Posted by John Byrne at 12:11 p.m.
Mayor Richard Daley today declined to join the growing chorus of Democratic leadership calling on embattled lieutenant governor nominee Scott Lee Cohen to withdraw, saying voters elected him.
"People vote in elections. Everybody knew he was a pawnbroker," Daley said. "You knew. The media knew. Everybody knew that, right?"
Several top Democrats have called on Cohen to step down after revelations that he has been accused of abusing women, failing to pay child support and spending lavishly on extramarital affairs. In Sunday’s editions, the Tribune looks at Cohen’s tax troubles and other issues.
"So anybody who’s allegedly — who’s arrested and the case is thrown out, should not run for public office. Is that right? You want that done? I’m just saying, it’s a very complicated issue. It’s much more complicated than you think it is. Just because I don’t like a person, he or she should not," Daley said. "If I did that, you would write editorials that the mayor is a boss, he’s a dictator. That he’s telling people who got elected in the primary that they should not be going to the general election."
Daley would not say Cohen should remain on the November statewide Democratic ticket, but warned that it is a slippery slope to start trying to force candidates not to run because "you don’t like them."
"You have responsibilities. This is not a game. People go to the polls and vote," Daley said at an event to dedicate a new police satellite office at a library in the Clearing neighborhood. "So you don’t like so-and-so, so we should maybe — not for another reason — take that person to not run for office."
Daley said he has long favored a system in which candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run as a team instead of separately in the primary and added that would be the proper way to prevent this kind of situation in the future.
"He’s already elected, that’s your dilemma," Daley said. "It’s a constitutional dilemma. Once you get elected in the primary, no mayor, no newspaper, no citizen can ask you to resign because I don’t like you anymore."