March 05--Clearly, most journalists in town didn't know how to handle a problem like Willie Wilson.
An apparently genial fellow with a charitable heart. An inspiring rags-to-riches biography. But a plausible mayor of Chicago? Lord, no!
He had ambition. He had $1.8 million available to mount a largely self-financed campaign. But he quite obviously didn't have clue about how to run a major U.S. city.
The Tribune's candidate questionnaire asked each of the five hopefuls how Chicago can pay down its existing debt and still provide necessary services, and how to address the city's looming pension crisis. Wilson's submitted answer to both questions: "As a new candidate I have to access the problem with my business expertise."
OK, he blamed those and other strangely clipped demurrals on staff error, gave himself a mulligan and posted a set of longer but barely more satisfying answers to his campaign website.
"I have a very specific two-part plan (to address the pension) problem," for example. "One part involves the cash matching due to these pension funds and the other has to do with federal law and the restructuring of the pension plans. These plans are in the process of being detailed out by my economic and legal advisers but they are real and unique. I will disclose more details when all of the law issues are explained properly."
They were vague even by the debased standards of a political process that rewards evasion.
And where Wilson's policy prescriptions weren't gauzy, they seemed more like whimsical notions -- he said he wanted to take 75 percent of Chicago police officers out of their squad cars, reopen Meigs Field as an airport, open trade academies in recently shuttered Chicago schools and so on.
In debates he was unimpressive at best. What his supporters described as a "Louisiana drawl" was barely intelligible at times, and when offered the opportunity of making closing statements at several forums, he instead delivered a generic prayer.
But take a comically amateurish candidate with a seventh-grade education, add lots of money and you have a player, one whose unfitness for office was the naked emperor of the campaign. Some reporters and broadcast hosts even fell to calling him "Dr. Wilson" in unctuous reference to his assortment of honorary degrees.
Was it racial sensitivity (Wilson is African-American, as was fellow candidate William Walls)? Deference to the modest traction he showed in the polls? A commitment to objectivity?
Whatever, the only sign that we didn't take him seriously was that we never bothered to subject his proposals to scrutiny -- does anyone in the field of law enforcement think it would be wise to put three-quarters of patrol officers on foot? What would be the cost and investment return of building a new small airport on the lakefront? Does the trade school idea make economic sense?
Why pick on the guy, right?
I bring this up now, a week and a half after he came in third with 10.6 percent of the vote, because the media remain on Wilson watch: To which candidate will he throw his support in the April 7 runoff, Mayor Rahm Emanuel or second-place finisher Cook County Commissioner Chuy Garcia?
The assumption is that those who voted for him will be loyal enough to follow his lead and become a decisive bloc in what looks to be a close final heat. I question the assumption, but Emanuel and Garcia, who have both reportedly had lengthy, closed-door courtship sessions with Wilson, seem to buy it.
They buy it even though Wilson doesn't seem to grasp what an endorsement is.
"I've been very clear I'm going to vote for Garcia," he told WBBM-Ch. 2 reporter Dana Kozlov last week. "But if the community tells me to endorse (Emanuel), that's what I'm going to do."
That statement, like the idea that Wilson is now a power broker by dint of his vanity entry into politics, is absurd.
How to handle Willie Wilson now? Treat him like just another rich guy with an opinion, no more, no less.
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NOTE
Hermene Hartman, publisher of 'N'Dgo, took a swipe at Wilsonthe other day:
The White media has romanticized Willie Wilson .... Willie is not a Black leader and will not broker the Black vote to the candidates, no more that he is a real PhD. Money can only buy so much. In many quarters, he is considered an embarrassment as he mumbles his way and pays for the singing stage and the pulpit. ...When he speaks about fairness it resonates a reality, but some of his ideas were downright laughable, like Stepin Fetchit had returned. White media cannot say this and would not dare for fear of being called racist, but responsible journalism must label it for what it is. Willie has spoken the truth about the sentiment and reality of the Black community, but also has proven that he does not have a real clue about politics.
She elaborated on this in an interview with Carol Felsenthal of Chicago Magazine.
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