Tag: exits

“There’s been this obsession that ‘She’s not nice’ and ‘She rubs people the wrong way.’ Well, we got a lot of shit done,” Lightfoot said during an interview in her office on the 5th Floor of City Hall, describing how her critics have portrayed her. “And I am proud. I’m very proud of it, unapologetically.”

She even played off that tension in a farewell address two days ago, after the interview, taking a swipe at pundits and the news media for “obsessing” about her temperament. Then, she said, the four-letter word she was fond of “was spelled h-o-p-e.”

After she steps down on Monday, leaving electoral politics entirely, her photo will be added to a wall in the lobby of City Hall featuring pictures of her 55 predecessors, where just one woman and two other brown faces are on display. Lightfoot even used her exit to reignite her long-running tension with the media by deciding to sit down with just one print media organization before she leaves office: POLITICO.

It’s one way she broadcasts that she lost reelection but not her right jab. In her mind, disruption was what voters bought when they elected her over longtime Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who also chairs the county Democratic Party.

“I came into government with a mandate of 75 percent of votes to break up the status quo and to make sure that I was doing things and putting ordinary residents of our city front and center,” Lightfoot said. “With that mandate, you’re going to disrupt the status quo. You’re going to make some people angry.”

Given how important public safety was in a mayor’s race that attracted nine Democratic candidates this year, Lightfoot said the party needs to figure out how to balance its themes. Progressive Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson won running to Lightfoot’s left and that of other Black mayors, including Eric Adams in New York City, on policing, so she said it’s critical to weave multiple issues together.

“As Democrats, we can’t just talk about police reform or criminal justice reform. What we leave out when we just focus on those two parts of a larger whole, is we leave out the victims and witnesses who have to be at the table,” said Lightfoot, who once served as president of an oversight board of Chicago’s police force before she was elected mayor.

“If we don’t talk about the grandmas, the moms, the kids, the families that are under siege in neighborhoods that are violent here and across the country … and we don’t advocate for them,” she said, “we are missing out entirely.”