As an old goat who came to town just in time to watch Council Wars erupt, I never, ever imagined the day would come when a candidate named Hynes would invoke—much less quote—the wisdom of the late, great Mayor Harold Washington.
Historically, winning the Democratic primary in Chicago was tantamount to winning the subsequent general election. But confronted with the prospect of a black mayor—particularly an outspoken one—white folks here lost their freaking minds. There’s really no other way to describe the six weeks of madness that followed the Democratic primary. Whites—including some of their elected officials—unleashed all the old stereotypes and assumptions about black people, often through crudely drawn, unsigned leaflets and flyers. If Washington were elected, they declared, businesses would flee, thugs would run the police department, and the streets would be unsafe for our wives and daughters. In the panic, thousands of white, lifelong Democrats voted for Bernie Epton, a quirky Republican state rep who campaigned under the slogan “Before It’s Too Late.”
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Meanwhile, the Daley wing got behind Tom Hynes—Dan’s dad—another lifelong Dem who was then the Cook County assessor and committeeman of the powerful 19th Ward Democratic organization. He didn’t want to divide the white vote in the primary either, so he formed yet another party, the Chicago First Party, and put together his own slate of candidates. His would-be clerk and treasurer informed reporters they were only running “in order to fulfill election law requirements that a third party have a full slate of candidates,” as the Sun-Times put it.
Officially, Alderman Burke endorsed Hynes. But he made it clear that he preferred any of the white candidates to Washington—Hynes, Byrne, Vrdolyak, or even Republican Don Haider. And he used his position as chairman of the City Council’s finance committee to steer damaging information about Washington to all the campaigns. “When Byrne held a press conference last week to savage the mayor’s record on hiring women, she based it on a personnel analysis from Burke’s think tank,” reported the Sun-Times. “Don Tomczak, a legislative analyst for the [finance] committee, was helpful on the personnel count.”
Both Vrdolyak and Haider stayed in the race, and Washington still got more than 50 percent of the vote—meaning he probably would have won even with only one white guy to run against.
Which brings us back to Tommy’s boy Dan and his campaign ad. The official rationale from the Hynes campaign is that it’s not hypocritical for Dan Hynes to use an interview with Harold Washington even though his father formed a third party to run against him because Dan was just an 18-year-old college kid at the time.
