Remember the scene from Citizen Kane, in which political boss Jim W. Gettys threatens to expose Charles Foster Kane’s affair with a chippy opera singer?
Kane tries to reason with Gettys by calling him a gentleman.
“I am not a gentleman,” Gettys snaps. “I don’t even know what a gentleman is.”
Apparently, gentility and chivalry have no place in politics. Just ask Hal Baskin, candidate for alderman in the 16th Ward. For the second time in his long and unsuccessful political career, one of Baskin’s opponents is being attacked over her romantic connection to a murderer.
The first time was in 1995, when Baskin was running against then-Ald. Shirley Coleman. A few weeks before the election, Coleman’s ex-husband, Hernando Williams, was executed for a rape and murder he committed after the couple’s divorce.
“She may not have been giving the man what he needed at home,” Baskin speculated.
The Sun-Times called that “one of the most grossly abusive comments ever inspired by Chicago politics.” Even Mayor Daley said it was disgraceful. Baskin tried to save himself by blaming female reporters.
Chicago Politics
“All the women in the press, they have to find something better to do than to jump on the strong black man,” he said.
Baskin lost.
Now, 16 years later, Baskin finds himself in another aldermanic run-off, against another lady alderman, JoAnn Thompson. There was a flier going around Englewood with a mug shot of Donald J. Byrd, who served 30 years in prison for murder. After he got out, Thompson hired him to run a program that buys State I.D.s for ex-offenders. But the flier suggests the relationship is more than professional.
“Is the alderman really against gangs? The man below is a known gang member and her boyfriend!” the flier states. “Have you seen them together? What’s the real story?”
Baskin hasn’t been linked to the flier, but he’s benefiting from the content: it was quoted in a Sun-Times article on the race. Given his past history with the ladies in his political life, Baskin should disavow it. He’s probably going to lose again, so it may be his last chance to look like a gentleman.
Buy this book! Ward Room blogger Edward McClelland's book, Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President , is available Amazon. Young Mr. Obama includes reporting on President Obama's earliest days in the Windy City, covering how a presumptuous young man transformed himself into presidential material. Buy it now!
