face of democracy. These aldermen are jokes. They all vote with the mayor. They give up their control over contracts. Any issue–Meigs Field, Soldier Field, Millennium Park, bus shelters on Michigan Avenue–you can’t criticize, you can’t speak. It’s the law of Ezekiel for three generations–a curse on you and your children and your children’s children because you’re not with Mayor Daley. It’s not healthy. It’s like a third-world country, what with all the vote fraud and violence and intimidation I see in some of the wards.”
