partnered with Chicago journalist and political consultant Don Rose, who served as her campaign manager. At first, political observers believed her to have little chance of winning. A memorandum inside the Bilandic campaign said it should portray her as "a shrill, charging, vindictive person—and nothing makes a woman look worse". However, the Chicago Blizzard of 1979 in January paralyzed the city and caused Bilandic to be seen as an ineffective leader. Jesse Jackson endorsed Byrne. Many Republican voters voted in the Democratic primary to beat Bilandic. Infuriated voters in the North Side and Northwest Side retaliated against Bilandic for the Democratic Party's slating of only South Side candidates for the mayor, clerk, and treasurer (the outgoing city clerk, John C. Marcin, was from the Northwest Side). These four factors combined to give Byrne a 51% to 49% victory over Bilandic in the primary. Positioning herself as a reformer, Byrne then won the main election with 82.1% of the vote, still the largest margin in a Chicago mayoral election. Tenure Leadership and general politics Byrne made inclusive moves as mayor, such as shepherding the hiring the city's first African-American and female school superintendent Ruth B. Love, and she was the first mayor to recognize the gay community. Byrne helped to make Chicago more welcoming to the gay community. She ended the police department's practice of raiding gay bars, and declared the city's first official "Gay Pride Parade Day" in 1981. However, during her tenure, Byrne drifted away from many of the progressive tenets she had campaigned on. Byrne began to collaborate with aldermen such as Edward M. Burke and Ed Vrdolyak, whom, during her 1979 campaign, she had denounced as an "evil cabal". In 1982, she supported the Cook County Democratic Party's replacement of its chairman, County Board President George Dunne, with her city council ally, Alderman Edward Vrdolyak. Byrne and the Cook County Democratic Party endorsed Senator Ted Kennedy for president in 1980, but incumbent President Jimmy Carter won the Illinois Democratic Primary and even carried Cook County and the city of Chicago. Byrne's endorsement was later considered detrimental because of her controversial tenure, and Kennedy's loss in the city was a key moment in the 1980 Democratic Party presidential primaries because of Chicago's role in delivering his brother John F. Kennedy the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. When Byrne and Kennedy walked in the annual Saint Patrick's Day parade they