I’m voting for Lori Lightfoot to be the mayor of the city of Chicago. Lori has the integrity, the experience, and the life that it takes to be the mayor of this city and to bring us beyond the brittle smallness of where we live.
I worked with Lori as a member of the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, which published an accurate and scathing report on the deep structural racism of the Chicago Police department and its effects on the people of Chicago.
In that work, I came to admire Lori for who she was. It’s easy to read in the newspaper that someone isn’t corrupt and it’s another thing to see her make decisions over the course of months that prove it. She wrote a straight-up honest indictment of an institution made up of 15,000 of her neighbors. She could have phoned it in, but she did not. Lori Lightfoot has integrity.
Lori has served in many civic functions to serve this city for decades. All of this work is summarized very well in the Chicago Sun-Times endorsement of Lori, published earlier this month. She has been unafraid to go the darkest regions of our collective municipal psyche— banal corruption in procurement, aldermanic pilfering, horrendous conduct of police officers. She has the experience— she’s gone to war for us— now she can do it from the 5th floor.
And it matters who sits behind the Mayor’s desk. What they look like, who they go home to at night, who they take their money from, what kind of life they lead. How they do their job. I’ve seen enough noblesse oblige bullshit to last me a lifetime. I’ve watched, with a seat at the table, as “policy” people make calculations that always seem to edge out the interests of powerless people. It’s tiresome built-in kabuki— half-measures that avail us nothing.
We need public meetings that actually account for public input. I’ve seen Lori Lightfoot lead these types of meetings— painstakingly, over weeks, with the voice of the people actually influencing outcomes. I want more of this. I want us to decide, together, how we move this city forward. We cannot do that without new leadership.
Lori Lightfoot can win this race. Every poll tells us she is in the hunt— with your support she can get to the run-off and knock out anybody. In such a tight race, your single vote can make a huge difference. Lori Lightfoot can be our mayor.
There’s a week and a half to go— let’s elect Lori Lightfoot our mayor on Tuesday, February 26.