It’s crow-eating time.
A month or so ago, most folks in the ward didn’t even know his name; many of them still don’t know how to pronounce it (A-may-ah Puh-war). He’s a program assistant in the Office of Emergency Management at Northwestern University. He’s only lived in the ward for the last four years. He’s not from Chicago, having grown up in the suburbs. And unlike mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel, he can’t even claim that his relatives hail from Chicago. Pawar’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1972.
In fact, a lot of the younger guys in the league probably thought Schulter’s first name was Fuckin’—as in, “that fuckin’ Schulter!”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But it was love from the start when a mutual friend introduced them in the fall of 2009. As both men tell the story, Pawar laid out his reasons for running at their first meeting. He told Kuhn he was tired of rubber-stamp aldermen; he wanted to be the kind of legislator who scrutinized the mayor’s proposals as opposed to routinely approving them. “We’re in a crisis—on the verge of going bankrupt,” says Pawar. “We can’t go back to business as usual.”
In fact, he didn’t have enough money to buy a campaign phone number or hire a staff. He convinced Sam Yanover, a friend from Maine East High School who’d been an advance man in President Obama’s campaign, to work for free as his campaign manager. He got a couple of graduate school friends from the University of Chicago, Jim Poole and Charna Epstein, to help him write his position papers. And in February 2010 they launched Pawar’s website. “We were hoping to get a groundswell of support,” Yanover says.
“We stashed our signs and stuff at Timber Lanes and basically operated out of a van,” says Yanover.
Meanwhile, Jacks laced into Schulter. “He said, ‘An alderman is not a king. And a ward is not his kingdom. And he doesn’t get to anoint his successor,’” says Pawar.
