Well, here we go. It took less than a day for the New York Times to call the Chicago Mayoral race a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party And I must admit I had that same thought—until I realized that I was thinking like a headline writer and, in the heat of the moment, had lost 50 years of perspective. Chicago is more like a skirmish in the perpetual battle between Democratic “progressives” and moderates that has existed since Eugene McCarthy challenged Lyndon Johnson in 1968…but, boy, this is a juicy one. Paul Vallas, who is white, has the support of the Chicago police union. Bradford Johnson, who is black, has the support of the Chicago Teachers Union. Choose your poison! Vallas finished first in the primary with 33.8% of the vote; Johnson finished second with about 20%. Lori Lightfoot, the incumbent mayor, finished somewhere in the Chicago River, with about 17% and then, hilariously, blamed her defeat on racism and anti-gay misogyny…even though the same electorate had favored her overwhelmingly four years ago—when she promised to be tough on crime, which she wasn’t. Lightfoot thus strutted the surreal identity-baloney jargongargle that makes some Democrats so unappetizing to normies. Chicago voters are equally divided, more or less, among whites, blacks and Latinos.
Crime is the issue the New York Times emphasized and portrayed, inevitably, as a liberal-conservative divide. The primacy of crime will probably be the case, but it won’t be a racial or ideological divide. Blacks are far more concerned about crime than white liberals are. It’s why Eric Adams beat Maya Wiley, the darling of college graduates, in the New York mayoral primary. (This has a long history: the Congressional Black Caucus pushed and, overwhelmingly, voted for the Clinton crime bill in 1994, which has become legislatium non gratum for the current crop of lefties.) No doubt, crime and race will dominate the coming campaign.
But I’m equally interested in education as an issue. Vallas was a great schools administrator in Chicago and later New Orleans, where every school has been a charter since Hurricane Katrina and the system’s improvement has been notable (but—reality here—not paradisiacal). Vallas was succeeded in Chicago by Arne Duncan, the best Secretary of Education of the 21st century, and a crucial factor in the Obama Administration push for school reform, which was, of course, opposed by the teachers unions. The Wall Street Journal lays out the gory details of Chicago’s education morass in its editorial about the election.
All of which presents an interesting choice for President Obama which, I safely predict, he will not make: whom to endorse. Chicago is his home-town. He should have a dog in this fight. And we’ll see which, if any, national democrats have the courage to back Vallas. I will, furthermore and fearlessly, predict that the issue of Vallas’ melanin-deprivation, and consequent “racism,” will be raised before long.
The choice seems pretty clear. I’m not too thrilled by the backing Vallas has received from the police union—they’ve been a subtle force for urban anarchy since the George Floyd killing, having quietly encouraged Blue Flu in response to Black Lives Matter protests in many cities; they should be abolished. But electing Bradford Johnson would mean the city of Chicago would become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the teachers union, another tightening of the stranglehold they have on the Democrats. (By the way, I refuse to call the teachers unions “progressives” since they are reactionaries in the truest sense, opposed to all reforms except non-merit raises for their members.)
The runoff is April 4. This will be an interesting month.
Other Matters of Interest
Mr. Ellis Suggests
Today is the birthday of John Ellis, whose News Items and Political News Items are entirely indispensable—even my spouse, who has a rather desultory interest in politics is addicted because of the medical and techie information John aggregates on a daily basis, in addition to economic and political news. As usual, today, Ellis is on top of a matter of interest that is just beginning to dent the mainstream media: the demographic collapse of China. If it weren’t so politically incorrect, I’d be interested in reading a exploration of whether China’s homogeneity—it is more than 90% Han Chinese—has an impact on its tendency to go off the deep end: The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, The One Child Policy, The Two Child Policy, The Three Child Policy. The need for conformity seems greater there than any other country, except perhaps North Korea—the absence of conformity is seen as luan—that is, chaos, imagined by Mandarins to be the greatest enduring threat to the Middle Kingdom. I’d say demographic collapse—especially the relative absence of women, who were aborted or murdered because princelings were so valued during the one-child era—might qualify as a symptom of Luan.
The Washington Post had two articles today on similar trends in Russia and Europe.
Ms. Rubin Reflects
I remember having furious jousts with Jennifer Rubin over Middle East policy; she was a thorough-going Likudnik when she wrote for Commentary. She has become a valuable commentator on a variety of issues for The Washington Post—and here she shows a very welcome concern about the Netanyahu putsch in Israel.
Mr. Klein Rejects
The Washington Post indulges in a smarmy bit of double-speak in this piece about gender-affirming health care for trans people. Gender-affirming? You mean the violent surgeries and hormone therapies that enable people to switch their sex? Wouldn’t gender-transition or, in plain English, gender-change be more appropriate? And spending public money on that? Those procedures should be available to those who want them, but they should be seen as voluntary…not crucial, life or death decisions to be financed by the state. We should be spending a lot more on preventive health care, lowering the cost of drugs, mental health, medical research, and home-care for the elderly. Not this.
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