He has found the ability to keep one single crisis spinning in the air for weeks as he twirls from one public humiliation to the next.
In 1962, legendary manager Casey Stengel was charged with the thankless task of guiding the New York Mets in their inaugural MLB season. And guide them he did, to a resounding and record-setting flop that remains to this day the go-to example of full-spectrum baseball futility: a 40-120 record put up by a team full of clowns serving up gopher-balls to batters, striking out haplessly at the plate, and booting the ball all over the infield. Stengel — the leader of so many Series-winning Yankees teams in the prior decade — once famously bellowed in the locker room after another humiliating loss, “Can’t anybody here PLAY this game?”
I’m thinking of the 1962 Mets because I live in Chicago, where their nearest political analog is currently running our city. Mayor Brandon Johnson, setting daily new lows for incompetence, has been nothing short of disastrous since he took office in May of 2023: The city has seen spikes in mob youth violence, gun crime, and carjackings as well as a flood of illegals choking city resources, and I haven’t even mentioned the tax plan yet.
All of this got worse (or better, if you share a similarly bleak, detached sense of humor about your own home’s urban blight) during the ShotSpotter Saga, which I discussed a few weeks ago. To recap: ShotSpotter, a technology used by Chicago police to echolocate live gunfire in bad neighborhoods, has long been hated by woke activists as a tool of racial oppression. Johnson promised during his election campaign to get rid of it, the consequences for the city’s residents be damned. But since the Democratic National Convention is coming to town this summer — when crime is typically at its worst anyway — he hypocritically announced he would be canceling it only after a seven-month extension to get the city through until September. (What’s good enough for hoi polloi apparently isn’t quite good enough for Democratic Party grandees under a national media spotlight.) Then — and here’s where the whole story transitions from outrage to farce — in one of the most inexplicably stupid moves of recent Chicago history, he announced this deal, whilst simultaneously insulting ShotSpotter as a company and product, at a press conference without remembering to get ShotSpotter’s signature on it first.
Oops! When last we left off, ShotSpotter had quite understandably told Johnson they were declining his (literally) insulting terms, and were preparing to simply switch off their services altogether the next day. That did not happen; the city and ShotSpotter banged out a deal at the last minute, extending the service for the seven months Johnson asked for, plus an extra two months of “winding down,” and all to the tune of $8.6 million. The company will be paid at a much higher rate as well — ShotSpotter now makes much more for the next nine months than it would have on a standard twelve-month contract. (Politics rarely affords us such a perfect opportunity to put a real dollar value on the price of one politician’s arrogance, stupidity, and haste.)
But wait! We’re not done yet. Because it turns out that the last-minute extension Johnson’s administration signed with ShotSpotter is technically illegal under Chicago’s city contracting laws. It’s not even a marginal case, amusingly enough: Since this new contract wasn’t bid on competitively or subject to the city’s regular procurement processes, the city is forbidden from extending it “under less favorable terms.” (Anyone familiar with government contracting is currently nodding along in frustration — this is a typical rule everywhere.) And the extension ShotSpotter negotiated for itself with the leverage Johnson gave them — fewer months at a higher rate — is more or less the textbook example of “less favorable terms.” A problem looms.
Again, it must be pointed out: All of this is entirely the fault of one man, Brandon Johnson. Last year, when the administration renewed the ShotSpotter deal, it claimed this was an “autopay/autopen accident” that clerical workers in the office missed. (Sometimes you find yourself out $50 because you forgot to cancel your subscription to Paramount+; Johnson used the same excuse to account for $10 million.) It was an obvious lie, but back then, everybody just shook their heads ruefully and pretended not to notice, because it beat dodging even more bullets. Had Johnson simply auto-renewed ShotSpotter’s contract for another twelve months and then phased it out, there would have been no legal issues. But instead the city is currently in legal limbo, because Johnson 1) was so eager to keep one of the few demographics in the city still supporting him (progressive white activists) on-side ; 2) so stupidly careless as not to finalize his short-term extension before announcing it and torching his bridges with them publicly. They don’t teach these sorts of negotiating tactics at business school.
Nobody knows right now how the ShotSpotter issue will be resolved, but given the principles of both inertia and fantasy-lawmaking which govern Chicago’s politics, the safe guess is that the city will find a way to avoid suddenly switching the program off unceremoniously. The verdict on Brandon Johnson is already in, however: He is the worst and most incompetent mayor in living memory for anyone whose experience with this city postdates Jane Byrne’s. Rahm Emanuel was hated. Lori Lightfoot was both hated and mocked. But Brandon Johnson is treated with contempt by all, even by the local media, which keeps publishing “we wish this administration wouldn’t make it so easy to notice how incompetent they are” opinion pieces.
This much — Johnson’s incompetence and doctrinaire progressivism — could have been predicted about a creature of the notorious Chicago Teacher’s Union long before he was elected, so nobody here has any excuses. But that was just on paper, after all; what Chicagoans didn’t know about the man until we were granted the opportunity to watch him play this game is that, like a great athlete — or, more accurately, a legendary Pagliacci-like clown — Johnson has a special gear available only to elite fools. He has found the ability, with the ShotSpotter debacle, to keep one single crisis spinning in the air for weeks as he twirls from one public humiliation to the next balletically, like a jester dancing the lonely Harlequinade. Once he’s locked in like this, who knows how long he can go on juggling disasters? Probably until the next election, is my guess.