[Susana Mendoza] also took a shot at Bill Daley, a fellow mayoral contender.
Daley was the White House chief of staff in 2011, when the Obama administration was grappling with a regulation in the Affordable Care Act that required religiously affiliated hospitals, charities and universities to provide birth control coverage for employees.
According to news reports, Daley, a lifelong Catholic, organized a meeting with President Barack Obama and then-New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan. Dolan and other Catholic leaders wanted an exemption to the contraceptives mandate.
“Democratic members of Congress who lobbied the White House said they believed that Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, William M. Daley, and his special assistant for religious affairs, Joshua DuBois, favored a broader exemption,” The New York Times reported. They eventually carved out a compromise.
Now Mendoza questions Daley’s commitment to reproductive rights. “You can’t claim to be pro-choice and then try to use your power to cut off access to reproductive choice for women as a chief of staff to the leader of the free world.”
* Response from a Daley campaign comms worker…
This is what's sad about politics, @susanamendoza10 using this issue to distract from her bad start to the year (VAP, Burke and Solis). I would NEVER work for a candidate who isn't pro choice. https://t.co/MxTafXSF7f
Mayoral contender Susana Mendoza’s own words were used against her Monday as two political allies of Toni Preckwinkle and a man exonerated from death row questioned her record on the death penalty. […]
Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough, state Sen. Robert Peters, D-Chicago, and Nathson Fields, who was cleared of double murder, sought to “set the record straight” about Mendoza’s role in abolishing the death penalty. The three specifically pointed to Mendoza’s claim that she was the deciding vote in overturning capital punishment — a claim that was found to be “mostly false.”
“This is especially concerning for me that she would use this because she had already made herself very clear where she stood on criminal justice issues,” Yarbrough said at the West Loop law offices of Loevy and Loevy.
“She’s no reformer and I really take issue with this whole business of being the 60th vote, like she carried the day.”
* Speaking of weak. Here’s a one-minute spot introducing a mostly unknown candidate which displays said candidate’s name on-screen for just a few seconds tops…
Don’t do this at home, kids.
* Related…
* With the mayor’s race now up for grabs, who does biz back?: The most likely to gain from that situation is former U.S. Commerce Secretary Bill Daley, who already has far and away the most business backing in the field. But doubts remain that Daley, despite his family name, has enough support to finish in the top two on Feb. 26 and make it to the April runoff election at a time when Chicagoans may be seeking something different in their next mayor.
* Mendoza seeks to reset campaign with ethics plan - After weeks spent under fire for her political ties, the mayoral hopeful brings in Dan Webb to help her refine an anti-corruption plan that includes term limits, a ban on hiring relatives, public campaign financing and more.
Q: The attorney general’s office said that it’s going to review the sentence of Jason Van Dyke. Do you think that’s a good idea for him to step in like that and do you think that Van Dyke’s sentence was fair?
A: Well, I think any ruling can be reviewed and I think it’s, there’s nothing wrong with doing that. Um, look, I happen to think that, uh, when someone has been killed, uh, the way that this, uh, you know, murder took place, uh, that, uh, a strong sentence, uh, would have been better than the one that was, uh, that was, uh, put in place here. So, it’s reasonable to review it, but, but I don’t know what the outcome of that review would be.
