Word: mayors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...liberal organizer named Don Rose, now considered a traitor by the all-but-dead lakefront independent movement. Byrne was Daley's loyal hand-maiden--willing to sing his praises more loudly and obsequiously than even the most seasoned of ward-heelers. It was she who helped direct the late Mayor's infamous infiltration of dissident groups. When Daley was alive, she was a terror; her acid-tongued remarks stung any who didn't toe the party line. When Daley died, Byrne, who had made few friends in the Machine aside from the boss, lost it all. Bilandic finally fired...
...Mayor, meanwhile, seemed fit. He jogged in the second annual Mayor Daley Marathon and his socialite wife lent a much-appreciated cultural air to the city. His fiscal and political leadership proved skillful and he moved to innovate in areas ignored by Daley for years. Polls showed him popular. If not exactly a reform independent, neither was he a hack. Bland was a better word. Chicago politics seemed to be turning into something of a snooze--a change from Daley's iron-fisted but always colorful 20-year reign. Bilandic was considered such a shoo-in that...
THEN CAME THE SNOWS. Bilandic was inexplicably helpless before the elements and voters, raised on an image of "the city that works," grew increasingly irritated. The incumbent tried advertising with a focus on the good times. His T.V. spots featured the sunny lakefront Chicagofest of last summer, when the Mayor was at the peak of his powers. The challenger showed snow-bound commuters and photos of herself with Daley. Laboring under Byrne's verbal barrage and a charge that one of his aides was improperly awarded a no-bid snow-removal contract, Bilandic played the martyr--an ill-advised ploy...
Even with the snow. Byrne wasn't given much of a chance. She had little money, no precinct organization, no newspaper endorsements. When Chicagoans woke up yesterday to find themselves with a probable new mayor (the April 3 general election is something of a formality), the ironies abounded. Byrne defeated the Daley Machine by cloaking herself in the Daley legacy; she won with the help of black votes when it was Bilandic who had finally addressed the black issues ignored in the Daley years; she will probably become the first big-city woman mayor after a career in which...
...politics may well have been set back by her victory. Jane Byrne is mean-spirited, less-than-competent, less-than-intelligent. Her election will mean only the end of the machine's invulnerability, not of its influence in Chicago politics. The city is set up on a weak-mayor, strong-city council system, which with a non-machine mayor suggests a return to the feudal, pre-Daley years when free-wheeling bosses ran wild, getting their hands into more cookie jars than modern-day Chicagoans can imagine even exist. Some of the more wily power-brokers might ally with Byrne...