Why Chicago mayoral fight bears watching elsewhere

The mayor is proud to tout his work expanding access to pre-kindergarten programs, raising the minimum wage, and making two years of community college available to everybody. He talks admiringly about his city’s ethnic diversity and stresses his commitment to making it a place where “every resident in every neighborhood has a fair shot at success.”

This is not a preview of the re-election campaign of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a hero to progressives around the country. It’s the actual platform of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. So it’s mildly ironic that the very sorts of left-of-center voters who elected de Blasio and other mayors blocked Emanuel’s re-election on Tuesday and forced him into a runoff campaign that will not be settled until April 7.

The champion of change was Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a county commissioner who quickly made himself a counter-brand. If everyone here calls their chief executive “Rahm,” everyone now refers to Garcia by his nickname, “Chuy.” The Rahm-Chuy Show prom- ises to be another storied encounter staged by a city that knows how to turn politics into drama — in this case, a production that could draw a class line across Chicago.

Garcia is unabashed in making this contest an ideological struggle. He has cast Emanuel — who received an endorsement from his old boss, President Obama, and vastly outspent his opponent — as a local reincarnation of Mitt Romney, “Mayor 1 percent.”

“Today, we the people have spoken,” Garcia declared on election night after his showing far surpassed his standing in pre-election polls. “Not the people with the money and the power and the connections, not the giant corporations, the big-money special interests, the hedge funds and Hollywood celebrities who poured tens of millions of dollars into the mayor’s campaign. They all had their say. They’ve had their say for too long.”

In this round, Emanuel received 45.4 percent of the vote, well short of the 50 percent plus one that he needed to avoid a runoff, to 33.9 percent for Garcia. Willie Wilson, a self-financed African-American businessman, received 10.6 percent and two other candidates split the rest.

The ideological frame on the race is an important part of the story, and it’s reinforced by the victories of several anti-Emanuel members of the City Council whom the mayor’s supporters tried to oust. Nationally, the race has been characterized as a shadow battle between the Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren wings of the Democratic Party. Garcia is clearly embracing the Warren role.

But this take oversimplifies the dynamics here because politics is also local, and personal.

Emanuel is one of the most complicated, and thus most interesting, characters in American politics. An unapologetically pro-business Democrat, his legendary feuds with liberals, often carried out at high decibel levels, created a legion of enemies who cheered his humbling. He also has a fondness for policies — on education, pre-kindergarten and community colleges — that reflect his passion for widespread upward mobility. The denouement of the RahmChuy Show could depend on whether the second Rahm can save the first.