The following year, I helped an insurgent candidate named Jesse Iñiguez in opposition to our alderman, George Cardenas.  George had been office for 2 terms thanks to the corrupting effect of HDO sponsorship.  I wrote a computer program to generate the walk sheets and to house the results of canvassing.  We gave it a good run.  On Election Day, the scene outside the Everett School polling place was a mad house with contending crews from each of the seven candidates.

The highlight for me came when a group of kids came from Kelly High.  Of the seven, six were Chinese – a constituency that usually goes for the incumbent.  George’s precinct captain at Everett School was a very aggressive Chinese guy named Frank.  He tried to take away the signs from the group of students.  I put my nose about an inch from his and said with a smile, “You’re not trying to intimidate these kids, are you?”  He backed down, muttering, “I know these kids from before they were born.”  Jesse Iñiguez won 18% of the vote.  He did well in his Back of Yards base.  But Cardenas took 52% overall.   We were locked in to another 4 years of our representative nodding like a bobble-head whenever the mayor looked his way.

The next big electoral contest came the following year.  Rudy Lozano, having lost by only 400 votes two years previously, was retooling for another run.  I led his campaign in Brighton Park, an area we needed to win big.  We needed to offset votes in the suburban part of the newly-drawn district.  The new boundaries had been gerrymandered to favor a machine candidate.  It was shaped like a bar bell, with urban and suburban concentrations at either end of a thin slice of geography along the Stevenson Expressway.  Rudy’s home was at the end of a finger-like shape.  He was isolated from his considerable base in Little Village.

I tried to come up with ways to energize the electorate.  I pushed a nonlinear approach – geometric not arithmetic.  I think it goes back to my memories of large enthusiastic meetings in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  We should, I argued, do some rallies or public meetings to hear the concerns of Brighton Park.

My suggestion was for us to have Rudy in a forum discussing the problems of education.  Rahm Emanuel was clearly gearing up to rip apart some of the foundation stones of public education.  I was not opposing the door to door canvassing for pluses and minuses.  I was asking for something that we could take to those doors.  My plan was seen as a distraction from the filling-in of a plus or minus grade from every home.  I also got a bad rap in the campaign because I stressed too many team-building meetings.

As daylight gave way to dusk on Election Day, I sent my two sons as runners to the homes of our plusses.  Few were at home and many never showed up to give us the needed boost.  We lost by a 52 to 47 margin.  Not even the imagery of a martyred leader’s son running to complete his father’s dreams could give us the magic that sometimes happens on election days.