Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot

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This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

This week, all eyes in Washington were on the Senate, where the impeachment trial is playing out.

But on Thursday, I wasn't chasing down senators or presidential candidates.

I was a few blocks away from the the White House at the Capitol Hilton, where the nation's mayors had gathered for their annual conference.

More than any other race in recent memory, this election has shown that running a city, even a small one like South Bend, can be a national platform.

Well, this week's interview is with the mayor of a big city, America's third biggest, actually,

and the political home of the last Democratic president.

Chicago has a new mayor, and many of you may not know her name yet, but that will probably change.

Gloria Lightfoot won the job in a landslide.

On election night last year, she carried every one of Chicago's 50 wards.

It was her first time running for higher office, and that victory was a night of several firsts.

She became the first African-American woman to lead the city and the first openly gay mayor of the city.

Today,

you

did more than make history.

You created a movement for change.

In a city defined by political dynasties and well-known political players, Lightfoot ran as an outsider, someone to fight corruption and reform the police.

With one exception, this vote was also the first time Chicago had an open mayoral race since the 1940s.

So all that's to say, her election is a big opportunity to remake one of America's largest cities.

So I want to get to know her better, understand where she's coming from and what motivates her, and what her perspective can tell us for beyond Chicago.

Before we play the interview, let me tell you a little bit of her background.

There's a lot to it.

She's a former federal prosecutor and a partner at a big law firm.

She became known in Chicago as a critic of the police department after holding several oversight roles.

But she grew up in a small town in Ohio.

Throughout her life, she's felt a drive against injustice.

We talked about how her parents sparked that in her, but also how she's experienced injustice herself.

Take a listen.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

It's my pleasure.

So

you have been mayor for six months now, about eight months.

I lived in Chicago for about a year.

I was in graduate school there.

I was already a while ago.

It was 2002, 2003.

So the city has changed a lot since then, but it's a complicated place.

I wonder what you have been most surprised by in terms of the government impacting people's lives or not.

Well, in in 2019 and 2020, where I go to places and people say to me,

I've never met a mayor before.

I've never seen a mayor in my neighborhood.

And these are not teenagers or 20-somethings.

These are our elders, people who are 60, 70 or older, and have never had in their minds a mayor who has focused on things that are part of their daily experience.

I'm grateful that I'm there and present in those places, but I'm also mindful of the fact that I've got to deliver for those people.

Fundamentally, what it comes down to is giving people in these communities that have been under siege for way too long by violence, by poverty, by all the things that we know manifest in social ills, giving them hope and letting them know that they're not abandoned, which is what I think too many people in some communities in our city feel.

In reading about you and getting to know your life and your record, it seems like one of the things that struck me is that you have had

your own experiences with

things that were unjust, things that went the wrong way, that

went on

if things had been just a little bit different, the pathway would have been very different for you.

Well, look, growing up in Masslin, in a pretty segregated city where my family lived on the west side of town, which was the you know, we were the factory workers, we were the people who clean your houses.

But being one of the few black families that lived in my neighborhood forever,

that definitely left an indelible mark on me.

I grew up at a time when racial discrimination was still very much on the top of the table, not under it.

And no question that I was denied opportunity solely on the basis of my race, not

going through through most of my K-12 educational experience and having a single black teacher in my school, you know, being the only black kid in my elementary school once the brother that's closest in age to me left.

Those are things where,

you know, and then in that context, having people constantly be surprised that you have a thirst for learning, that you, you know, like to read.

And luckily, I was raised by a great father and mother, and my mother in particular, you know, kind of prepared me for the world.

But if I didn't have that kind of support, there were all kinds of signals around me that I didn't belong, that the expectations for me were so low.

But that's not how I viewed my life, and it's certainly not how my parents, in particular, my mother, viewed my life.

The other thing that definitely shaped my experience as a child is watching my father struggle.

My father was deaf my entire growing up years.

He lost his hearing when he was in his early 20s before I was born.

And seeing

how difficult it was for him to be part of just a conversation, be part of a community, and knowing his experience, particularly in the workplace, being denied opportunities because of his disability, being treated differently and worse because he couldn't hear,

that had a profound effect on me.

You knew that as a child, that that was going on?

Absolutely, I did.

How did you know it?

I knew it because I watched him struggle just in having conversations within our household.

It was a struggle for him.

And I have stacks of little notebooks that my father and I use to communicate back and forth.

So I saw that.

I'd hear stories from relatives that worked in a factory that my father worked in of how he was mistreated by supervisors and management.

mistreated like they were insulting to him he was just insulting behind his back and he couldn't of course hear it mocking him because he he was deaf I mean stories like that I'll be candid in telling you that they enraged me and made me feel like I wanted to do something not just to help my father but with that of course but also feeling like if I was ever in a position that what I would do differently and how I would be

how I would defend people who needed an advocate that's probably part of what drove me to be a lawyer is knowing that people that look like me growing up in my circumstances, if they got into trouble, they needed somebody on their side who could traverse the different worlds but be a fierce advocate for them.

And you felt that you mentioned on your own part too, having teachers who didn't think that there was much to you.

Were there moments that

jump out when you think back on that, of being in school?

When I was in first grade, there were different challenges to read 25 books, read 50 books, read 75 books.

And

I read my 75 books, and my teacher was so astounded that I was able to get to that threshold.

And I thought, my mother reads to me every night.

And I remember feeling like, this is strange that she's making this big fuss.

Because there are other kids, of course, that were reading the 75 books over the course of the year.

It started to slowly kind of open up my eyes to what the expectations were for me.

And, you know, growing up in an overwhelmingly white world and being very good at school, I graduated fourth in my high school class, so I was compulsive about grades.

But recognizing people feeling like I was an exception, and for a while I'm like, yeah, I am an exception.

But then I started thinking, no, I'm actually not.

The difference between me and somebody else who looks like me and growing up in similar circumstances is the opportunities that were presented to me.

And then what happens with Miss Masolyn?

Say again?

So it's the Miss Mascellonian contest, which is kind of the outstanding senior girl.

And I was president of my class all three years, president of the Pep Club, which is a big deal because

our whole lives revolve around high school football.

I was in the band, in the choir, on sports teams.

So by all objective measures, I should have won.

And what I later found out was the judges had selected me, but were essentially told, no, you can't make a black girl Miss Massalonian.

So I didn't win.

And I think to this day, so I graduated in 1980, I don't think there's ever been a black girl selected as Miss Massalonian.

And I mentioned that this episode with Richard Posner.

I wonder if you can talk through what happened there.

Look,

I would be lying if I didn't say that this was something that still makes me incredibly angry.

Just to put the context, this was an extradition case that a lot of junior prosecutors were called upon to handle.

The individual had kind of exhausted his rights,

and the U.S.

Department of Justice, who we reported to, of course, determined that it was time for him, having lost at two different levels, to be extradited to Norway.

He was a Ponzi scheme guy who fled from Norway during the middle of his trial and was subsequently convicted.

His lawyer tried everything he could to stop the extradition, but

he filed an emergency motion, the judge denied it, and then at that point, based upon advice that I received from my supervisor and from the Department of Justice, we perfected the the extradition, if you will.

So he was turned over to the Norwegians.

His lawyer subsequently filed an appeal to the Seventh Circuit, and at the time that he handed it to me, I said,

John, his name is John Green, it's too late.

He's in the hands of the Norwegians and they're on their way to the airport.

So we got on the phone, again, talked to our counterparts at Maine Justice because this was a unique circumstance.

They told us

what we should write in a motion.

It was my name on it because it was my case, but literally it was kind of dictated to me by my supervisor.

And we were anxiously awaiting a response from the Segund Circuit saying, hey, he's on a plane getting ready to go back to Norway.

We need some guidance here from you.

We don't think that we have any right now as a country to stop that extradition that's already come to fruition.

Long story short, the Seventh Circuit filed disciplinary proceedings at Rule to Show Cause why we shouldn't be held in contempt.

Over a long period of back and forth and briefing, it came down to me, the low man on the totem pole.

And I think, candidly, the Seventh Circuit have put themselves out so far.

They wanted to hold somebody responsible, but they exonerated everybody else except for me, who as a junior prosecutor was held responsible for something that was a chain of events that I was literally following my chain of command, including folks at Maine Justice.

But it's something that haunted me for a very long time.

I was afraid that I I was going to lose my law license

and was a problem for me every time I went into a new jurisdiction.

But what it shows you, what my takeaway from that was,

you know, no matter who I am as a black woman in this world, there are going to be people who judge me more harshly and the rules are going to be less fair simply by virtue of my status and who I am.

You talk to your mother every every day.

I do.

Well, yeah, I can't talk to my mother that much.

What do you talk to her about?

And you're the mayor of a big city.

Well, you know, my mother's 91.

My father passed away 10 years ago now.

And one of the commitments that I made to him as he was dying was that I would take care of my mother.

And there are four children, but I'm the one who's close enough,

close enough physically, but also emotionally.

And I just, I check in with her to make sure she's okay and you know sometimes they're long conversations sometimes are brief conversations but I do try to talk to her every day and you know when I'm not physically there and now it's harder to get get there I want to make sure that

she knows she can rely upon me and if there's anything that she needs that I'm going to take care of it

do you think about what

you would be saying to your father and you're so close with him too that

I talk to my dad all the time

I miss him every day.

It's an amazing thing the closeness that you had and obviously the way that it drives you and

that

he saw your career take off but not you as mayor.

So my parents are very

They're very interesting for a number of reasons, but you know, both of them grew up in the segregated South, my dad in Arkansas and my mom in Alabama.

But their outlooks on life were radically different.

My father grew up very, very poor.

His family were failed sharecroppers, and part of the reason they left Arkansas is because they just weren't making it.

I mean, literally weren't making it.

And my mother grew up in a big, strawling family, multiple generations.

But, you know,

in their and her family, pretty horrific racial violence that prompted the family to leave Alabama and ironically settle in this same general area as my father's family in Ohio.

My mother is the kind of person who feels like she has a right to sit at any table,

period.

Whereas my father, I think growing up in segregation and growing up in such poverty, it really affected his worldview.

And he was not a person who believed that the world was fair.

He saw the world as a glass half empty.

And that profoundly affected his worldview.

I think in part because he was working two or three jobs.

Most of my childhood, I spent most of my time with my mother, and her influence was probably more dominant in shaping my own sense of myself than my father's.

It feels like you get your sense of confidence from your mother and your sense of injustice from your father.

That's probably right.

That's probably right.

Yeah, my mother is one of the most confident people I've ever met in my life, rightly or wrongly.

Let's take a quick break.

We'll be back with more with Mayor Lightfoot in a moment.

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I want to take it back a little bit here.

You have such a

distinct route to getting to be mayor,

including not being born in Chicago.

You wouldn't have run if you hadn't thought that you had the experience to do the job.

But I wonder now that you've been doing it for these eight months whether

you have been surprised by the

way that some of your previous experiences have applied to what you've been doing.

You know, I think everything that I've done in my life to this point has helped prepare me for the moment.

You know, I'm a lawyer by training,

spent a lot of time working on very complicated matters that take a while to fix.

And so

being able to kind of screen out the noise, but be really laser focused on getting towards a particular end, I think that experience has served me well.

But I also think that my experience, of course, in being a former law enforcement official serves me well every single day because I have a very keen sense of the strengths of our police department, but also recognizing that solving public safety requires a different set of tools beyond just law enforcement itself.

It requires really getting all city actors engaged in

understanding that that everyone has a role to play in bringing peace and safety to our neighborhoods.

And I've used that.

I convened early on in my administration a public safety cabinet.

We're having our first meeting of the year here

soon.

But the all-hands-on-deck approach and really looking at the root causes of the violence and not just the daily manifestations of it is something that

not just the shootings and

the resulting effect.

I mean, don't get me wrong, we are focused like a laser beam on that, but why is it that young men are picking up a gun and shooting indiscriminately into, for example, a barber shop as happened recently?

Why are young people robbing folks at gunpoint and not having any compunction about shooting somebody who doesn't want to give up their iPhone, for example?

Those are things that are happening, unfortunately, very frequently in my city.

And what I know is,

you know, from my University of Chicago training, people are rational economic actors.

And if they don't have another means to get an income, to provide for themselves and their family, they're going to choose the opportunities in front of them.

And until we dislodge the illegal drug trade and guns from being part of the calculus and replacing them with more legitimate forms of

employment, but also

investing in human capital so that our young people have hope and think of themselves as having a life beyond whatever their current circumstances are.

We have to do all of those things simultaneously to really get ahead of public safety and

bring the levels down so that we become the safest big city in the country.

You came in,

again, not having served in government as an elected official before, having had a variety of roles, but sort of

as an outsider.

Now you've been in there.

We are living through a moment where people are reconsidering what government does, what it should do, whether they can trust the government.

Should there be distrust of the government based on what you've seen the government was doing?

I certainly understand why people feel that way.

And the cross currents that have been blowing for some time that I think are very much responsible for the election of Donald Trump, I get it.

I get why people have lost confidence, not only just in government, but the governance of people, the government is the leaders.

It's I think important for us to understand

that loss of confidence in public servants and public service, but all the more urgent for us to regain that trust.

Our democracy depends upon participation.

And as more and more people opt out and feel like government isn't relevant to their lives, that makes the challenges that we have to face and the problems that we have to solve, they're not diminished by that.

If anything, they're exacerbated by it.

So the challenge is how do you operate in this kind of climate in a way that regains people's trust because we can't take on and solve the challenges of the day, name any of them.

For me, public safety, education, housing affordability, climate change, environmental injustice.

None of those things we can move forward on as a government if we don't have the trust and confidence of the people.

And regaining our legitimacy in their eyes is mission-critical.

Regaining, I mean, you feel like people should have lost trust, it seems like, that there were things that were going wrong and that it was time for government to change.

There's no question about that.

You know, I'll take my city as an example.

We have way too many people in public life who feel like they've won the lottery and that their primary mission is to make sure that

they have a lot of pecuniary gain at the public's expense.

I see it everywhere.

Pecuniary gain is a

good lawyer's term now.

Yeah, meaning that they shouldn't be able to do that.

They have the right to line their pockets with taxpayer dollars.

And that's not right.

But that's the way that it's gone.

And worse is there's an expectation on the part of many people in the public who thinks, yeah, that's how government works.

That's why I don't want no part of it.

That's wrong fundamentally.

And we've got to take on, we've got to take on, they're not myths They're truths, but we've got to take them on and show that we actually can serve the people

and put people first without lining our own pockets and that's I think winning back that trust by showing example after example of how we're going to do that and do it in a different way is critically important and you know I'm not naive I'm sitting as the mayor of Chicago because of people getting fed up with a level of corruption that kind of erupted with the downfall of Ed Burke, one of the most powerful politicians not only in the history of our city, in the history of our state.

People were fed up in his, the FBI going in and executing search warrants on his city hall office, his ward office, subsequently the U.S.

Attorney's Office charging him with a far-reaching conspiracy that really boils down to, I have power and I'm going to use it to personally benefit myself and my family financially.

That's fundamentally what those charges boil down to.

And people seeing, I think, me as somebody who's saying no, I was going to use another term, but I'll clean it up.

You can go for it.

Well, calling bullshit on that as an acceptable form of

doing business in our city.

And it manifests itself in lots of different ways.

But fundamentally, I'm not in this to

ingratiate myself with the clouded few.

I'm not in this to be in office and perpetuate my power forever.

I'm in it to do the right thing.

And those people that I saw along the way,

the people that went to church with our family, the people in my town, they exist in huge numbers in my city.

I want to be an advocate for them.

Can I ask you, I had this conversation with Rahm Emmanuel, your predecessor, at one point in 2017, and I asked him if President Trump came to Chicago and you were to bring him around, where would you bring him?

President Trump has been to Chicago recently, was there at the end of October.

He stopped at a police convention and then for lunch at his building that's downtown.

I assume that those would not be on your itinerary as the preferred stops.

Where would you take him in Chicago?

Well, look, the thing I'd want to do, and I've said about President Trump, is the facts matter.

And we are a complicated city.

We're a fascinating city.

There's a lot of great things that are happening.

If you really want to know who we are as Chicagoans, then let me take you to neighborhoods outside of the glamour of downtown and show you how Chicagoans are living their lives every day.

Talk to you about the challenges but also the triumphs of our city.

You know, I don't think he really cares about the facts, but he's got a very misguided notion of who we are.

And unfortunately, he's got the world's biggest megaphone by which to spout his views.

So if he were to come to our city, and I don't think he will,

and certainly won't take me up on, let me give you a guided tour about what we are, I would take him to see the neighborhoods and people in those neighborhoods who are working hard every day, but who are struggling and who need a leader in the White House who truly sees them, but more to the point, just doesn't see them, has empathy, and is going to work hard every day to make sure that they have the opportunity to participate in the American dream that he has had throughout his life.

Do you think the Democratic Party nationally is getting that conversation right?

I don't.

I think there's a lot more that we can do.

And I've made no secret of the fact that I think that we miss a real opportunity as a party.

And I'm challenging our presidential candidates to

think about who we are as a party, what our core values are.

And as a lifelong Midwesterner, it's important to me that the candidates are really speaking the values of the people that made the Democratic Party, the working class people, the folks in organized labor, and the folks who are worried that their life and the life that their parents had or their grandparents had is slowly slipping away from them and won't be there for their kids.

We have to speak to those folks because those are the people that we need to show up in huge numbers in November to vote.

And if we lose them, we have no shot at winning the White House, but also we run the risk of losing a lot of down-ticket races as well.

Illinois politics the last couple years has been complicated as always,

and you've had your role in it.

But in the State House, you had in 2014 a Republican businessman who was elected, spending a lot of his own money and won.

He was replaced by a Democrat who spent more of his own money and won.

What do you think that that maybe

tells us or previews for what life could be like as we go into a year where one way or the other we're going to have massive spending in this presidential election?

And we have

Donald Trump who may be spending some more of his own money but is certainly running as a businessman.

And you've got candidates like Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer who are spending their money.

What do we have to look forward to?

There's a lot to that question, right?

It's, one, the influence of money in politics, which I think is a huge problem.

And I'm a supporter of campaign finance reform.

I don't think we will, in the long term, benefit if the only people who can afford to run at the national level, or really at any level, are folks who come with a lot of individual wealth.

Wealth doesn't buy you leadership, experience, great ideas, and an ability to navigate difficult policy and political terrain.

So I don't want to see us exclude a whole category of people simply because they can't go into their own pocket and run for office.

The other thing about that is the businessman model.

Governance, not business.

There are things that we should do to run government much more efficiently, and we're trying very hard to make that happen in Chicago.

But it's not a

bottom line balance sheet proposition.

It's much more complicated than that because every single day, particularly at the local level, we're talking about how can we move the needle to affect the trajectory of people's lives.

And you can't just measure that in dollars and cents.

And, you know, it's no secret, I think,

God bless Bruce Rauner, but our state is better off with him in retirement doing something else.

So these are complicated concepts, but again, fundamentally, it's not the wealth that I think is the thing that we should focus on.

It's who's the person?

What's their ideas?

What's the track record of being able to make a difference in people's lives?

Do they understand people who don't come from that kind of massive wealth?

What have they done over the course of their lives to really invest themselves in learning about people who come from very different experiences?

And what are their ideas about how we create a different kind of vision for families and communities who are struggling?

All right, Mayor Laurie Lightfoot, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Pleasure.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

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