Editorial: The Lightfoot legacy comes tinged with a sense of what might have been

Lori Lightfoot, an attorney and former prosecutor with a strong interest in police reform and other civic issues, took office as the 56th mayor of Chicago on May 20, 2019. Her election broke many notable barriers. Lightfoot became the first Black woman to run the city and only the second female mayor in Chicago’s history and only the third Black mayor. She also became the first openly lesbian Black woman to run a major city in the United States.

Lightfoot was afforded just 10 months of normalcy. Then came COVID-19 and the city was plunged into a crisis that would eclipse most all else for at least the next two years.

The Chicago Teachers Union led a successful and unrelenting fight to keep the public schools closed far longer than most suburban, parochial and private schools. The Loop was suddenly silenced; its sidewalks eerily quieted and its retail businesses devastated.

Lightfoot was tasked with preventing panic even as a terrifying, temporary medical facility was rising at McCormick Place and Chicagoans were seeing refrigerated trucks overflowing with New York bodies on their TV screens.

By the summer of 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, city streets were filled with protesters. Crime spiraled, a consequence of systemic disinvestment, cynical opportunism and the factors mentioned above.

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.

So when historians assess Lightfoot, they’ll focus on the pandemic and will judge her as a indefatigable mayor, both a meme and a diminutive whirling dervish, who did all she reasonably could to keep Chicagoans safe, leading this city through a global crisis far more effectively than many of her peers. That was both this mayor’s greatest challenge and her signature achievement, and the city’s COVID-19 response should be a source of pride for both Lightfoot and her staff.

But memories are shorter than ever. History reveals that most crisis-era leaders rarely have survived. They typically struggled to change gears and, even if they tried, they still were seen as walking reminders of eras to be forgotten fast. So it has gone with Lightfoot.

There are signs that this mayor is exiting City Hall thinking that her work has been unappreciated. She has avoided legacy-burnishing exit interviews with media outlets, and she certainly does not appear to be doing anything comparable to her predecessor’s Hollywood-style exit in 2019, when Rahm Emanuel played himself on a TV show.

Lightfoot, the evidence suggests, always lacked Emanuel’s ability to compartmentalize criticism and feels too much to shrug the haters away. But whereas Emanuel always had the business community in his corner, Lightfoot also lacks any natural ally with whom to celebrate.

She has detractors on the left, who view her as too conservative on matters of crime, cops and punishment, too focused on personal responsibility, too reluctant to use inequity as an excuse, and insufficiently supportive of progressive values.

Those on the right, meanwhile, typically view her as too focused on neighborhoods at the expense of downtown (notwithstanding the excellent idea of the INVEST South/West program), too short on management competency, and as having presided over a serious dive in the city’s reputation as a safe and workable place to visit, to raise a child or to open an office.

When the city’s wealthier residents complained that their relative idylls were changing for the worse, Lightfoot was not above suggesting that they now had a taste of what their neighbors in this segregated city had suffered through for years. She was right, of course, but rich people do not like to hear that. And everyone has the right to feel safe.

The fall of San Francisco, of course, has been far more drastic than anything in Chicago, but most Chicagoans don’t allow for that. There is a battle underway for a once-moderate, once-pragmatic Chicago’s soul. Lightfoot mostly governed from the center-left in an era when such a lane is far emptier than the much louder ones on either side.

Worse, most members of the media, the ones who forged her narrative, viewed her as a very reluctant convert to the requisite transparency of city governance, and they had the evidence. She did not ameliorate that perception through the time-honored schmooze. What everyone saw is what most everyone got.

She could probably have still made everything work had she been more consistent and less volatile in the eyes of her staffers, who often did not know which version of the mayor was about to walk through the door, and less inclined to be abrasive with those who just wanted to be her allies.

We’ve heard from those who said that Lightfoot typically preferred to stand alone and was far more comfortable in combative, prosecutorial mode than in sharing credit or forging equal partnerships. That might well not have been intentional, and the charge is neither entirely fair nor even fully accurate. But it was a perception that Lightfoot allowed to become reality and that made no effort to change, because she was insufficiently self-reflective to acknowledge the issue in the first place.

Had she been able to do so, had she been able to step back and talk about a pending pivot to a different era for Chicago and a refreshed commitment to collegiality, transparency and optimism, we have no doubt that this month would have seen the beginning of a smart, talented and deeply passionate mayor’s second term.

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