Former Mayor Jane Byrne exchanged taunts and barbs with several hundred student supporters of Mayor Harold Washington Monday in a raucous appearance at Northeastern Illinois University.
While Washington supporters challenged Byrne on the North Side campus, the mayor`s campaign unveiled two stinging commercials that criticize Byrne`s administration and mark a shift in his media strategy.
Washington also toured a South Side neighborhood that he said had received $5 million in loans through his administration, met with Asian-American reporters at a news conference and attended a reception fundraiser in Chinatown.
Byrne has been noted for the low-key style of her comeback bid, but she appeared to relish the chance to joust with students who shot hostile questions at her and several times drowned out her answers with boos.
Ironically, Byrne talked of the need to overcome ”great disunity” in Chicago before the crowd of 400 students, which split about evenly between the political camps and warmed up for her speech by chanting ”Byrne” and
”Washington” at basketball-arena decibel levels.
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”Those Bears chants are real good, shall we do them again,” Byrne at one point taunted the Washington partisans, who had ”woof-woofed” their pleasure at a question to Byrne from a student wearing a Washington button.
”You came with no facts, sir,” Byrne snapped at another student who charged that she attempted to reduce Hispanic representation through a remap of city wards.
When one student asked Byrne a question in rapid-fire Spanish, trying to test the former mayor`s reputed bilingual fluency, several members of the audience shouted, ”Speak English, this is America.”
Byrne, who also was greeted with cries of support and shouts for the Washington crowd to be silent, spoke of attempting to unify the city and said she would create a ”Fairness Commission” to assure that city contracts and services were doled out equitably to all races and both sexes.
”Something has come over this city. It is disunity, a great disunity,”
she said. ”We must come together. We must lower the harsh voices, and think of the important issues facing us.”
Byrne said after the speech that she believed that the antagonistic students were a ”plant,” but declined to speculate on whether it was orchestrated by Washington`s campaign.
Byrne also charged that Washington is distorting her record in two new commercials that accuse her of falsifying crime statistics and raising tax levies to a record level.
”We`re just telling the truth,” Washington said.
Both commercials begin by asking the viewer, ”Which Jane Byrne do you believe?” and offering the same photo of her from a different angle.
In one, an announcer said $386 million in levies was raised and the former mayor still left the city with a $168 million deficit.
In the other commercial, an announcer said that crime statistics under the Byrne administration were underreported by as much as 48 percent and her police superintendent was indicted.
Washington`s media campaign had largely focused on his own record without mentioning campaign opponents. David Axelrod, the media consultant who produced the commercial spots, said the new commercials mark a strategy to emphasize Byrne`s record in the coming weeks.
Byrne said Washington`s spots misstate the revenue raised by tax increases during her administration and challenged him to cut taxes. ”If he didn`t like my taxes, he`s been mayor for four years, why didn`t he reduce them?” she said. ”He added another $356 million on top of that.”
Washington, meanwhile, led reporters and bureaucrats on a tour of the Kenwood-Oakland community and to several city projects.
”We`ve been successful in balancing the needs of the communities and the downtown developments,” Washington said. ”The city needs downtown developments for jobs and a tax base to pay our bills. But we`ve also paid attention to the neighborhoods, where three-fourths of the jobs come from, where the children play day in and day out. Both can be done.”
The mayor claimed credit for providing $5 million in loans to multi-unit home buyers and hundreds of thousands of dollars for weatherization and renovation in the community.
”All this contrasts sharply with my predecessor, who did nothing, zero, in your neighborhoods,” Washington said. ”Instead, she had a boondoggle, hiring patronage employees on election day to work for the betterment of her campaign.”
During the tour, Washington was escorted by Ald. Timothy Evans (4th), community organizer Bob Lucas and U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.), who also spent the weekend campaigning with the mayor. The tour, through a few of Evans` strongest precincts, also was aimed at boosting Evans in his re-election contest against Toni Preckwinkle, an employee of the planning department.
Later in the day, Byrne held a press conference across the street from a Chicago Housing Authority high-rise where two children died in a fire last month, using the fire-scarred building as a backdrop to charges that Washington has neglected to provide adequate life-saving services.
Byrne said that Washington scuttled a program launched near the end of her administration to increase ambulances and paramedic services.
”All this time, the people who need and have a right to vital services are kept at risk,” she said. ”They pay the price of Washington`s
mismanagment.”
As Byrne spoke, television cameras panned up to blackened windows on the 15th floor of the Henry Horner Homes at 111 N. Wood St., scene of a Jan. 11 fire that killed two children. Firefighters were forced to haul hoses up 15 flights of stairs to the fire because both elevators in the building were broken.
The press conference was a last-minute addition to Byrne`s schedule and came one day after the release of a Tribune poll that found only 14 percent of CHA residents think they`re better off today than they were when Washington was elected. One in four residents said he thinks Byrne cares more about CHA residents than Washington does.
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The Henry Horner Homes was also recently at the center of a rare split in Washington`s City Hall ranks. After the fire, Ald. Wallace Davis (27th) said he would introduce a resolution calling for the resignation of the entire CHA board. Davis later backed off from the threat.
A campaign aide, however, said Byrne expects to receive 15 percent of the vote from CHA residents and that the appearance marked no increased effort to woo support from public housing residents.