Karen Lewis, who as president of the Chicago Teachers Union two years ago led the rank and file through one of the most bitter strikes in the city’s history, told the Chicago Sun-Times there’s a chance she’ll run for mayor of Chicago, challenging Rahm Emanuel.
“It’s 50-50,” the Sun-Times quoted her as saying. “There’s a possibility that you do and a possibility that you don’t. … This is not about hesitation. It’s about process.”
She said she has formed an informal exploratory committee, which will start raising money and circulating nominating petitions.
“The decision that gets made will be based on what’s best for the city and what’s best for me and my family. I’m not ready to even discuss what the deadline looks like. I know that’s frustrating, but I have to do things the way that’s comfortable for me.”
In today’s print edition on page 3, the Chicago Tribune quoted her as saying, “You want to have things in place. I’m a schoolteacher. We plan. That lesson plan isn’t done yet.”
In recent years, Mr Emanuel has alienated the African-American community. The Chicago teachers’ strike was the first in 25 years, and at the end of that school year, Mr Emanuel made sure 50 public schools closed down and charter schools were opened. Most of the school expansion took place on the north side, whereas African-American communities are concentrated on the south side of the city.
“What’s missing is a participatory democracy—the fact that people actually get to have some say in how things get done,” Ms Lewis was quoted as saying, in describing the absence of any democratic process in Chicago, especially during the hearings that addressed the largest mass school closing in US history.
The nonpartisan mayoral election in Chicago will take place on Feb 24, 2015. In April 2013, the Chicago Reader speculated that a campaign between Ms Lewis and Mr Emanuel would be a “bomb-throwing campaign,” writing that Ms Lewis appeared to be more interested in “playing kingmaker than king.”
