To the editors.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The question remains: what did Washington actually accomplish? Certainly he showed blacks, as Jane Byrne showed women, that one no longer has to be a white man to become Mayor of Chicago. In that sense his position in and of itself was inspirational to many. However, what few want to admit is that as a mayor, Washington was completely ordinary. This does not make him any worse than most other Chicago mayors; indeed, he was better than most, for what that is worth. But that would be like calling recent Cub Jody Davis a great catcher simply because he was better than the numerous awful catchers that preceded him into Wrigley Field.
Some of the better minds of the city have long maintained that the way to rebuild Chicago to its onetime greatness is to recapture our once booming tourist industry by making our city the Las Vegas of the midwest by legalizing sports and casino gambling. Building several casino-hotels here would bring in badly needed revenue that presently goes to Nevada, Atlantic City, local bookies, and even the blackjack casinos of North Dakota. This would additionally bring in jobs and take gambling out of the hands of Syndicate sleazebags and into the hands of legitimate businesses and city services. But Washington, with his do-gooder ideology that gambling is somehow “immoral,” would not even consider the idea, instead sticking it to home owners for additional revenue.
Chicago needs a mayor who has vision and a grasp of the issues. Unfortunately, this is not anything I see in any of the present candidates, black or white, Democrat or Republican or third party. We hear much about so-and-so being the “black candidate” or the “white candidate” but nobody has come forth as the issues candidate. Until that changes, we figure to end up with a mayor who is exactly like every other over the past forty years.
