What do political pundits know about the future? In a word,
nothing.
The grand pronouncements that learned folks get paid to make about
the meaning and implication of most any event – an election, a major speech, a
scandal – are as ephemeral as the digits that spread the punditry across the
internet. Two years out from the next presidential election – as pundits
explain with this or that candidate cannot possibly win for this or that reason
– is a fine time to remember that pundits know nothing about the future.
Among the countless examples one could cite, my personal favorite
happened on the evening of April 7, 1987. That night Harold Washington was
celebrating his re-election as mayor of the city of Chicago. Washington was the
first African-American to serve in that office having been elected to his first
term in the spring of 1983. He was a popular mayor, and beloved in the
African-American community on the city’s south side whom he had served in the
state legislature and in the United States Congress since the mid 1960s.
I was in my car listening to the news on the radio that evening as newscasters
and pundits reacted to Washington’s resounding victory. At some point, having
cut away from the victory party and the mayor singing “Sweet Home Chicago,” a
pundit was asked what Washington’s victory meant for Chicago politics.
He responded, “it means we’ve seen the last white mayor of the city
for maybe another hundred years.”
I recall thinking, “how could you possibly know?”
Indeed, within the year Harold Washington was dead, having suffered
a massive heart attack in his office that November.
On April 4, 1989, Richard M. Daley was elected. His father, Richard
J. Daley, served as mayor from 1955-1976. The younger Mayor Daley served a year
longer than his father, before being succeeded by current the current mayor,
Rahm Emmanuel.
It’s been 30 years since Eugene Sawyer, who succeeded Washington as
acting mayor and served until the next city-wide election, lost a primary election
to Daley. Sawyer was the most recent African-American mayor of the city.
Pundits know nothing about the future. (Oh, and neither do the rest
of us.)
