Chicago: Still Not Byrned Up?

The mayor rides a softer image into a strong lead

Chicago's modern political history reads like a florid novel, chockablock with shameless rascals and small-time chiselers, ethnic vendettas, loose talk, brazen vote fraud and suspicious sums of cash. The protagonist of Volume I, of course, was Mayor Richard J. Daley, the city's flinty czar for 21 years until his death in 1976. The plot of the sequel, still unfolding, is no less vivid.

In next week's Democratic mayoral primary, Incumbent Jane Byrne, for years a Daley protegee, is opposed in her campaign for a second term by her patron's eldest son, State's Attorney Richard M. Daley, and by black U.S. Representative Harold Washington, a spunky orator. The winner of the primary will be a shoo-in for the general election seven weeks later; Chicago, its 50-member city council entirely Democratic, last elected a Republican mayor in 1927.

Mayor Byrne, 48, is the heavy favorite, even though as recently as last fall she seemed to be in real jeopardy. But a Gallup poll released late last month found Byrne to be the first choice of 45% of registered voters, with 23% preferring Washington and 22% for Daley. The campaign expenditures are even more lopsided: Byrne has raised $9.7 million since her surprising, underfinanced election in 1979, while Daley has got contributions and loans of $1.8 million, and Washington just $377,000. Taken together, the campaign will probably be the most expensive mayoral election in U.S. history.

Much of Byrne's huge budget has gone into TV advertising. Her slick commercials have run as often as 15 times daily since November, the most effective contending that the mayor singlehanded righted Chicago's wild fiscal course. (The commercials pass over the resulting $407 million in tax increases over the past four years.) Other ads project a new, less shrill image, helped by Byrne's gradual superficial transformation: her hair style and clothing have become more muted, and she has remained uncharacteristically placid in the face of bitter campaign attacks.

Congressman Washington, 60, who spent a month in jail in 1972 for failing to pay $508.05 in income taxes, has only an outsider's chance. Yet in a city 40% black, he might win if he picks up a solid majority of the 650,000 registered black voters and a liberal tenth of the whites. His likely effect, however, will be to hurt Daley's chances of exploiting black antagonism to Byrne. As Cook County's chief prosecutor since 1980, when he beat a Byrne-backed candidate, Daley, 40, has impressed the legal community as being industrious and levelheaded. He has cast doubt on Byrne's putative fiscal remedies, pointing out that she vastly overstates her inherited budget deficit and in effect has been borrowing from municipal pension funds to help balance the books. He is, however, an awkward campaigner, and political analysts wonder how much Daley's dynastic surname will help: the electorate remains ambivalent about the corrupt but efficiently run era of Daley the elder. Still, the young Daley carries his father's battered old briefcase to work with him every day, as if dressing for the part. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.