As Chicago’s mayor enters her last week on the job before a transfer of power on May 15, the Tribune Opinion section tries to answer the question: How will Lori Lightfoot be remembered? To read each piece, click the links below.
Editorial: The Lightfoot legacy comes tinged with a sense of what might have been
Lori Lightfoot had to deal with a situation faced by no previous mayor. You have to go back to Roswell B. Mason, mayor during the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, to find a chief executive who was dealt a comparable catastrophe and that fire burned out far more quickly than COVID-19, a mine field for any pol. Read more here.
Clarence Page: Mayor Lori Lightfoot wasn’t here to make friends — and that’s her loss
What went wrong? To borrow an overused motto from the world of reality TV, Lori Lightfoot wasn’t here to make friends. She didn’t promise to make enemies, either, but she developed quite a number of new critics, including some former allies. Read more here.
The postmortems on Lightfoot’s single term as mayor are in, and the reasons given are plenty. She was short-tempered and vulgar. She didn’t work well with others. But those were symptoms of a larger problem that hasn’t gotten much attention: Lightfoot’s inability to lead may have been the pathogen that caused her mayoralty to go belly up. Read more here.
Kam Buckner: Candidate Lightfoot and Mayor Lightfoot were on opposite ends of many fights
Many of her struggles lay in the truth of onetime New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s famous words, “Campaign in poetry; govern in prose.” Candidate Lightfoot and Mayor Lightfoot found themselves on the opposite ends of many fights. The inability to turn campaign promises into governing success plagued her administration and overshadowed her wins. Read more here.
Lori Lightfoot through the eyes of editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis
A selection of cartoons by Tribune editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis comments on Lori Lightfoot’s four-year tenure as mayor. See all the cartoons here.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].