Byrne Butts Back In

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Unwilling to take no for an answer, the mayor re-enters Chicago's race

In the days of the all-powerful Democratic machine--that is, for nearly all of the past half-century--Chicago's mayoral elections generated about as much suspense as the drying of paint. No more. When Windy City voters choose a mayor three weeks from now, leaders of the national Democratic Party and black communities all over the country will be watching not just with interest but with more than a tinge of apprehension. The election has turned into a test of how much power blacks can exercise by working within the Democratic Party, their political home since early New Deal days.

The issue, unmistakably, is whether white Democrats will vote in large enough numbers for a black candidate who is carrying their standard. Congressman Harold Washington, 60, won that designation on Feb. 22, when he unexpectedly triumphed in the Democratic primary. He took only 36.3% of the vote, nearly all from blacks who had registered in record numbers. But that was enough, barely, to top two white candidates: Incumbent Mayor Jane Byrne, 48, and State's Attorney Richard M. Daley, 40, son of the mayor who ran the city machine with an iron fist until his death in 1976.

In Chicago, a city where Republicans are so heavily outnumbered that they have captains in only a few hundred of the 2,914 precincts, the primary should have ended the race. But this time the Democratic organization and its official candidate did not exactly hurry to embrace each other. Only half of the 50 ward committeemen endorsed Washington, who declared that he would not "grovel" for their support and pledged during the primary campaign to strip the machine of its muscle, city hall patronage. Park District Superintendent Edmund Kelly went so far as to endorse Republican Candidate Bernard Epton, 61, a millionaire lawyer who had some slim hope of profiting from the dissension to become the first G.O.P. mayor elected since 1927. And then last week Mayor Byrne suddenly upset all the calculations by announcing that she would re-enter the race as a write-in candidate, giving those voters dismayed by Washington's nomination not just a white but a white Democrat to select as an alternative.

It was a startling reversal for Byrne, who had pledged her support to Washington the day after losing to him in the primary and as late as March 1 scoffed that a write-in campaign "couldn't be done." Though there were grim cracks that she had launched a "white-in" campaign, Byrne stoutly insisted that her decision "has nothing to do with race. I'm not running for blacks or whites or the Democratic Party or the Republican Party or any political organization. I'm running for Chicago." In fact, she seems to be running for her political life. Her imperious and erratic performance during four years as mayor so alienated machine and maverick Democrats alike that there is little possibility she will be nominated for any other office.

It is clear that Byrne's only hope of hanging on is to enlist the many Chicagoans who are reluctant to vote for either a black or a Republican--especially if that Republican, like Epton, is Jewish. Says Don Rose, a Democratic strategist who helped engineer Byrne's election in 1979: "This is purely a racial gambit." Agrees Alderman Martin Oberman, a Byrne critic: "She's thinking that Epton is not catching on, and there are all of those white votes out there to grab."

The issue will not come up very openly. Byrne plans to run mostly "educational" ads to teach her supporters how to cast a write-in ballot. In Illinois this is currently a cumbersome procedure: a voter must first write out the name of the office, then draw a box, then put an X in the box and after all that write in the name of the candidate. Conventional wisdom is that no candidate can inspire many voters to go to all that trouble.

Washington would not be an easy opponent under any circumstances. Though he came across as an arrogant maverick after the primary, more recently he has been campaigning harder in white districts and reaching out to a suspicious business community, presenting himself as a reassuring moderate. (He has been careful to distance himself from the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who campaigned for him in the primary but is widely regarded as a firebrand.) When Byrne got back in the race, Washington promptly denounced her as a sore loser. Says Washington: "When you're struck out, you're out. You don't come back and ask for three more strikes."

In fact, Byrne seems to have done more than Washington could to unify the party hierarchy behind its official nominee. Believing that her candidacy will both fail and leave a legacy of racial bitterness, white Democratic leaders are hastening to disavow any connection with it and some who had been fence-sitting have come out openly for Washington. For example, Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a major power in Chicago politics, issued a statement branding Byrne "a spoiler" and declaring that Washington "deserves the support of all Democrats."

Nonetheless, politicians are uneasily wary of the power of even an unvoiced racial appeal in Chicago, a city so polarized that two-thirds of its neighborhoods are either 95% white or 95% black. As one national Democratic strategist asks rhetorically: "What do you think is Topic A in all the ethnic bars in Chicago?" With alienated voters, the mild-mannered Epton, who has been disavowing racism, is not lighting any fires. Byrne's candidacy has dimmed whatever slender chance he might have had. Asked last week what he could do to revive his campaign, the Republican wryly replied, "Tomorrow I'm planning an earthquake. I don't know how to arrange a flood."

Byrne's analysis is that Washington will get no more than 500,000 votes, while she will hold the nearly 400,000 that she won in the primary and pick up the great majority of the 350,000 who chose Daley. (Epton by her calculations will get less than 100,000.) Many analysts think her arithmetic is flawed. To begin with, they observe, Washington, who got 84% of the black vote in the primary, should get virtually all of it in the general election. His chances of capturing more than the 6% of the white vote that he won in the primary look bright; many Daley voters were not anti-black but anti-Byrne and, as party loyalists, may now be disposed to vote for Washington. But other political professionals are not ready to count out the incumbent. Says Ted Van Dyk, president of the Center for National Policy, a Democratic think tank in Washington: "Unfortunately, the write-in candidacy will be sufficiently divisive that Jane Byrne stands a good chance of winning."

If she does win, warns Milton Rakove, a political expert at the University of Illinois, blacks will be so angry that "the city will be ungovernable." Moreover, the effects would be felt far outside Chicago. Blacks across the country would take Harold Washington's defeat as a sign that whites simply will not vote for any black candidate. It would show, asserts the Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, that "there is something wrong with the philosophy of the party. Democrats would have to name themselves the white Democrats. Blacks would see the donkey as a jackass for a long time."

Some black leaders are already talking of running a black candidate in next year's Democratic presidential primaries in order to demonstrate enough clout to have a strong voice in the selection of the nominee and the writing of the party platform. A defeat for Washington in Chicago might intensify this movement, since it would spread the impression that blacks cannot count on white good will to get their point of view accepted. In the general election nobody expects a significant number of blacks to vote for Ronald Reagan or any other Republican, but a what's-the-use-of-voting feeling among blacks could lead many of them to stay home and grievously hurt the chances of the eventual Democratic candidate. At minimum, whether Washington wins or loses, a divisive Chicago election could so damage the party's unity as to hurt its chances of winning Illinois, a crucial swing state in any presidential election.

It may not come to that, of course. The mood of crowds watching the St. Patrick's Day parade in Chicago last week was surprisingly cheerful. Washington, Byrne and Epton all marched, separately. Each drew a mixture of cheers and boos, but even the booing sounded good-natured. Given the latent racial antagonisms Byrne's candidacy could rouse, however, it may seem a long way to the vote on April 12.

--By George J. Church.

Reported by Christopher Ogden/Chicago

With reporting by Christopher Ogden This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.