*Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor, is now the new mayor-elect of Chicago. She is the first black female and first openly gay person to head the government of the 3rd-largest city in the US.
On Tuesday after the votes were counted, Lightfoot defeated Toni Preckwinkle, who served in the City Council for 19 years before becoming Cook County Board president. Interestingly, Lightfoot has never been elected to public office.
It’s a point that’s highlighted in Crain’s Chicago Business‘ report on the election and her victory:
Talk about nobody nobody sent.
Lori Lightfoot never worked for a ward committeeman. She never was a ward committeeman. She didn’t grow up here. She’s in a same-sex marriage. Rahm Emanuel lumped her among the contenders he said had no chance of succeeding him as mayor, when she had declared her intention to run months before he opted out of the race in September.
But in a “change” election, Mayor-elect Lightfoot’s outsider cred prevailed. Now, the question is whether it gives her a chance to kill the Chicago Way, or whether she’ll be taken captive like her reform-mouthing predecessors.
Like a good politician, she (and her opponent, Toni Preckwinkle) talked as little as possible during the campaign about remedies for the pension monster. Lightfoot’s call for citywide “equity” in economic development confronts economic and demographic trends that have stymied previous mayors going back to at least Harold Washington. Her government experience in police matters, on the other hand, is a clear asset for dealing with the city’s open sore of neighborhood violence, with its many unsolved murders and strained police-community relations.
We’ve seen how, listed at 5-foot-1, she won’t be pushed around, as if size matters. When state Rep. Robert Martwick, D-Norridge, crashed a press conference convened to critique a bill he had introduced, she confronted the legislator, describing him as “Exhibit A of the broken and corrupt political system.” He called her a bully. When Preckwinkle attacked during their TV debates, Lightfoot’s umbrage was palpable.
“I don’t think she will buckle under political pressure,” says Eric Sussman, who served with Lightfoot as a federal prosecutor. Around 2000, he says, she was summing up the prosecution’s argument in a bank-robbery trial when the defendant stood up and began yelling. “She dropped her legal pad and went toe-to-toe with this guy who must have been twice her size. Both of them had to be restrained.”
