If you can`t beat `em, how about changing the rules?
Back in the days when Kareem Abdul Jabaar was leading the UCLA Bruins to all those national championships, the have-nots of college basketball attempted to reduce the 7-foot center`s winning edge by making it illegal to slam the basketball through the hoop.
When all those European soccer-style kickers started booting 60 yard field goals on Sunday afternoons, the National Football League moved the goal posts deeper into the end zones to hold down the scoring.
After losing four consecutive presidential elections to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Republicans struck back after the Democratic president died by pushing through a constitutional amendment setting a two-term limit on the White House.
Mayor Harold Washington`s political opponents are now seeking to shorten his tenure at City Hall by promoting a referendum that would eliminate party primaries in local mayoral elections and would provide for a runoff in the event that nobody received a majority of the vote.
This procedure is now used in the selecting the 50 members of Chicago`s City Council. And Washington himself once advocated a nonpartisan mayoral contest, saying that party labels have little to do with local government.
Anthony Haswell, a lawyer and North Side independent political activist who is pushing the nonpartisan referendum, notes that seven of the nation`s 11 largest cities–Los Angeles, Houston, Detroit, Dallas, San Diego, Phoenix, and San Antonio–now choose their mayor in a nonpartisan system with runoff elections. Haswell asserts that changing the law would give the city`s next mayor a majority mandate to govern.
Although there are strong arguments in favor of the nonpartisan idea, Washington is on the money in depicting the current referendum drive as an effort to block his re-election. None of his opponents were interested in changing local election laws until Washington`s surprise nomination in 1983 when he captured the Democratic nomination with 36 percent of the vote over former Mayor Jane Byrne and State`s Atty. Richard M. Daley.
Under the current primary system, Byrne`s comeback has frozen out other prospective Democratic challengers. Washington`s political opposition has all but conceded that the mayor will win re-election in 1987 unless he can be isolated in a one-on-one contest. Cook County Democratic boss Eddie Vrdolyak is the only other potential candidate who has seriously discussed taking on Washington and Byrne in a three-way contest. Polls have indicated that Washington would win such a matchup, with Byrne running second, and Vrdolyak a distant third.
If the nonpartisan referendum qualifies for the ballot and is approved in the March primary, Washington could suddenly find himself with a half dozen challengers seeking to force him into a runoff election. Daley, Vrdolyak, Chicago Park Supt. Edmund Kelly, U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, and Cook County Assessor Thomas Hynes are among the potential candidates who could benefit from the rules change. Next to Washington, Byrne has the most to lose in 1987 from an 11th-hour adjustment in the ground rules.
In the event the referendum is passed, a senior Washington administration official declared last week that the mayor`s allies would challenge it as a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on grounds that the rules change was pushed through to discriminate against a black mayor.
Just a few months ago, New York City`s 15-year-old primary runoff law for mayoral elections was thrown out by a federal judge, who declared it unconstitutional because it discriminated against minority candidates. New York`s election law had required the winner of a mayoral primary to receive 40 percent of the vote. The federal court ruling probably has lengthened the odds against a rules change in Chicago.
One of the problems facing proponents of the nonpartisan system is that the 1987 mayoral campaign is already underway. Washington and Byrne both have declared their candidacies, and Vrdolyak has been an undeclared candidate for months. By seeking to change the rules in the midst of an election cycle, Washington`s opponents probably are strengthening the mayor`s political standing and undermining their own efforts to replace him. If proponents of the measure are interested in genuine reform, they could revise the measure to have the nonpartisan system go into effect in 1991.
When new rules are put into effect in retaliation against an individual, the sponsors of the changes are often disappointed with the results. Despite the ban on dunking, Jabaar and UCLA kept on winning. The soccer-style kickers are still stealing victory in the final seconds of NFL games. And the only chief executives victimized by the GOP-inspired constitutional limits on the presidency have been a couple of guys named Eisenhower and Reagan.
