Race For Mayor Heating Up
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CHICAGO (CBS) -- Less than two days after the November general election ended, the next big election for Chicago was heating up as mayoral candidates Gery Chico and Carol Moseley Braun took shots at rival Rahm Emanuel's Hollywood fundraiser.
Emanuel was traveling to Los Angeles on Thursday for a fundraiser organized by his brother, Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel. Donations reportedly ranged from $1,000 to $5,000.
The fancy event drew jeers from some in Chicago.
"No doubt he's hobnobbing with the stars, sipping champagnes, talking with the celebrities -- but we've chosen our own form of Hollywood, right here in Chicago," rival mayoral candidate Gery Chico said at a campaign party at Hollywood Grill in Wicker Park.
Fellow mayoral candidate and former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun was more biting in her criticism of Emanuel's Hollywood fundraiser.
"On this day when President Obama and Illinois Democrats are still recovering from the painful political debacle that he was the architect of, Rahm Emanuel is off in Hollywood hanging out with bankers and billionaires," Braun said in a written statement. "But maybe Hollywood is where he belongs because the story of how he *helped* the Obama administration when he was chief of staff is indeed fiction. Rahm Emanuel cut and ran after pushing policies that lead to the biggest Democratic Party political loss in 27 years. He left the President holding the bag. If Rahm abandoned the President of the United States, what makes anybody think heʼll stick by regular Chicagoans?"
Emanuel stepped down as White House chief of staff on Sept. 30 to run for mayor, although he said when he took the job shortly after President Barack Obama's election in 2008 that he would stay at the White House for about two years.
Petitions to get on the ballot in the mayor's race are due Nov. 22. The mayoral election is on Feb. 22 and, because the race is non-partisan, if no candidate gets 50 percent of the vote, the two top vote-getters will face off in a runoff election on April 5.
