To the editors:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
(2) Just what is there in the public records of either Evans or Sawyer to support the notion that one was a reformer and the other wasn’t? Before 1983 they were both machine aldermen. From 1983 through 1987 they were both followers of Harold Washington (Sawyer actually hopped on the Washington bandwagon before Evans). Since 1987, Evans has backed Sawyer on almost every city council vote. And the few votes on which they disagreed were mostly things on which reasonable progressives could differ–e.g., the O’Hare lease, which Bloom supported as well as Sawyer. Moreover, on some issues (such as the human rights ordinance) Sawyer was more successful with the City Council than Washington had been.
(3) In Cassel’s eyes, Sawyer’s unpardonable sin was apparently that “machine hacks” put him in office. Let us leave aside the fact that Harold Washington was not above making deals with machine politicians, white as well as black. (Remember the 1988 county ticket, including Aurelia Pucinski?) Let us also leave aside the fact that Evans wanted the support of “machine hacks” as much as Sawyer did, and was merely less successful in getting it. The real point is this: any objection to Sawyer on the basis of Burke, Mell, etc. supporting him, should have lost its force, once these aldermen realized they would not have much influence with the new administration, and shifted their support to Daley.
(8) Finally, one must question whether leftists like Cassel have their priorities straight. They seem to view everything as a battle between good “reform” Democrats and evil “machine” Democrats. They seem to forget that there is a third alternative, which from their point of view should be worse than either–namely, conservative Republicanism. This may seem like a negligible force in most Chicago mayoral elections, but it has, after all, won five of the last six presidential elections. To defeat the Right on the national and statewide levels is going to require something more than blacks and a few white leftists. Denouncing white ethnic aldermen as “machine hacks” and denouncing all blacks who cooperate with them may add to one’s feelings of moral purity. The same is true of writing columns in defense of the FALN, as Cassel has done. But they do not exactly help in drawing undecided centrist voters to the Democratic Party. Unless Cassel wants the Supreme Court, the National Labor Relations Board, et cetera to keep going in their present direction, this fact should be of some concern to him.
