Chicago: King Richard the Fourth

In the euphoric aftermath of his upset victory over Illinois' three-term Sena tor Paul Douglas last fall, Charles Percy tramped the executive suites in search of a fellow Republican who might un seat Chicago's seignorial mayor, Rich ard Daley. One after another, the big-name businessmen he approached turned Percy down. Most of the G.O.P.

noncandidates told him that they supported Daley.

Eventually, Percy and other top Republicans were forced to find a sacri ficial lamb. Last week the lamb was ritually slaughtered as Daley, 64, walked off with his fourth term by a margin of more than half a million votes. The mayor racked up 789,163—73% of the total ballots cast — while his opponent, John Waner, a prosperous, self-made heating contractor, tallied 272,955. Even in the Negro wards, from which the Democrats feared a strong protest vote, Daley outdrew Waner 5 to 1.

The lopsided outcome had been all but preordained. Waner, 52, a diligent, longtime Republican precinct captain, was little known to the public. He re mained all but unrecognized this year as he funneled $100,000 of his own money into a woefully underfunded campaign.

The son of Polish immigrants, Waner (ne Jan Wojnarowski) confessed at one point: "My English ain't so good. I didn't learn it until I was nine." Waner alienated Chicago's militant civil rights groups by opposing open housing, then blundered into a vow to fire Chicago's able Police Superintendent Orlando W. Wilson, whom he labeled a "$30,000-a-year con artist."

Even with a blue-ribbon candidate and a more expertly managed campaign, the G.O.P. would probably have fared little better. Daley is an autocrat, a Democrat and a bureaucrat in that order, and handles all three roles with zeal and efficiency. Though skeptics might reverse his slogan—"Good government is good politics"—King Richard has made it work well enough to satisfy the "big mules" of Chicago's power structure. Nudged by the nation's most formidable political machine, the city's rank-and-file voters agreed.