City Treasurer Miriam Santos, the first Hispanic to hold citywide office, Tuesday emphatically won the Democratic primary for treasurer, swamping Hyde Park Ald. Lawrence Bloom (5th) by better than 2 to 1.
Ald. James Laski (23rd) was the winner in the Democratic primary contest for the city clerk nomination, easily dispatching State Sen. Rickey Hendon.
The Santos-Bloom contest had been the liveliest-and sometimes nastiest-rivalry in an otherwise comatose election season as the two candidates charged, countercharged and spent their way to the Tuesday confrontation that turned out to be a landslide for the incumbent.
With a win in the primary virtually assuring victory in the April general election, Santos, 39, now has a post she can use to vault to a higher-profile office, a widely predicted career path for the feisty Puerto Rican-American.
Bloom, 51, ending his 16-year aldermanic career as a leading independent representing Hyde Park, has said he probably will now retire from public life and concentrate on the downtown law practice he shares with his 83-year-old father.
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With only half the vote counted, Bloom called Santos to congratulate her and then told campaign supporters, “I consider myself a winner too. You can’t serve your city for 16 years through very historic times and not consider yourself a winner.”
Bloom, a key supporter of the late Mayor Harold Washington, told some 50 supporters gathered in his law office building north of the Loop, “I was standing there when Harold Washington won . . . and I tell you, becoming a private citizen will become a pleasure too.”
Bloom had hoped that a heavy African-American vote, plus white lakefront support, would move him past Santos and into the second-floor City Hall offices, just down the hall from the City Council where he became a financial expert and served for a time as chairman of the Budget Committee.
Patricia Rogers, 47, a self-employed financial consultant and 7th Ward GOP committeeman, easily won the GOP primary for treasurer, running against little-known West Sider Melvin Delk, 42.
In the GOP primary race for clerk, perennial candidate Edward Howlett was unchallenged.
For Chicagoans yearning for a sizzling election, the best they could do was the slow boil generated by Santos and Bloom, who together spent close to $400,000 on TV ads designed to make the other candidate look bad.
But with the city in good fiscal shape, the race came down to who had better name recognition and help from key aldermen.
Bloom accused Santos of everything from sloppy bookkeeping to taking a Chicago policeman as a taxpayer-paid “consort” on non-business-related trips out of town. But the charges, spread with the help of a $160,000 TV and radio budget, clearly did not raise many negatives against the incumbent or give voters a compelling reason to turn her out of an office she has held for six years since she was appointed by Mayor Richard Daley to fill the vacancy in 1989.
She won the job handily in 1991 and sought re-election on a platform that said, basically, the city was in sound financial shape. With the city’s bond rating recently improved, voters clearly agreed, endorsing her again for a job that consists of banking city tax dollars and voting on four city worker pension boards.
An undercurrent of the Santos-Bloom race was the feud between former Daley prot eg e Santos and the popular mayor. Daley had pledged neutrality and wouldn’t say for whom he cast his ballot on Tuesday.