.jpg)
Money can’t buy you respect — and Alexi Giannoulias is spending an awful lot of lettuce just to make himself look silly
There’s one lesson Chicago’s insurgent left has taught the old political establishment extraordinarily well: Money can buy you an enormous amount of political advertising, but it cannot buy authenticity. Sometimes the more money you spend trying to manufacture authenticity, the more ridiculous you look.
Which brings us to “Sexy Alexi” Giannoulias, our new poster child for the art of making yourself look like a fool at great expense. I have occasionally wondered whether his opposition is secretly funding his current ad campaign. Giannoulias enters the Chicago mayoral sweepstakes with the enormous advantages of money, name recognition, and the apparently unshakable conviction that the electorate has been waiting all these years for the second coming of Alexi Giannoulias.
So what is he doing with all that? Making goofy TV commercials and social-media videos. It has gotten sufficiently embarrassing that even the Chicago Tribune editorial board — hardly a muckraker these days — called him out. Its August 23 editorial pleaded: “Enough with ‘Sexy Alexi.’” When the Tribune starts wondering whether a Chicago politician is making himself look ridiculous, the politician might want to listen.
There is a larger point here. Giannoulias appears to be fighting the last political war with the wrong weapons. He has money. Lots of it. He has professional consultants, establishment connections, and St. Barack Obama as his political godfather. He apparently believes all those things can be combined in some political witch's brew to manufacture a hip, youthful, social-media-friendly Alexi out of the cold, calculating power pol he is.
The problem is Alexi isn’t 22 anymore. Watching a middle-aged politician desperately trying to demonstrate how young and cool he is has roughly the same effect as watching your father arrive at the high-school dance wearing his baseball cap backwards.
Giannoulias played professional basketball overseas. He stays in shape. Good for him. Hopefully he’ll keep his shirt on throughout the campaign unless he decides to go full Vladimir Putin. However, Chicago is not auditioning for a Peloton commercial or a Ralph Lauren underwear model. It is choosing somebody to govern a city staggering beneath enormous pension liabilities, high taxes, crime, population flight, and a political establishment seemingly incapable of admitting that arithmetic exists, perhaps because the teachers’ union has a .357 Magnum pointed directly at its political temple.
Back when we elected fat, pasty, ugly Irish guys, at least we didn’t have the teacher’s union running the city. Those days are gone, even though Mike Quigley apparently didn’t get the memo.
Even the normally clueless saps at the Tribune noticed the disconnect. Its editorial argued Chicago needs a “turnaround agent.” Someone focused on growth, spending restraint, repairing relations with the City Council and confronting the city’s fiscal problems. Instead, we get Sexy Alexi pandering to the proles with a big bribe he can barely wrap his basketball-palming hands around: A whopping 30 percent increase in Chicago’s minimum wage by 2032.
Maybe his next commercial should show him with a basketball labeled “minimum wage,” slam-dunking it and saying: “The minimum wage is a slam dunk if Alexi gets electi.” Wait. I’m actually producing better commercials for him gratis than his high-priced team is doing for his $20 million-plus campaign. So let me stop before I kill again.
Notice the fine print: 2032 happens to be two years after the end of Mayor Alexi’s much-desired first term, which may as well be the twelfth of never. Granted, one campaigns in poetry and governs in prose, but does Slick Alexi really need to use the hourly wage slaves in this town so badly? Perhaps his opponents could do them the service of calling him out on this particular fast one.
Even if he pulls the trigger in increments, consider the economic gamble. Chicago sits cheek by jowl with suburbs and states like Hoosierville and Cheeseheadland where employers can escape Chicago wages, taxes, regulations, and mandates simply by moving a few miles. Indiana and Wisconsin have minimum wages of $7.25 an hour. Yet the supposed alternative to Brandon Johnson apparently wants to make doing business inside Chicago substantially more expensive. Where have we heard this before? Out of the yapping mouth of Mayor 6.6 percent.
For the architect of the proposal, however, the day-to-day anxiety of losing a job is entirely abstract. With an estimated personal net worth reportedly running into the tens of millions, Giannoulias occupies a completely different financial reality from the working class voters he aims to represent. On top of his private wealth, he pulls in a healthy public salary as Illinois secretary of state, which he’s hanging on to as if it were his only way to pay the rent.
Why does a multimillionaire chase penny-ante jobs like secretary of state or mayor anyway? Sounds kind of Trumpish to me. One need look no further than Jelly Belly Pritzker for a possible answer: Politics provides very rich men with one commodity even money has difficulty purchasing — importance.
Evidently Alexi thinks because he played basketball he can pass for the same identity politics magnet Mayor 6.6 percent used to be before alienating his own people. It was rich watching him sit on a dais in Woodlawn Saturday looking like he was having cocktails on Rush Street, wearing sunglasses and an expensive suit. I’m sure the locals were looking at him like one of the brothers, and you could tell from the scowls Boss Toni Preckwinkle and Mayor 6.6 percent were sporting that they were about as glad to share the stage with him as with Border Czar Tom Homan.
Giannoulias has enough money to position himself almost anywhere on Chicago’s political spectrum. Yet, he appears determined to crowd into precisely the lane already occupied by Johnson and the progressive interests surrounding him. Why? Chicago has already conducted that experiment. Johnson came into office promising an ideological transformation of city government. Whatever you think of the results, his political standing demonstrates the danger of assuming voters simply want another version of the same product with more attractive packaging.
That brings us to a lesson I learned the hard way. For years I would have happily embraced almost anybody who could defeat Lori Lightfoot. Then Chicago actually did it. And what happened? Voters replaced Lightfoot with a clumsy CTU lobbyist, Brandon Johnson. Whatever one thinks of Lightfoot, Chicago demonstrated something important: Throwing out an unpopular incumbent is not enough. Thou shalt not replace bad with worse — a constant risk in an enslaved, one-party DSAcrat town. Lori was a fool but nobody’s tool. She didn’t get Stacey’s high-heel stiletto holes all over her spine like Mayor 6.6 percent, who seems to have had his backbone sucked out of his body along with what passed for a brain.
Chicago cannot afford to repeat the exercise by deciding that the antidote to an unpopular progressive mayor is simply a richer, better-connected and better-buffed politician capable of producing slicker social-media content. We need to know what the guy would actually do.
Fortunately, Giannoulias must run on a record. His family’s Broadway Bank was closed by federal regulators in 2010 after enormous losses stemming largely from risky commercial real estate lending. Giannoulias had previously served as a senior loan officer there.
During his 2010 Senate campaign, the bank also became notorious for loans involving borrowers with criminal histories. Giannoulias denied personally approving some controversial loans. Examinations of Broadway’s collapse pointed primarily toward aggressive commercial real estate lending and inadequate risk controls rather than the cartoonish version in which Alexi personally handed sacks of cash to mobsters. Still, campaigns are supposed to be about judgment, and Broadway Bank remains part of the record on which voters can judge this.
That’s why the attempt to reintroduce Alexi Giannoulias to Chicago as "Sexy Alexi" is so politically bizarre. He doesn’t need to convince voters that he works out. He needs to convince them that he works — and his policies do too. That’s much harder than doing goofy, cringe-inducing TikTok videos your consultants foisted on you at great expense. Voters want to know whether they will be better off after four years of the next mayor than they were after four years under the miserable CTU marionette currently running their town.
Chicago has had enough brands. We need a mayor. We need somebody who understands the city competes every day — with its own suburbs, Indiana, Wisconsin, Sun Belt cities, and every jurisdiction capable of offering businesses and families lower costs, safer streets, and functional government. We need somebody willing to confront the Chicago Teachers Union rather than lick its stilettos for affection; somebody willing to say "no" to spending proposals that cannot be financed; somebody willing to "Back the Blue;" somebody who understands economic growth is not a favor bestowed on corporations but the indispensable source of jobs, incomes, and tax revenues that make everything else government does possible.
In short, this town needs an adult in the room where the man on five used to dwell. That may sound like a remarkably low bar for the mayor of America’s third-largest city. Recent experience suggests otherwise.
This campaign should therefore be about records, arithmetic, and results — not abs, basketball shots, viral videos, or which candidate can produce the cutest Instagram reel. Inquiring voters want know why it’s not about the real issues. Maybe it’s because Sexy Alexi’s got no game.
Giannoulias has plenty of money to make a serious case for himself. If he believes Chicago needs different policies from Brandon Johnson’s, tell us exactly what they are. If city government spends too much, tell us where you would cut. If taxes are too high, tell us how you would restrain them. If Chicago is hostile to business, tell us what you would change. If the schools are failing children, tell us what you would do about the CTU. Those answers would be considerably more interesting than another jump shot.
Because Chicago learned something expensive when it replaced Lori Lightfoot with Brandon Johnson: “Anybody but the incumbent” is not a governing philosophy. This time we should demand something better before we buy the product.
Alexi Giannoulias has millions of dollars available to persuade us that he is that something better. He should probably stop spending it trying to persuade us that an aging Gen Xer is sexy, like we care anyway. This town is ready to elect Jabba the Hutt if he can restore peace and prosperity.
Because there is one thing even a $20 million political war chest cannot purchase.
Respect.
Hopefully, in this case, it can’t buy you votes either. That’s up to us, though, isn’t it?
Featured image courtesy “Συνάντηση ΥΠΕΞ κ. Δ. Δρούτσα με Υποψήφιο Γερουσιαστή κ. Alexi Giannoulias” by Υπουργείο Εξωτερικών, CC BY-SA 2.0
