The campaign trail to the mayor`s office on the 5th floor of City Hall is not straight and narrow; it is filled with peaks and valleys, some foreseen and others surprising.
And last week`s leg of that trail was no exception, with each candidate in the diverse field making points, losing points or simply staking out the roles that they will follow in the five weeks to come before the Feb. 24 mayoral primary.
For Mayor Harold Washington, the benefits and deficits of incumbency were apparent. Like his predecessors, Washington used the trappings of his office to travel about the city, announcing new and old projects alike, using city department heads as surrogates to fend off the attacks of his opponents and acting, in general, mayoral.
For former Mayor Jane Byrne, it was a campaign week that started shakily and ended on an up note.
Still trying to shake off the effects of a campaign stump misstatement of the week before, when she, in garbled syntax, mistakenly lumped Puerto Ricans in a list of aliens, she went on the attack. Byrne, Chicago`s first woman mayor, charged that Washington`s record on female hiring was poor, and she produced computer statistics showing that the mayor gave good-paying city jobs to four times as many men as women.
Her charges, however, were quickly shouted down by a pack of reporters who demanded that she unveil her own record of female hiring. Byrne`s aides said it would be unfair to compare the two records because Byrne, they said, started the trend of female hirings and Washington should have improved on it. And Washington, showing the quick response that has become his trademark in this fledgling mayoral campaign, produced a group of more than 200 women in his City Hall office to illustrate for the television cameras that he had hired many women since he took office in 1983.
But by the week`s end, Byrne produced records of her own more favorable female-hiring record, a record verified by employment records and a computer analysis by The Tribune.
Byrne and Washington continued to trade invectives for the rest of the week. Byrne chartered a Chicago Transit Authority bus and took reporters on a tour of spots where, she said, Washington had failed to produce promised improvements, such as Navy Pier, the Quincy-Wells elevated station and vacant land in the North Loop. In response, Washington brought out several department heads to dispute Byrne`s charges and report that the projects were ”on line.”
The mayor and the former mayor are the focus of immediate attention because they are the major foes in the primary battle. They are joined in the Feb. 24 Democratic primary by Sheila Jones, a disciple of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche.
So as the two main opponents in round one of the city`s mayoral election swapped jabs, the other figures in the race spent last week staking out their ground for the April 7 general election.
Republican candidate Donald Haider, who lost a chance at much-needed publicity with the removal of his major opponent, Bernard Epton, from the ballot because of a lack of sufficient nominating signatures, last week tried to beat his most immediate enemy: obscurity.
The other Republican candidates–Kenneth Hurst, the 39th Ward Republican committeeman; Chester Hornowski, a police officer; and Ray Wardingley, a clown –are considered long shots, at best.
With no real Republican opponent to battle, Haider had to find other ways to get attention.
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First, he held a news conference on a snowy sidewalk next to some broken parking meters to illustrate city laxity on meter repairs. Later in the week, he traveled to a deserted Northwest Side warehouse to show that a thriving industry that once made Beatle Ringo Starr`s drums had fled Chicago for better economic climes.
Professorial and seemingly aloof from Chicago`s rough-and-tumble political realities, Haider made special efforts to tell the media that he was in the race to stay and would not bow out in favor of his former associate, Cook County Assessor Thomas Hynes.
As for Hynes, who plans to file his nominating petitions Monday in the new Chicago First political party, he seemed content last week to let Washington and Byrne slug it out while he stood to the side, making scholarly observations and offering himself up in the April 7 general election as an alternative to intracity warfare.
”This is not a high water mark for either mayor in this race,” said Robert Benjamin, Hynes` campaign spokesman.
Reflecting the political observation that the mayor`s race is one to be lost, not won, Benjamin noted that for Washington, ”every stumble is costly,” and for Byrne, her record is not without blemish.
The campaign strategy for Hynes is to be ”a presence,” Benjamin said.
”When he has spoken up, he has been the dominant voice.”
”The campaigning is going to become increasingly nasty, we believe. Hynes pledged to unify the city. To the greatest degree, we don`t want to get into the fray.”
Into the fray is exactly where Ald. Edward Vrdolyak (10th) wants to be, though he doesn`t always let the media know exactly where that is.
Campaign trail observers said last week that Vrdolyak`s campaign has taken on ”guerrilla” characteristics. The sometimes churlish alderman who has led the anti-administration bloc on the Chicago City Council for nearly four years has been emerging from the racquetball court or his Cook County Democratic organization chairman`s office in brief forays, when he assails Washington, Byrne, Hynes and the media, not necessarily in that order.
While clinging to his ”Anybody But Harold” campaign, Vrdolyak has made it clear that he thinks the best ”anybody” is himself, the candidate on the Illinois Solidarity Party in the Feb. 24 primary. Of Byrne, he says, ”I don`t think she has any issues. That leaves her in tough shape, that leaves her just getting the anti-Harold vote.”
And Hynes, his principal rival as the alternative candidate in the general election, he dismisses as ”a nonfactor.”
Mixed in generously in the campaign recipe last week was fundraising, and it was there that the benefits of the incumbency bore the most fruit. Washington held a $150-a-ticket fundraiser, in which he raised about $500,000, the same night Byrne held a $35-a-ticket fundraiser and spent much of it on dinner and cocktails for the guests.
Haider, Hynes and Vrdolyak have been relying on private contributions by close supporters and much smaller fundraisers in neighborhood gatherings.
If Vrdolyak dismisses his opponents as nonfactors, Byrne generally dismisses Vrdolyak, Hynes, Haider and any other candidates as nonfactors as well.
She points out, correctly, that the winner of Chicago`s Democratic mayoral primary has been the ultimate winner of the mayor`s office for more than 50 years. And, for the moment, she considers her only opponent to be Washington.
For the next five weeks, at least, she may be right.