It looks like Chicago's voters have given Mayor Lori Lightfoot the boot.

It's welcome news, given her loathesome persona -- her insults, her blacklists, her bizarre behavior. And worse still, her record: Soaring crime. A disastrous public educational system where groomers rule and literally no kids can read nor do math. A corporate base that is fleeing. Locals who have already fled in great numbers. The homeless taking over O'Hare international airport. How this creature could get elected in the first place attests to the power of "firsts" on the left -- first black woman mayor, first lesbian mayor, and all those things she was loudly hailed for when she first got elected in 2019. That she was incompetent was unimportant to the left and its media cheerleaders. Anyone who crossed her was a "hater."

Now she's out, booted by voters, another historic "first" as Chicago's first ousted mayor in 40 years.

The Chicago Tribune suggested that she had little political base upon which to build her support, given the number of Democrats she picked fights with, which stood in contrast to the far left, which had its political machines running at full speed (I wrote about how that works here), and of course, people fed up with violent crime on the other side of the matter.

Others, such as PJMedia's Stephen Kruizer have pointed out that her dictatorial style, coupled with her "defund the police" stance created a toxic contradiction between her harsh lockdown mandates and the freewheeling crime without consequences that became the signature event of life in Chicago. Kruizer wrote:

Lightfoot quickly established herself as one of the more obnoxious Democratic leaders during the pandemic and the George Floyd Memorial Summer of Mostly Peaceful Rioting. She relished being an authoritarian tyrant, perhaps more than any other Democrat. The photo I chose for today’s feature image perfectly encapsulates Lightfoot’s embrace of the tyrant role.

 

As 2020 bled into 2021, Lightfoot morphed into an odd combination of harsh enforcer of the rule of law that she made up, and an official who loathed law enforcement.

There also was this guy, Eric Carter, a Lightfoot appointee overseeing the police force, who insulted a fallen Chicago police officer with the word "sh--." That would explains why Chicago can't seem to attract police recruits anymore, why Chicago police officers are leaving the force, why residents can't get a cop on the phone anymore when they need a cop. Last I checked, this Lightfoot-appointed police-hating horror is still in his sinecure.

Eeew.

All of this would explain the voting totals -- Paul Vallas, reportedly the moderate Democrat semi-conservative of the bunch, taking 33.8% of the vote; Brandon Johnson, the radical leftist of the group, taking 20.3% of the vote, and Jesus Garcia, the Latino identity-politics leftist who claims to be the anti-Lightfoot uniter, taking 13.7%. Lightfoot drew just 17.1% of the vote total, putting her in lowly third place and squarely out of the runoff.

While it's tempting to say that even Chicago's left-wing voters have had enough, and the ousting could be compared to the booting the voters gave to Chesa Boudin of San Francisco, a far-left District Attorney who let criminals run wild over there, there still is a hard left that calls at least some of the shots in Chicago. Their beef with Lightfoot is that she wasn't left-wing enough -- and they do have political muscle. I wrote about how they work here and here.

Who Lightfoot's 17.1% and Garcia's 13.7% go for in the mayoral final on April 4 is an open question. It could be a sign of a turnaround and a return to common sense from voters. If it's not, then it's a death warrant for Chicago, promising even worse to come.   

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License