All’s fair in love, war … and campaigning. At least that’s what some political candidates think.
During her unsuccessful bid for reelection as mayor, Lori Lightfoot’s campaign tried to recruit Chicago Public Schools students for political work, dangling extra credit as a carrot. Her team also solicited city workers for campaign help, and as the Tribune reported last week, Lightfoot’s camp had been told to stop the electioneering nearly a year before her people reached out to CPS students.
The city’s Board of Ethics, which oversees City Hall’s adherence to ethics rules, warned Lightfoot’s team in March 2022 to stop sending electioneering emails to city workers at their workplace email addresses, and to cull those addresses from the mayor’s campaign email lists.
The warning was ignored, according to city Inspector General Deborah Witzburg, and the Lightfoot campaign continued soliciting city workers for campaign help. Later, Lightfoot’s campaign began reaching out to City Colleges of Chicago instructors, as well as to CPS teachers with the request that they help recruit students to work on the campaign in exchange for extra credit.
A spokesperson for the former mayor told the Tribune that the campaign made “good-faith efforts” to cull city government email addresses from its reelection bid email list. As for the attempt to enlist CPS students, Lightfoot at the time blamed it on one of her campaign workers.
Aside from the bad publicity the whole affair generated, Lightfoot and her campaign team never endured any punishment. They should have, however, and that’s why, moving forward, stronger measures need to be enacted to prevent future campaign chicanery. Right now, the Lightfoot campaign’s transgressions are violations of ethics rules. The former mayor and her team were scolded by the IG’s office, but that’s a slap on the wrist without consequences.
There’s a reason why citizens have scant trust in candidates, their politics and the government offices they seek. Bending the rules and exploiting loopholes to gain an edge over an opponent is about as routine in campaigns as yard signs. More often than not, Chicago political campaigns are tainted by a mindset that, “They don’t play by the rules, so why should we?”
City Hall has a new mayor and a new City Council. So here’s the perfect opportunity to enact new laws and ordinances that restore citizen trust in city politics.
Mayor Brandon Johnson and the new City Council should enact an ordinance that makes it illegal to solicit city workers or even worse, CPS students, for campaign help. That ordinance should be enforced civilly with fines that escalate if the violations continue. No one should go to jail, but a hefty fine would send a strong message.
This is also the perfect time for Johnson and aldermen to, once and for all, bring reform to the city’s decennial remap process, an exercise that always devolves into behind-closed-doors turf wars and leaves ordinary Chicagoans pushed to the sidelines. City Hall won’t see another election for four years, so why not seize the moment and finally the power over ward redistricting where it belongs — in the hands of voters?
The fix is simple, aldermen. Work with Springfield to draft legislation that would put the city’s remap process in the hands of an independent citizens commission, and end the unfairness of gerrymandering wards into nonsensically shaped fiefdoms that reflect aldermanic accumulation of clout rather than the will of voters.
Public trust in government has reached historic lows. In 1958, 73% of Americans said they trusted government to do what’s right either always or most of the time, according to the Pew Research Center. Over time, that level of trust has plummeted, and this month fell to merely 20%. Many reasons explain why Americans harbor such deep distrust of the people that represent them, but one clear factor is the self-serving refusal to embrace campaign reform.
Chicago represents a microcosm of that national skepticism toward government and politics. Now is the ideal time to begin rebuilding trust.
