By John Kass

March 26, 2025

Fran Spielman, a great old-school Chicago reporter for the dying Sun-Times newspaper, still knows a good story when she hears one.

And Chicago Mayor Brandon “Six percent” Johnson announcing he’s the second coming of the late Harold Washington is a good story. Johnson has the lowest approval rating in history. Only six percent of Chicago voters think he’s doing a good job.

So it’s crazy, yes. But a good story.

I didn’t say that Mayor Johnson is rational. He’s bat bleep crazy for comparing himself to the late great Washington.

I knew Washington. He was not a fool. We had an uneven relationship. He once declared that I should be “bullwhipped in the public square” for writing stories he didn’t like.

Was it the one about Harold the Reformer and his top aide at City Hall, a pimp with a bad wig known as Clarence McClain, who used a city limousine to collect rents at a slum building he owned?

Or was it the time I met Clarence and several colleagues and editors at “the paper”–among them Dean Baquet who’d end up running the New York Times–at the high end Gordon’s restaurant in Chicago. It was a place known for excellent fish. We were meeting Clarence to determine if he’d agree to become a source. That’s what the editors with us wanted. All Clarence wanted was to drink. He wore a loud plaid suit and his bad wig and he kept slurping down several Crown Royals and 7-Up–shouting in the quiet dining room: “Kass! I’m as pure as Caesar’s wife!”

The ladies who lunched just stared, their mouths open, astonished. As did the editors.

Perhaps what caused Harold to want to bullwhip me might have been that Sunday magazine I worked on for “the paper,” all about Harold and black politics, his father working for a 3d Ward boss named, oddly enough Mike Sneed, then moving on up through machine politics.

Who can say, really?

Apparently, all those sleepless nights suffering from panic attacks hasn’t improved Brandon Johnson’s ability to reason things out.

But Chicago Way podcast producer Jeff Carlin thought this was a good story—as did Fran Spielman—and I can’t turn down a good story either.

So we discussed Johnson’s mad ravings that he is the second coming of Washington on the current edition of The Chicago Way ™ podcast.

We talked of many things, about that trademark, and Fran’s story “Brandon Johnson likens himself to second coming of Harold Washington” and the fact that under Johnson—and for the 13^th year in a row—Chicago is the murder capital of America.

Nice going Democrats. Have a cigar.

Carlin and I also talked about the Democrat boss of Cook County Toni Preckwinkle cutting Johnson lose.

Preckwinkle made the famed Soros prosecutor Kim Foxx (a.k.a. Jussie’s girl) as the do-nothing Cook County state’s attorney who destroyed  Chicago by not prosecuting the violent repeat offenders, thereby encouraging waves of violent crime. Downtown Chicago is now a ghost town. Thanks Democrats. Please don’t come out to Indiana, we don’t want you.

Preckwinkle and CTU boss Stacy Davis Gates made Brandon, but now Toni doesn’t know him.

She doesn’t want to know him. She wants to stay in her own lane, meaning she’d use a long pole to keep him away from her. She’ll let him fall with a thump. She doesn’t want his mess messing up her sensible shoes.

I don’t think the crackerjack city hall writers at “the paper” care much about Preckwinkle, Foxx and Soros. Happily, Fran Spielman is sharp and a good reporter. She’s interested and curious.

Now Mayor Johnson is at six percent popularity, a dead man walking, so weak that several perennial has-beens now want a piece of him.

According to Spielman’s story, Johnson continued adding feathers to his 2^nd Coming  of Washington throne.

“We’re laying the foundation … that Mayor Harold Washington established,” Johnson told listeners during an interview on radio station WVON-AM.

Johnson portrayed himself as the second coming of Harold Washington and tried to ease lingering tensions with African American voters created by the migrant crisis.

Johnson sat with WVON-AM 1690 host Matt McGill, telling listeners that African American voters were getting a “second bite at the apple” nearly 40 years after the death of Chicago’s first black mayor Harold Washington.

A second bite? Washington and Gene Sawyer were black. Lori Lightfoot is black. The head of the Chicago Teachers Union is black. The chief judge of Cook County is black. The boss Democrat, Preckwinkle, is black. Another bite? OK, serve it up with a big ladle of frijoles.

According to Spielman’s story quoting McGill:

“Washington “thought he was gonna be mayor for 20 years.” He was “setting in place a new Chicago that was going to change Black Chicago,” McGill said. “He had the vision. He felt like he was going to be around to make sure that this plan to improve the lives of Black Chicagoans was gonna happen.”

Well, I was there working for “the paper” as Fran was working for the Sun-Times.

When Washington died in 1987, McGill said, acting Mayor Eugene Sawyer “took the baton and kept it going” for a while, but “Black people got split” between Sawyer and then Ald. Tim Evans (4th), McGill added — a rift that “handed City Hall to the Daleys,” McGill said.

Years later and after many twists and turns Brandon Johnson was elected mayor. And I began to call him Mayor Panic Attacks as a result of his debilitating panic attacks.

Why? He had panic attacks.

I wasn’t the only one. Reporter Anita Padilla, now in Florida, knew about the Johnson panic attacks, as did several police officers and firefighters.

 

 

My 2 cents: You can’t hide who you are from the guys who wake you up in the morning and put you to bed at night.

During the Harold Washington years, I was at City Hall working for “the paper” and Fran was there working for the Sun-Times. I remember that the left wingers went crazy, casting their machine hack Tim Evans as an angel. They portrayed Gene Sawyer as a race traitor. In his college days Sawyer guarded Martin Luther King jr., standing between King and white racists bent on harming the Civil Rights leader.

But to Timmy Evans–who picked up a few personal injury cases from Eddie Vrdolyak–Gene Sawyer was an “Uncle Tom?”

Evans could only get away with it because the media let him get away with it. I was the angry barking dog at that party. They just steamrolled Sawyer.

It was sickening to see the Saul Alinsky types destroy Gene Sawyer simply because they weren’t in power. That’s how they roll. The same Jacobin fanatics are destroying the Democrat Party now. Back then they pulled poor Gene Sawyer limb from limb. All the Chicago lefties from Evans and Preckwinkle, and Slim Coleman, Vernon Jarrett, Jacky Grimshaw and the others pulled Sawyer apart.

Chicago had a black mayor until they destroyed that mayor. And the Daley faction loved it. Because Daley would be the beneficiary of the civil war. He benefited greatly. More than 20 years worth.

Now back to Fran Spielman’s story:

When McGill asked Johnson if he was “mischaracterizing your vision here,” the mayor replied: “Not at all.”

Johnson has been revving up his Blackness as a Political Movement, touring Black churches, playing the race card as part of what he is calling his “Faith in Government” initiative.

He talked about how he should have “cleaned house faster” when he took office, now planning to kick the disloyal out of City Hall because, “if you ain’t with us, you just gotta go.”

What happened to loyalty oaths signed in blood?

Johnson got a hostile question about the migrant crisis from a listener who asked the mayor how he can “justify” spending hundreds of millions of dollars “putting these people up when you can’t throw a brick without hitting a homeless Black person.”

That’s a problem for Mayor Panic Attacks. Black Chicagoans don’t like being told to step off the corner for illegal migrants because white Democrats opened the borders to put pressure on those Trump voters. All that backfired. And black Chicagoans are migrants themselves, having come up to Chicago from the plantations and farms of the hard deep south. Harold Washington’s own father had to work on the killing floor of the Union Stockyards.

What’s astonishing to me is that Mayor Johnson considers himself to be the Second Coming of Harold. Rather sacrilegious methinks.

If Brandon is really the Second Coming of Harold, then I am forced to announce that I am Edmon Dantes, the first mate of the merchant ship Pharaon out of Marseilles and inventor of the Monte Cristo sangwich, consisting of turkey, shaved ham and mustard, dipped in beaten egg then sauteed to a golden crispiness.

(editor’s note: In an earlier draft I misspelled  Cristo as Christo. My bad, but hey, it’s Lent. Give me a break.)

After being unjustly imprisoned in the Island fortress prison the Chateau d’If  off the coast of Marseille for decades and befriended by a gentle friar. I will eventually make a devious escape, secure the fabulous treasure of the Crusader knights, becoming the devilishly handsome and dashing Count of Monte Christo, fighter of many duels.

I could buy the office of Chicago mayor with my pocket change.

But would I want to?

No.

Mon Dieu! A thousand times no!

You’d have to be a lunatic to be mayor of Chicago, a raving madman just like Brandon Johnson.

(Copyright 2025 John Kass)

 

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About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.

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