Rahm Emanuel shied away from making the obvious observation that his mayoral bid could benefit greatly from Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart‘s decision not to run in the Feb. 22 election.
“Nobody is going to hand you this election but the voters,” Emanuel said as he began a news conference Wednesday after a campaign stop on the Northwest Side.
“The dynamics, obviously, when somebody of Tom Dart’s quality and capacity gets out, that has an impact,” he added. “I’ll leave that interpretation to others.”
Asked if his likely candidacy had discouraged Dart from running, Emanuel replied, “I don’t think you can scare Tom Dart away.”
Democratic State Sen. James Meeks, a South Side minister who is considering a mayoral campaign, said Dart’s withdrawal “definitely favors me” because he had lobbied many people who told him that their choice had been between him and Dart.
Asked to describe the traits that he and Dart share, Meeks replied with a thinly veiled jab at Emanuel: “The fact that we live here. That we’ve been working here. That we have a track record of addressing issues here.”
Meeks said his lawyers are investigating whether they could challenge Emanuel’s residency in the city and were likely to do so after the candidates for mayor file nominating petitions next month. “I don’t see why they wouldn’t,” Meeks said.
Another mayoral hopeful, former city school board president Gery Chico, said he thinks Dart’s withdrawal from contention would benefit him. Chico said he expects some mutual friends who were considering backing Dart would now side with him.
Without naming anyone, Chico said he expects endorsements soon from “six or seven committeemen,” most from the South and Southwest Sides.
Like the other would-be mayors, City Clerk Miguel del Valle praised Dart, and he said he is “working hard to garner his support and endorsement.”
Despite Dart’s absence from the field, Emanuel said the election would mark an opportunity for the city to “have a real, thorough debate, something we haven’t had in 21 years.”
He said he wants to focus on discussing important issues such as crime and city finances. But the most specific descriptions of his fiscal policy proposals on Wednesday, such as there were, came when he said: “We can’t keep doing what we have been doing as a city and expect different results as it looks to the budget.”
Other candidates have been similarly vague on the issues facing the cash-strapped city.