Hoffman For Mayor

Anything that makes Shortshanks react like this is a good thing:

• On more than one occasion during his campaign for the U.S. Senate, voters told David Hoffman he was running for the "wrong office" -- the "right" one being mayor of Chicago.

• Mayor Daley, who has not yet decided whether to seek a seventh term, sounded a bit defensive when asked whether he was impressed with Hoffman's maiden political voyage. The former inspector general earned the nickname "Abby Hoffman" for the bombs he threw at the mayor's office.

  "Everybody worked hard. ... Everybody did a good job. ... I don't know why you pick one person. Why is that? I know. You're friends with him," Daley told a reporter.

  Asked whether he's concerned about Hoffman running for mayor, Daley said, "I don't know. I don't know why you're asking about him. Boy, you're really good friends with him."

  The mayor's comments unmasked a sore point in the Daley camp: that Hoffman used the power Daley gave him to embarrass the mayor, "create a platform to run for office out of City Hall" and become a media darling.

We've had a bunch of comments deriding Hoffman as "not the answer" to Chicago's problems. Let's face some facts:

• Whoever comes after Daley is coming into a mess;
• There is no republican savior - it just ain't happening;
• Once the Machine cycle is broken, it becomes easier to disrupt the political order in future elections.

If the resistance coalesces behind Hoffman and vaults him into office and he bumbles around for four years, is Chicago really worse off than where it's headed now? And if Hoffman gets in and the aldercreatures are working to protect themselves and their slices of the pie, they aren't actively screwing you and us and everyone else - their immobilized temporarily, which in turn could provide Hoffman with the opportunity to actually do some good. And when they're up for reelection, maybe 10 or 20 of them go looking for new jobs and maybe Chicago is spared.

Why not Hoffman?