GOP’s er Dems’ Vallas Next Chicago Boss?

WSJ asks “Who Will Save Chicago?” & suggests it’s Paul Vallas who’s a one-time Boss Daley protégé & Bridgeport neighbor, but doesn’t mention he’s lost as many high-profile elections as the state’s Stevenson dad-son team …

Not that Mr. Vallas isn’t a giant step up from the union hack he’ll be running against in the run-off primary election in April. As the WSJ editors say: The other guy, a union organizer, is “a wholly owned subsidiary of the CTU [aka teacher’s union]” while “Mr. Vallas’ vow to stop the city-wide crime wave [in 2022 it was 5 times that of NYC’s] & fix broken schools [many students still can’t read or count at grade level] resonated with voters. Nor is there a problem with Vallas having lost elections in the past for governor, lieutenant governor and, yes, mayor of Chicago, in a checkered political career dating back to 2002. Hell, Vallas is almost a household name in the Windy City, not just by virtue of those failures, but his reputation for doing a decent job in his appointed educational posts, including as Supt of the Bridgeport Public Schools & CEO of both the Philadelphia and Chicago Public Schools. (Let’s be fair, those were TOUGH posts to manage.)

This ex-Chicagoan who still loves this once beautiful city now hopes he lives to see his ex-neighbors get their heads out of their butts & vote for the right progressive aka least radical Democrat this time. As the WSJ concluded: “The Vallas-[CTU Hack] showdown is as clear a contrast as voters could get, esp among candidates of the Democratic Party. It will test whether Chicago can start on the road to recovery or continues its tragic fall.” Now, if only the Boss’s Ghost can get his new neighbors to the polls for Paul & bury the fact that he once told Sun-Times muckraker Carol Marin that he was considering to run for Mayor of Chicago as a REPUBLICAN.

Davd Soul