Once counted out, Alvarez gets big help from women, suburbs

It's 8 a.m. on the day after elections and some character Anita Alvarez hardly knows is calling her cell phone asking for a job.

A few weeks ago, her press secretary, Sally Daly, could barely keep a prominent television political reporter on the phone long enough to say hello.

This morning, however, he's tripping over himself to congratulate Alvarez on her victory as she makes the obligatory television appearances, starting at 6 a.m., after a light night of watching the returns.

With the exception of her Republican opponent, everyone loves Anita Alvarez.

Now.

But before Tuesday evening, the 48-year-old prosecutor wasn't getting much credit as being able to win the race.

Most major politicians' endorsements went to Chicago Alderman Tom Allen, Chicago Alderman Howard Brookins or Cook County Commissioner Larry Suffredin. Her own boss, retiring State's Attorney Dick Devine, broke his vow to be neutral and backed his first assistant, Bob Milan.

The slights may have irked her just a little -- when a reporter asked her Tuesday night if she thought her opponents had underestimated her, the question was hardly out of his mouth before she forcefully shot back, "YES!"

But she also conceded that in some ways that was good.

Alvarez avoided many of the attack ads that brought other leading contenders down in the polls.

That let her operate largely unimpeded as she made a concerted effort to appeal to women. Her ads featured her getting her children ready for school, followed by a recitation of her strong prosecutorial background.

The appeal to women gave her a political base that cut across racial and ethnic lines, allowing her to win 14 of the 50 city wards and nine of the 30 suburban townships.

As expected, Alvarez won Hispanic areas. But some areas she took were a surprise. Alvarez won Cook County Commissioner John Daley's 11th ward, Chicago Alderman Dick Mell's 33rd Ward and Bloom Township, as well as almost all the Northwest suburban townships.

But more importantly, Alvarez placed well in wards she didn't win. In the city, Brookins took more wards than she did. In the suburbs, Allen took more townships.

But Alvarez was the only candidate to score above 10 percent of the votes in all 50 wards and above 16 percent in all townships. Whereas other candidates varied wildly ward by ward or township by township, Alvarez's more consistent distribution won the six-way race with about 26 percent of the vote -- albeit by a slim margin of about one percentage point over Allen.

So now that Democrats have elected her, just who is Alvarez?

The third in command at the state's attorney's office, Alvarez grew up in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, which she can still see from her office at the criminal courts complex at 26th Street and California Avenue.

Her father was a waiter who died when she was 12, leaving her mother to raise three children as a seamstress.

Despite modest means, her mother was able to give Alvarez a Catholic high school education at Maria High School.

"Once the nuns discovered my mom could sew, … it was the barter system," she laughed.

She started college at Southern Illinois University, but decided she was too urban for the environment around Carbondale and transferred to Loyola University. She did pick up something useful in Carbondale, however: her husband, James Gomez. The two struck up a friendship, but didn't start dating until she was in law school at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Gomez, an obstetrician/gynecologist, pumped more than $600,000 in loans into her campaign, giving her the money she needed to get on television.

Surprisingly, while most of the debate surrounding the state's attorney's race focused on the office's tepid prosecution of political and police corruption, Alvarez won with some of the least aggressive proposals for increasing those types of prosecutions.

Instead she relied on her history as the former head of the political corruption unit and her history as a prosecutor who convicted two corrupt special operations police officers.

When it was pointed out to her in a Daily Herald interview that the U.S. attorney's office had been much more successful than the state's attorney at finding political corruption in Cook County, Alvarez defended the office.

"The Feds do have more resources. That's the bottom line. … We don't have $25 million in our budget to just, in fact, put, in total, into corruption," Alvarez said.

"Our core mission is violent crime, and I would never want to be in a position where I'm looking a rape victim in the eye and say, 'Well, ma'am, sorry, we're not going to do anything to find the man who brutally raped you because we have now diverted all of our attention to weeding out bad police officers and fighting corruption."

That answer will likely be target No. 1 of her Republican opponent Tony Peraica, who has long railed against Cook County as being corrupt because of its largely one-party governance.

He lost no time going after Alvarez Wednesday, even following her on morning newscasts at 7 a.m., lest the glow of her recent victory go undiminished on the airwaves.

The two ran into each other at the ABC 7 Chicago studio hallway. They exchanged pleasantries, but hours later, Peraica began taking shots at her in on-camera interviews.

"Let's keep it in proper perspective," Peraica said. "Ms. Alvarez won 26 percent of the (Democratic) vote -- which means 74 percent … voted for someone else."

Peraica even suggested judges and prosecutors had told him her courtroom skills were not all they were cracked up to be.

Peraica will soon have a chance to see for himself. Alvarez is scheduled this spring to try Moses Phillips for the murder of 10-year-old Siretha White in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood.