Democrats, led by President Joe Biden, are making a big bet on Brandon Johnson.
They’re betting the Chicago that delegates and reporters pour into for their national presidential nominating convention in August 2024 will be helmed by a progressive, labor-friendly mayor whose policies are making the city a better place.
They’re betting Johnson can help them tell a multicultural, multigenerational Democratic story that their geriatric presidential nominee can use as a springboard to energize young voters and win four more years in the White House.
And they’re betting their made-for-TV bash will go off without a hitch in a city that has a spotty record throwing these shindigs and a national reputation for violent crime that Republicans are certain to try to exploit.
Mayor-elect Johnson did little of the heavy lifting to woo Democrats to choose Chicago for 2024, most of which took place in the year prior to his recent election win.
He acknowledged as much when he proclaimed himself the Steve Kerr of the process at a celebratory news conference last week — he gets to take the last shot like Kerr did in 1997 to seal the Bulls’ fifth NBA championship. Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Lori Lightfoot joined him onstage, the Jordan and Pippen of Johnson’s apt analogy.
Nonetheless, it’s Johnson’s Chicago the convention will highlight when Democrats convene in the United Center, the same building where Kerr drained his clutch jumper.
For better or worse, Chicago’s turn in the national spotlight 16 months from now will go a long way to defining the untested mayor’s first term: Hit the shot and he’s the GOAT, miss and he’s a goat.
Southwest Side Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th, supported Paul Vallas and his tough-on-crime approach in the April 4 mayoral runoff election, and asked a question that no doubt many are also wondering: Will Johnson take the steps necessary to allow Chicago to put its best foot forward for conventioneers and the national media?
The task, he noted, is a tall one.
“His challenge is, you have to make policing work, you have to make prosecution work and you have to make public transportation work, all in less than a year,” Lopez said.
Johnson, a former teacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer whose public office experience is limited to barely more than a single term as a Cook County commissioner, sounds assured he can pull it off.
“What I’m confident in is the very theme of my campaign — to make sure that we are invested in people because that’s what makes for a better, stronger Chicago — that this convention reflects the best part of our values and that we are actually investing in neighborhoods, which means that we are investing in people,” Johnson said in an interview with the Tribune.
In a congratulatory phone call with Johnson, Biden nodded to the difficulties the new mayor will face.
“One of the most memorable things that (Biden) said … is that being the mayor of the city of Chicago is certainly one of the toughest jobs in America,” Johnson said. “That comes from the president of the United States. But he said that he will be there for me.”
A party’s national convention gives the host city’s mayor a chance to raise their profile and that of their city by calling attention to their initiatives and how they are succeeding.
That could be especially important to Democrats, and Biden in particular, as they try to rally younger voters to support the ticket.
Pritzker called Johnson “a new generation politician” who “brought a lot of young voters to the polls and many voters of color and that’s going to be important to the Democratic coalition that wins for Joe Biden in 2024.”
The convention will put a spotlight not only on the city’s problems but also on the progressive politics of Johnson, who spent much of his mayoral campaign rebutting accusations he had advocated for defunding police in the past.
Mayor Richard J. Daley took an autocratic approach to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the infamous images of his police force beating protesters on Michigan Avenue have joined Jordan’s exploits and Al Capone’s machine gun massacres in the pantheon of quintessentially Chicago moments.
Prior to the 1996 Democratic Convention, Mayor Richard M. Daley cleaned up the scruffy Near West Side through which attendees would pass from their downtown hotels to the United Center. The city planted new trees and erected Daley’s beloved wrought iron fencing to beautify a stretch that had long been known as Chicago’s skid row, though many of its homeless residents had already been displaced by development.
The transformation continued in the years following the convention and today, as Lightfoot noted, the nearby Fulton Market area has gentrified into “one of the hottest real estate markets in the country.”
Still, the city’s homelessness problem is serious enough that the outgoing mayor felt compelled to pledge that “this is not going to be what, frankly, you’ve seen in other places around the world, where suddenly the homeless people are swept off the street as the world turns its eyes to Chicago.”
It won’t be Lightfoot’s call, though. The agenda will be set by Johnson, who ran for mayor championing the longtime progressive goal of hiking the real estate transfer tax on expensive house sales to fund homeless services, and who has called dealing with the city’s burgeoning homeless population a moral imperative.
Johnson also will determine the city’s response to protests at the convention, including any by progressive groups whose interests are much more aligned with his own than they were with either of the mayors Daley who presided over Chicago’s most recent nominating conventions.
Democrats argue that will work in their favor. Young voters who make up an important part of Johnson’s base “want to vote for the person who is standing up and fighting for their issues and the things that matter to them,” Pritzker said.
“It’s not just, ‘Oh, here’s a list of issues and you can check some boxes on this candidate.’ They want to see that you are somebody who is going to fight for them,” he said.
There’s also the question of the city’s violent crime and Johnson’s relationship with Chicago police, which has the potential to be exceptionally ugly even given the traditionally rocky relations between City Hall and officers. Before the election, the head of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police predicted there would be “blood in the streets” and mass resignations if Johnson won. The resignations have so far not transpired, but the background does not augur sunny days ahead for the new mayor and rank-and-file cops.
Though gun violence is always top of mind for Chicago’s mayor and a leading concern for residents, anything that happens during the convention will instantly become fodder for GOP politicians and right-wing commentators who will rip Democrats for failing to deal with crime in American cities.
Johnson’s challenge is to make sure none of those variables overshadow the image of the city he wants to portray.
“Anything that brings more tourism to our city should be viewed as a good thing,” Lopez said. “We’re going to have hundreds of thousands of people coming to the city of Chicago.”
Lopez, a frequent critic of Lightfoot and the city’s policing policies, said Chicago is “failing daily to keep our own residents safe, let alone easy pickings for criminals once the DNC arrives.”
“Unless you’re going to have the city look like a military state, you have to solve these problems now if you’re going to showcase Chicago being the most American of American cities that doesn’t resemble the Ukraine or Baghdad.”
Lopez’s warning is an echo of former GOP president and current White House contender Donald Trump’s constant critique that Chicago is worse than Afghanistan when it comes to violence. The failure of Johnson and the city to counter that narrative would play into the talking points that Republicans would be certain to use after they pick their nominee — be it Trump or someone else — a month earlier in Milwaukee.
jebyrne@chicagotribune.com
rap30@aol.com
