In its election Tuesday of Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson as its 57th mayor, Chicago chose an inspiring orator. This will be a City Hall first for most Chicagoans.
Neither Mayor Lori Lightfoot nor Mayor Rahm Emanuel were known for their rhetorical prowess and neither, heaven forbid, was Richard M. Daley. Nor was Eugene Sawyer, dubbed “Mayor Mumbles” by the media. As anyone who heard Johnson’s eloquent acceptance speech knows, that is not a nickname anyone will be flinging Johnson’s way anytime soon.
Given that David Orr was in office for all of a week in 1987, barely time to speak in public at all, that means you have to go back to Harold Washington, who died in office almost 36 years ago, to find a Chicago mayor who could ascend to a podium and make Chicagoans feel good about themselves, their city and their future prospects.
We don’t intend this as faint praise for the mayor-elect. The ability to communicate clearly, powerfully and, above all, optimistically is a crucial asset for any leader and a quality that many of Johnson’s predecessors in the office have lacked. This bully pulpit will be one of Johnson’s biggest assets. He will need it.
On Tuesday, following a victory that came as a huge surprise to many, Johnson ticked off the long progressive legacy in Chicago — citing Washington, Jane Addams, Jesse Jackson Sr. and other politicians who had endorsed a campaign that was not supported by many of the older Black leaders in this city.
He found a place for God, but not, strikingly, for Barack Obama, inarguably the most important leader this city ever has produced. The omission was telling, a reminder that the progressive movement of which Johnson now is a Midwest standard-bearer, feels ambivalent about the former Chicago community organizer and his more pragmatic legacy.
The city, and the nation, have traveled far away from 2004, when Obama delivered the unforgettable keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in front of 9 million viewers and began his meteoric rise. Many of Johnson’s most enthusiastic voters were still in middle school.
How did Johnson triumph in the runoff? Some factors are obvious. The Chicago Teachers Union, which had supported his campaign to an extraordinary extent, continued its legendary ground game, getting out the vote, or at least the right votes from the union’s point of view.
It’s pretty clear that some of the voters on the South and West sides, especially, who did not feel comfortable voting for Johnson, also did not show up at the runoff and vote for Vallas, who simply did not close the deal.
Combine that with the rise of so-called Boho Chicago along Milwaukee Avenue and in neighborhoods such as Rogers Park and Andersonville and a coalition was achieved. The so-called Lakefront Liberals with their concerns about safety and the central business district saw their nadir, although some of them clearly suspected that Vallas was never one of them.
Johnson’s campaign was successful in defining the opposition. Vallas, a centrist and policy wonk at heart, was not just reluctant but personally unwilling and unable to return that fire.
We also wonder whether some Vallas supporters wrongly thought their vote on a day with lousy weather would not be needed for their preferred candidate to win. They’d be wrong about that.
But there’s another factor we saw at our endorsement meetings. Given the stated philosophy of this page, with its longtime belief in limited government, transparency in public leadership, freedom of speech, public safety as a priority and its pro-business outlook, Johnson and his campaign surely surmised that he had an uphill battle to gain our endorsement.
And, indeed, he did not. We already had concerns about the growing scope of influence and radicalism of the Chicago Teachers Union before their preferred candidate landed in the runoff. And we also felt there were better progressive candidates who did not have the backing of so powerful a union, and who had done a better job at actually answering some of the harder questions rather than wriggling rhetorically away.
But Johnson was undaunted. “Yes, I want the Chicago Tribune’s endorsement,” he said, boldly, looking all of us in the eye, clearly convinced that this was an endorsement both deserved and absolutely to be had. In life, a lack of confidence and a reluctance to ask for something is often a barrier to personal success. Johnson does not have that problem and his sense of his own place in history is a significant part of why he will become mayor of a great American city atop what is likely to be the most progressive administration in its history.
As Emanuel, now the U.S. ambassador to Japan, noted late Tuesday, in a congratulatory tweet, the success or failure of a city’s mayor is, inevitably, also the success of failure of a city itself. The two cannot be separated.
In that spirit, and at this juncture, we congratulate Mayor-elect Johnson and wish him well.
