With a few weeks and counting to the epic mayoral showdown, Mick Dumke and I thought we’d apply a little truth serum to the campaign, as part of our February 3 talk show extravaganza at the Hideout.
In addition to obsessively discussing the ins and the outs of the race, we’ll take a look at some recent campaign mailings to see if any of them offer anything vaguely resembling the truth.
Other than the correct spelling of the candidate’s name.
This, of course, means looking at Mayor Rahm’s mailings because, at the moment, he seems to be the only candidate who can afford them.
Lesson for mayoral challengers Fioretti, Garcia, Walls, and Wilson: if you want to raise more money, it helps to take about $17 million from our dead-broke public schools and give it to a bunch of wealthy bankers.
For exhibit A, I’ll bring in the flyer the mayor recently sent to my home, in which he congratulates himself for having had the courage to raise the city’s minimum wage.
This is fertile ground for discussion. Is it courageous to do what 88 percent of the electorate wanted you to do? That’s roughly the percentage of Chicagoans who voted yes when asked in last year’s referendum whether we should raise the minimum wage.