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LOCAL News :: Civil & Human Rights

Emanuel 'mandate' is a big fat lie

Dan Mihalopoulos of the Chicago News Cooperative fired off a piece today suggesting that "Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel could claim a mandate to enact the potentially drastic changes that he has said are inevitable at City Hall."

Uh, no, the premise of a ‘mandate’ based on ‘big victory’ is simply false. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Let's do the math.

Something like 2.8 million people live in Chicago. Roughly a million of those people are too young to vote (I’m basing these number on 2003 federal population estimates). That leaves about 1.8 million potentially voter eligible residents, less the number of people who are not citizens. Roughly 1.4 million residents are registered to vote, according to the Chicago Board of Elections. 590,000 people voted. 323,546 voted for Rahm. That’s less than a quarter of the eligible electorate. If you factor this in terms of the number of adults in the city, roughly 18% voted for Rahm.

Sorry, but that’s hardly a mandate from the people, including the taxpayers. Some taxpayers clearly like him. The local majority do not, at least not enough to show up and vote for him. Out-of-towners — more than half the donors to his ample war chest — apparently like him a lot, too, although with the vast tax loopholes our richest US residents employ (and these people are clearly rich enough to afford some pretty hefty donations), there’s no telling if they’re taxpayers, either.

Dan Mihalopoulos also neglected to point out that Emanual’s campaign ad — the one he says “may have scored points with the broader, tax-paying public” (where Emanual says City Hall “is not an employment agency”) — actually refered to the hiring policy of his biggest booster, Richard Daley, in a deft bit of electoral hypocracy.

And Mihalopoulos let stand without analysis Juan Rangel’s outrageous assertion in the article that big outside money somehow “frees [Emanuel] up to make some tough decisions” without having to sweat the pesky sentiments of local folks. Yeah, OK, big outside bucks and slavish editorial cowtowing dovetailed with missteps from the other contenders to produce — 18% of the eligible vote? Which is OK, since it’s better that Emanuel doesn’t have to be accountable to the wishes of local residents anyway? Really?

People don’t vote for lots of reasons. Some can’t, because they’re not ‘citizens’. Or they’re not registered. Maybe they look at the results of electing people who promise ‘change’ when all they subsequently get is change for the worse, and they lose faith in the electoral system. Egypt also has had elections for the last 30 years, but they didn’t exactly produce democracy and opportunity for the bulk of her people.

But to suggest that Emanuel has some sort of ‘mandate’ from the people based on his numbers Tuesday just doesn’t hold up. And there’s a lot of traffic out there in the electronic ether, as well as plenty of old-fashioned people to people conversation, about how to push back against what many fear will be an even more unforgiving imperial mayoralty than the one that is exiting this May.

Sometimes the new boss IS worse than the old boss. Good thing we’ve got inspiration from people from the Mideast to the Midwest to help show us what is possible -- because resistance will most certainly be necessary, and if we get our shit together, it most definitely will not be futile. Too many millions of people in motion across the planet are putting the lie to THAT tired old myth.
 
 

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