King Richard the Fourth

In the euphoric aftermath of his upset victory over Illinois' three-term Sena tor Paul Douglas last fall, Charles Percy tramped the executive suites in search of a fellow Republican who might un seat Chicago's seignorial mayor, Rich ard Daley. One after another, the big-name businessmen he approached turned Percy down. Most of the G.O.P.

noncandidates told him that they supported Daley.

Eventually, Percy and other top Republicans were forced to find a sacri ficial lamb. Last week the lamb was ritually slaughtered as Daley, 64, walked off with his fourth term by a margin of more than half a million votes. The mayor racked up 789,163--73% of the total ballots cast -- while his opponent, John Waner, a prosperous, self-made heating contractor, tallied 272,955. Even in the Negro wards, from which the Democrats feared a strong protest vote, Daley outdrew Waner 5 to 1.

The lopsided outcome had been all but preordained. Waner, 52, a diligent, longtime Republican precinct captain, was little known to the public. He re mained all but unrecognized this year as he funneled $100,000 of his own money into a woefully underfunded campaign.

The son of Polish immigrants, Waner (ne Jan Wojnarowski) confessed at one point: "My English ain't so good. I didn't learn it until I was nine." Waner alienated Chicago's militant civil rights groups by opposing open housing, then blundered into a vow to fire Chicago's able Police Superintendent Orlando W. Wilson, whom he labeled a "$30,000-a-year con artist."

Even with a blue-ribbon candidate and a more expertly managed campaign, the G.O.P. would probably have fared little better. Daley is an autocrat, a Democrat and a bureaucrat in that order, and handles all three roles with zeal and efficiency. Though skeptics might reverse his slogan--"Good government is good politics"--King Richard has made it work well enough to satisfy the "big mules" of Chicago's power structure. Nudged by the nation's most formidable political machine, the city's rank-and-file voters agreed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.