Candidate Johnson one of SEVENTEEN county board commissioners. Who even KNEW he was there?

Long form to good effect, including swipes at the other one. . . .

Chi Trib brings a new news-room team to cover the union-organizer-lobbyist running for the highest office in the city, and it shows.

On the mayoral campaign trail, Brandon Johnson leans heavily on his tenure on the Cook County Board of Commissioners.

It’s an important chapter in his background as a candidate who’s otherwise short on government experience, a way to show voters he can accomplish things while working with others in a setting akin to the City Council he would need to lead as mayor.

Fair enough.

But Johnson’s record is complicated by the realities of serving since late 2018 as one of the junior members on a 17-person body where President Toni Preckwinkle, who has endorsed Johnson, runs a tight ship and much of the real decision-making is top-down.

Oh.

Not a problem, argues Johnson.

On the Cook County Board, Johnson points to his work to pass a “Justice for Black Lives” resolution as a defining moment of his four years, saying it was “the impetus behind” more substantial legislation the board subsequently adopted.

Commissioners passed it in July 2020 as Chicago and cities across the nation were reeling from violent unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer.

But . . .

Like many other resolutions enacted by the board, it is essentially a set of values and aspirations, in this case a broad mandate urging the county to keep Black people and other marginalized groups in Cook County safe from police violence and from unfair incarceration at the Cook County Jail.

A political, not a governmental, action.

This rundown, weighing in at 1,800 well-chosen words, is worth reading in toto.

It’s another case of Trib playing catch-up ball with an avalanche of second-day or later coverage following on-the-case breaking coverage by light-on-its-feet Sun-Times — marines charging the beaches vs. slow-turning battleships.