Challenging Hizzoner

With dogged zeal, Alderman William Singer, 34, has visited every public school and transit station and nearly every supermarket, bowling alley and bingo parlor in Chicago during his 16-month campaign to defeat five-term Mayor Richard Daley in next week's primary. At many of the stops, city employees--among them transit workers, policemen and firemen--have been sidling up to offer encouragement to the maverick Democrat. "Lotsa luck, Alderman. We're with you," are words often heard. That people who owe their jobs to Daley's political machine would even cautiously express such support for an opponent is a token of what has happened to Singer's campaign. The impossible dream of an energetic upstart with a lot of nerve has turned into the most serious challenge to Daley's rule since his election as mayor in 1955.

Private Gain. Singer has benefited from a series of setbacks suffered by Hizzoner since his election. A stroke in 1974 required an operation and three months of convalescence. Seven top members of his machine, including his right-hand man Alderman Thomas Keane, have been convicted for using their offices for private gain. Questions of propriety have been raised over the mayor's secret ownership with his wife of a real estate company with assets of about $200,000. He has been criticized for influencing the placement of millions of dollars' worth of city insurance with a firm that employed one of his sons. Partly as a result of these blows, three opponents are running against him in the primary: Singer, former State Attorney Edward Hanrahan and black State Senator Richard Newhouse.

Of the trio, only Singer has any chance to oust Daley, and even his remains an outside one. Singer is a liberal attorney who was elected to the city council from a machine ward on Chicago's well-to-do Near North Side in 1969. He established himself as leader of the city's antimachine Democrats and in 1972 headed the rebellious group that unseated Daley's delegates at the Democratic National Convention. In his campaign for mayor, Singer has put together a surprisingly strong grass-roots organization. He raised more than $600,000 and launched a TV advertising blitz. Singer has also scored points with voters by blaming Daley for the flight of industry that cost the city more than 200,000 jobs between 1960 and 1970; a 12% rise in serious crime in the first ten months of 1974; and the deterioration of the city's 584 public schools, whose pupils (60% of them black) trail national averages in mathematics and reading.

In the last weeks of the campaign, Singer has picked up support from groups that have traditionally backed Daley and the machine. Among them were 37 black leaders, including U.S. Representative Ralph Metcalfe. The Chicago Sun-Times and Daily News broke with precedent and endorsed Singer. So too have several leading businessmen. Ben Heineman, president of Northwest Industries and a friend of Daley's, has gone so far as to declare his support for Singer in a TV ad. Heineman explains: "To put it purely in business terms, I would never put a man who is 72 and has had a stroke in charge of one of our major corporations."

Outraged Blacks. As a result, Daley has had to run hard for the first time. His course has been at times erratic. He has stoutly defended the city's public schools as among the finest in the country, despite persuasive studies to the contrary. He unnecessarily reaffirmed his infamous "shoot to kill" order to police, which outraged blacks and many others just as it did when it was first issued during the riots that followed Martin Luther King's death in 1968. He rather crudely declared at a press conference that his mother once advised him to reply to political attacks by pinning some mistletoe to his coattails.

Despite all of the mayor's campaign gaffes and his administration's scandals, few people are willing to predict that Singer will topple Daley in patronage-padded Chicago. The reasons were succinctly stated by Jack Guthman, a lawyer and Daley stalwart: "The precinct captains work late in the campaign." Indeed, the machine still controls 44 of Chicago's 50 wards. As the primary neared, Daley organization workers were canvassing door-to-door to deliver him enough votes to win the Feb. 25 primary, which would virtually guarantee victory in the April election over a token Republican candidate.

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