ALDERMAN BOB FIORETTI THROWS HIS HAT IN THE RING: OH, HEART BE STILL

9/13/14

So 2^nd Alderman Bob Fioretti has thrown his hat into the Chicago mayoral ring.  Yawn.

As 1^st Ward Alderman Proco “Joe” Moreno said of Mr. Fioretti’s quixotic quest

“I think he has no shot.  None.  It’s delusions of grandeur on his part.”

Delusions of grandeur are somewhat characteristic of Mr. Fioretti, but probably only to a slightly greater degree than is the case with most politicians.   Like most pols, Mr. Fioretti is convinced that he has all the answers and that he is duty bound to enlighten us with his brilliance.  His feelings in this regard pale beside those of the man he seeks to unseat, but I digress.

There is nothing endemic to Mr. Fioretti that renders his bid for the 5^th Floor laughable.   While being accused of being somewhat loony left, it is hard to label the advocacy of more cops on the street, removing control of the Chicago Public Schools from the mayor’s control, and elimination of red light cameras as being somehow leftist.  A commuter tax is a potentially ruinous idea that does smacks of liberalism run amok.  But, on balance, there isn’t as much room for ideology in running a city as most would have you believe.  The most dyspeptic aspect of Mr. Fioretti is, in any case, not his ideology but his aforementioned ego.  In a field that includes Rahm Emanuel and Karen Lewis, however, Mr. Fioretti’s ego would be, by comparison, a non-issue.

Mr. Fioretti does have some admirable qualities.  What immediately comes to mind is his courage to stand up to Mayors Daley and Emanuel when his colleagues in the City Council were, and are, acting like love struck schoolgirls desperately angling for so much as an approving grin from the object of their sycophancy.   Those who decry the financial ravages Mr. Daley inflicted on our city would do well to have imitated Mr. Fioretti’s voting record in the Council.   Those who decry Mr. Emanuel’s highly unpopular attempts to deal with this mess would have a hard time finding a more genuine champion than Mr. Fioretti.

None of this matters, however.  Mr. Fioretti could be a flawless candidate with impeccable credentials and a solid voting base (He has none of those.) and still get clobbered by Rahm Emanuel.   As I’ve said ad nauseam in the past (KAREN LEWIS, THE HUMAN MONOPOLY GUY: SOME QUESTIONS THAT HAVEN’T BEEN ASKED, 8/14/14, TONI PRECKWINKLE RULESOUT A RUN FOR MAYOR OF CHICAGO…MY READERSYAWN, 7/15/14, et. al.), Rahm Emanuel has all the money and all the organization.  Chicago is an array of constituencies that can readily be bought, one way or another, making it an especially fertile ground for pols with money and organization.   Toni Preckwinkle, who has more name recognition and qualifications, and a more natural voting constituency, than Mr. Fioretti, realized that she had no chance and dropped out.   Karen Lewis, with at least two more natural constituencies than Mr. Fioretti, may be in the process of seeing the light and dropping out.  Who knows what she will do?  But that, too, doesn’t matter; nobody is going to beat Rahm Emanuel in 2015.

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.