Any politician who thinks that the 50-some inches of snow that just got dumped on Baltimore is an “act of God” — we need to just stick it out, and it’ll eventually get cleaned up — would do well to revisit the story of Jane Byrne and Michael Bilandic.

The Chicago Tribune has a nice little summary of the story here, but the gist of it is that in the stormy January of 1979, Byrne unseated Bilandic, the mayor who had fired her from city government two years earlier, and became the first female mayor of Chicago. She had been the head of consumer affairs for the city, a mid-level government position, but one that she enjoyed with the support of the Daley Democratic machine. So how did she beat, Bilandic, the incumbent acting mayor with a long history in city politics as both a lawyer and an alderman? The answer is four letters long: SNOW.

Two huge storms dumped 35 inches of snow on the city over the course of about two weeks, and the widely-held public opinion was that Bilandic was too inept at cleaning it up. “Streets were not plowed, garbage was not collected and mass transit was staggered. Chicago was the city that could not get to work. By Election Day, many voters who had been faithful to the machine were ready to dump Bilandic,” the Tribune writes.

Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has a year before she has to worry about any electoral primary challenge, but as anyone in this town knows, Baltimoreans have long memories. If the prevailing opinion of SR-B’s job cleaning up this frosty mess shifts negative, it could be a problem. Already Gov. Martin O’Malley has predicted a $40 million cleanup bill, and scolded Marylanders for their impatience with the cleanup. Meanwhile, Rawlings-Blake has been shown on TV in the city’s special Emergency Operations Center (known these days as the “Snow Room”) nearly around the clock. Yesterday the Baltimore Business Journal published a rather random selection of local businesspeople giving their opinions on the mayor’s cleanup effort, which ranged from vague statements about the “great job” SR-B is doing to carping about Thames Street being still unplowed. Twitter has been abuzz (here’s one feed that’s been particularly vocal) with plowing updates and griping. But by and large, the jury’s still out.

But pols beware: Don’t get Byrned by the snow!

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