When you’re right, you’re right.
And all of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s critics are right that it was wrong for Lightfoot’s deserves-to-fail reelection campaign to solicit teachers to solicit students of the city’s public schools to work for her reelection campaign in exchange for class credit.
A former city inspector general called the move “deeply, deeply problematic.” Local teachers union honchos called it a “shakedown” and “exploitative and wrong.” Mayoral election challenger Brandon Johnson called it “outrageous, desperate, and downright unethical,” an abuse of power.
This may be a case of Corruption Grade B rather than Grade A if, as seems slightly possible, nobody on Lightfoot’s team understood that they were crossing another line in the endless saga of incumbents’ shameless misuse of government-controlled resources for political gain.
First, Lightfoot’s campaign said “this is common practice” and that they were just giving students “the opportunity to learn. . . .”
Eventually, they ended up saying that out of an “abundance of caution, we will cease contact with [public school] employees.” Then that campaign staff were being admonished about the “solid wall” that must exist between the campaign and “contacts” with noncampaign government employees.
Is enlisting public school teachers to enlist public school students to help an incumbent mayor’s reelection campaign really so very different from other abuses we have seen before, especially in a super-corrupt town like Chicago?
It doesn’t change the fact that when you’re wrong, you’re wrong.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Craiyon
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3 replies on “Lightfoot, Heavy Hand”
But is it “wrong” if you don’t get indicted and do get re-elected?
But is it “wrong” if you get re-elected AND don’t get indicted?
Most people use social norms to gauge what is or is not ethical. More conservative types may use former norms that have slipt from fashion. When people cannot locate ethics in something more fundamental, the propensity is for deviations to be corrosive.
A sociopath such as are many of our politicians — and plainly Lightfoot — has no other guide but norms, and no concern about ethics other than to maintain the tolerance if not the favor of a coalition to keep him or her in power.