Paul Vallas is No Stellan Skarsgard, But He Might Be Mayor

I’ve never seen the 2008 movie musical Mamma Mia. Have you?

Not having seen Mamma Mia is not an intentional choice. I don’t have a problem with musicals. I like Meryl Streep. I don’t even mind Abba, really, especially all those TikTok remixes. It seems like a fun movie.

Here’s the general premise: at one point, free spirit Meryl Streep slept with three men — Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard, and another guy. 20 years later, her daughter Amanda Seyfried tries to determine which one of these men is her father. Also, they sing ABBA.

Until very recently, I didn’t know how Mamma Mia ends, which is rare for me: I tend to look up the endings of movies and television for fun, a perverse trait I won’t excuse. Here’s what happened.

A few months ago, I was at a party where a lot of queer people were standing around (that part will be relevant soon).

At this party, for some reason, I told my friend I had never seen Mamma Mia. What a coincidence! My friend had just recently seen Mamma Mia in its entirety. Because of my weird desire to know the full plot of movies I’ve never seen, I asked my friend to describe the ending.

“Well, the hot one ends up being the father,” they said. Even though they had just seen the movie a few days ago, the narrative arc of Mamma Mia hadn’t left a lasting impact.

“Stellan Skaarsgard is the father?” I asked. Based on my limited knowledge of the film and the 3 potential fathers, Skarsgard was obviously and unquestionably the hottest one.

“No! What?” My friend said, then thought for a moment.

“Well, yes — Stellan Skarsgard is the hottest one. But — Meryl Streep doesn’t think he’s hot.” They considered what they were trying to convey for a moment. “Well, you know — Meryl Streep chooses the person that society says is the hot one. I just can’t remember his name.’

“It’s Stellan Skarsgard,” said someone behind us who had been listening to the conversation. “He’s the hot one in that movie.”

My friend got flustered. “Well, yeah, I agree, but that isn’t what the plot of the film is,” they said. “It’s the hot one — ugh, I wish I could remember his name! “

“You mean Stellan Skarsgård?” asked another person listening to our conversation. “He’s hot in Andor. I forgot he was in Mamma Mia.”

“Yes! I mean no!” My friend said. “I agree that Stellan Skarsgård is the hot guy in that movie. But there is a person that the film wants us to view as the hot guy, and that person is the father in Mamma Mia! And his name is —“

“Stellan Skarsgård,” said yet another person who had been listening.

This went on for a while.

Eventually, someone who understood the cultural conventions of hotness that Mamma Mia operates within was able to explain: Amanda Seyfried’s father in that film — the hot one — was Pierce Brosnan, much to everyone at this party’s chagrin.

Upon further research, it seems that none of what was described to me at this party is actually the plot of the film Mamma Mia. For the weirdos like me who want to know the end: Amanda decides all three of them are her father, emotionally speaking, then Meryl Streep marries Pierce Brosnan (the hot one). But here’s the point:

We were all wrong about Stellan Skarsgard.

Anyway — this is how I feel about Paul Vallas.

Who is Paul Vallas, and Why Do We Have to Care?

To be clear, I don’t have any opinion on the hotness of Paul Vallas.

The reason that Mamma Mia reminds me of Paul Vallas is not because of hotness, but because of cultural framing.

Paul Vallas was the only white guy in the Mayor’s race. In spite of his Modern Political Administrator glasses and his Numbers Guy wonkiness, he has Bridgeport energy.

His candidacy, as the only white man who ran in an election with 7 black candidates (and Chuy!), appeals to racial lines in Chicago, the city’s deeply ingrained structural racism. He recently (like, 2021 recently) spoke at a fundraiser for Awake Illinois, a group so transphobic and homophobic that they called JB Pritzker a groomer. His son shot a Black man during arrest in San Antonio earlier this year, sparking concerns about the department’s practices around body cameras.

He’s Ken Griffin’s favorite candidate. He loves school choice (that’s why the anti-gay groomer group had him speak on that panel) — as Kari Lydersen puts it, in New Orleans he was ‘a “shock doctrine” mercenary, tearing apart public schools in the Big Easy after Hurricane Katrina.’ This is a sizeable volume of alarming facts.

Because Vallas’ racism, ties to right-wing groups, and administrative incompetence obscure the fact that — well.

Many people in Chicago voted for Vallas.

Like — the majority of the people who showed up to vote at all.

Why Would Anyone Vote for Vallas? Why Would Meryl Streep Marry Pierce Brosnan?

I know one single person who voted for Paul Vallas in the general election. He lives in South Shore. I won’t pretend like I know many people in South Shore, but I do know this guy. He, in spite of my best efforts to the contrary, voted for Paul Vallas. He says Vallas has experience running things.

Experience at doing a lousy job running things, you might say. Sure. But that’s not what this guy says.

He thought Chuy was too corrupt, Lori was too… Lori. And the rest of them were just crazy.

“I like Johnson, I guess, or his ideas,” he said when we finally got to Johnson. It took a long time. A lot of people ran for mayor. “But ideas aren’t the same thing as experience.” This leaves Vallas.

This guy doesn’t think Stellan Skarsgård is hot.

Actually, I don’t think he even knows who Stellan Skarsgard is, I’m blurring the metaphor.

Vallas, according to this chaotic voter, is the only one who addressed everything he actually cares about in this election. Crime. Carjacking. Violence. Other words for crime.

As Taylor Moore points out in a deep dive on Vallas, reports about how endemic crime is in Chicago are wildly overblown.

Still: just like when you try to discern the hottest man of Mamma Mia, perception is not always reality. Two-thirds of Chicago residents say they feel unsafe from gun violence and crime. And as reporter Heather Cherone put it in an interview with PBS, some of the most striking changes in Chicago crime rates since the pandemic began are in “neighborhoods that are not used to being in the headlines… which is disconnected from what the reality of crime is.”

Still, it’s not like Vallas’ chosen answer for public safety, spending money on the police and adding 1,800 officers to the force, would help alleviate crime even if was as bad as the New York Times likes to say. Chicago is one of the cities that spends the most on policing per capita, but our murder rate, until very recently, was about the same as in New York and LA. This data is from Crime Lab.

In contrast, Brandon Johnson’s public safety plan isn’t to defund the police, exactly. But it’s not NOT to defund the police, you know?

Johnson is stuck in a challenging position: the national fervor around Chicago’s public safety means his plan for policing is under heavy scrutiny.

But, as Alice Yin puts it, “there is no one consensus among the largely decentralized network of defund activists” on how to do this effectively. That “largely decentralized network” is a substantive part of Johnson’s power bloc — the non-terrible Left counterpart to Vallas’ own coalition.

Johnson certainly has a plan: it’s a good one that includes an audit of CPD and re-evaluating the police ranking system. It’s not one that CPD itself is likely to get excited about, but as Johnson would probably tell you, that’s the point.

He also continues to try to reframe the conversation, beyond policing — asking what it could look like to invest in other public systems to elevate public safety, ones not controlled by a power structure actively at war with the local government.

It lets Vallas name ways he will support and fund the police over and over again without question, meeting the terms of the Chicago Mayoral race as defined by national media.

Paul Vallas got only 2% of the vote in 2019, by the way — Chicago is fickle.

But in 2023, I see a sort of disturbing reverse Stellan Skarsgård in Vallas, made of horror instead of hotness.

Obviously, obviously, Vallas would be a terrible mayor. But this is so obvious to me that I’m missing something: all of the other parts of Vallas that are appealing in the framing of Chicago politics.

Because when you look at the voting map from the general election, it’s clear that many people in Chicago feel very differently about Paul Vallas than I do — and they’re more in line with my one-person South Shore sample size than you’d think.

Last week I wrote about how Lightfoot lost because she didn’t have a base — she focused on national media over building with the established (however messy and precarious) power blocs already in Chicago.

Vallas has got police unions, charter school lobbies, and people pushing anti-gay rhetoric all on the same team.

That this bloc is funded by even worse people (including Ken Griffin), who rightly see Vallas as the candidate with their best interests in mind, is even more concerning.

But if you don’t know who Ken Griffin is, or bristle at the words ‘school choice’ — it’s not immediately obvious from Vallas’ campaigning that Paul Vallas’ power bloc is made up of the worst people in the world.

Vallas was endorsed by Alder Tom Tunney, Robin Tunney’s cousin and Chicago’s first openly gay alderman, in an ad where he says Vallas has been a “passionate ally”.

 The Tribune endorsed him, calling him “unapologetically wonkish” like they don’t know nerds can be fascists too (clearly they didn’t watch Andor).

This is why Johnson pointed out in this week’s debate that Vallas has called himself a Republican.

It’s why LGBTQ+ groups continuously object to his campaign materials that describe him as a champion of equal rights.

Because, with 6.3 million dollars to spend (Johnson has raised 4.2 million), it will be easy for Vallas to run ads every day that encourage the people who feel like he has experience to continue feeling this way — especially in the wards with the highest turnout.

How Does This Movie End?

Unlike the ending of Mamma Mia (2008), I am very invested in how the story of Vallas Running for Mayor (2023) turns out.

Brandon Johnson ultimately lost to Paul Vallas in the general election by 12% of the vote — though of course, this was enough for a runoff.

Conceivably, Johnson could make this 12% up in a number of different ways.

Option A: As The Tribe reported, nearly half of Chicago voters chose neither Vallas nor Johnson in the first round of the election on Feb. 28. There could be a greater turnout than the lukewarm polls showed last Tuesday, with new voters showing up for Johnson.

Option B: Other candidates (particularly Chuy and Lightfoot) could endorse Johnson with such enthusiasm that he attracts a substantial chunk of their voters.

I would love to continue listing options, but that’s it, really. There aren’t many other options for Johnson to beat Vallas, barring some kind of Mamma Mia-like act of fate. (...There’s an act of fate in Mamma Mia, right? A ghost or something?)

Either way: with my Stellan Skarsgård is hot glasses on, I easily forget that not everybody feels the way I do — about national safety, about crime, and about Vallas.

But it would be very easy for Vallas, for all of his terrible deeds, with the absolute worst people behind him, to play right into that Pierce Brosnan “tough on crime” framing — and win.

Coming Soon:

— Brandon Johnson and the elite secret cabal that is the Chicago Teacher’s Union

— What exactly is the FOP anyway, besides your worst uncle’s favorite source of boycotts?

👇 Want more tenuous metaphors about niche Chicago politics? 👇