POLITICS
Mayor Daley Wins! And Deserves To
By Stump Connolly
There are certain events in the political life of America that merit study. The re-election of Richard M. Daley to a sixth term as mayor of Chicago Tuesday is one of them.
Chicago is not an easy city to govern, much less be popular while doing it. Wildly divergent interests are always at work. We are the headquarters city for a range of global corporations, many built on the back of immigrant labor. We are a transportation hub, a key player in international financial markets and yet provincially focused on our own little neighborhoods. The high rises glisten along the lakefront, but we still have in some parts of our city the largest concentration of poverty in America.
Mayoral elections are a way to measure how well these elements are meshing. If the balance is too far out of whack, something as slight as a snowstorm can bring to power a Jane Byrne or as ubiquitous as festering racism can cause voters to rise up and elect a Harold Washington.
Filling His Father’s Shoes
What most Chicagoans see as the baseline for analyzing the progress of modern day Chicago starts in 1955 when current mayor’s father Richard J. Daley was first elected.
The first Mayor Daley -- “The Boss” as Mike Royko famously called him -- built the expressways that connect Chicago to the suburbs, started a high rise boom in the Loop that brought us the Hancock, Sears Tower and Standard Oil Building, and tamed the warring factions of The Democratic Party (by running it.) He eradicated thousands of acres of slums, only to replace them with cinderblock public housing high rises, and juggled the inequities in the public school system by hauling temporary trailers known as Willis Wagons into poor neighborhoods to give under-privileged children in Chicago a place to go -- and learn nothing.
In his 21 years in office, the first Mayor Daley gained early repute for making Chicago “The City That Works” -- only to see his reputation shredded by the turbulence of the late Sixties, then undermined in the early Seventies by federal prosecution of his closest friends, aldermen and aides for bribery and public corruption.
The second Mayor Daley has spent most of his last 18 years in office undoing much of his father’s legacy. Not that he would ever admit it. He is, as his father was, a son of Bridgeport. He would not be where he is without the support of the Democratic machine. But he has shifted power away from its patronage army in ways his counterpart at the county board (former president John Stroger) never could and relies on the new forces in politics, money and media, to get out his message.
When Richard M. Daley first won office in 1989, Chicago was a city wracked by dissension. “Beirut by The Lake,” The Wall Street Journal dubbed it. Harold Washington’s tenure as mayor had been marked by a deep white vs. black divide in the city council and city services were frozen in place by the stand-off.
Daley ran and won office by promising to bring efficiency and order to city government. He started with the little things. He privatized city towing services to get abandoned cars off the street, upgraded city computer systems, and re-organized inefficient departments. He sent his chief of staff Forrest Claypool to the Chicago Park District to curtail featherbedding and re-focus attention on neighborhood parks. And he took responsibility, as his father never did, for the performance of the public schools.
Daley was slow to wean the city off patronage hiring (as the trial of Robert Sorich showed.) But with a focus on finding “the best for the job” in top-level positions, and a remarkable openness to recruiting African-American and Hispanic candidates, he defused racial politics. Ten years into office, he was confident enough in his position to do what no other big city mayor had ever attempted, taking over public housing and convincing the federal government to tear down the high rise projects that were his father’s worst legacy.
At the same time, Daley brokered a deal with The Chicago Bears for a new Soldier Field stadium, undertook the renovation of the downtown lakefront into Millenium Park, started a program to improve CTA mass transit platforms and opened a barrage of new schools, libraries, police stations and parks in the neighborhoods. His efforts were so well received that no serious candidates ever stepped forward to challenge him. In his last bid for re-election in 2003, he beat the four other contenders with 79% of the vote.
This Time Around
If Daley was going to have a rough go of it, 2007 should have been the year. Only a month after his 2003 victory, in a brazen exercise of executive power, he sent bulldozers in the dark of night to tear up the runway at Meigs Field so he could claim the land for a new Northerly Island park. Nine months later, the Chicago Sun-Times began running a series of stories on bribery in the city’s $40 million hired truck program.
The newspaper investigation spread to the city clerk’s office and the mayor’s Office of Inquiry and Information, where Daley confidante Robert Sorich was discovered channeling patronage workers into city jobs. Federal officials subpoenaed city records and, for the next two years, a steady stream of city workers – some 41 in all – resigned, pleaded guilty or were convicted of wrongdoing, including Sorich and City Clerk James Laski.
His Millenium Park finally opened in July 2004, but the final costs were $482 million, double the original estimate. And although Chicago for the most part welcomed the tear down of CHA high rises, the relocation of tenants to new apartments was going slower than expected.
Anti-Daley forces began threading together charges of City Hall corruption, slow progress in school reform, displaced public housing residents and overspending on showpiece downtown development into an argument for change. Even Mayor Daley’s surging interest in bringing the 2016 Olympics to Chicago – focused around showing off the city lakefront – could be cast as another sign of neighborhood neglect.
Two strong challengers stood poised to make the run. South Side Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. launched a two-pronged campaign to raise money in Washington and build a network of supporters at home in all the wards of the city; and West Side Congressman Luis Guitierrez started sounding out Puerto Rican businessman about his desire to be the city’s first Latino mayor.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the starting line. The U.S. Olympics Committee nixed the city’s plan to build a second Olympic stadium on the lakefront next to Soldier Field. In the end, this would prove a godsend because, looking for alternatives, Daley alighted on the idea of placing the Olympic stadium -- the centerpiece of the games -- in Washington Park, which just happened to be in a neighborhood in the heart of Jackson’s South Side electoral base.
A month later, Jackson and Guitierrez took telephone polls to gauge their early strength. Much to their surprise, even after offering up a series of “push questions” noting the corruption convictions and accusing Daley of favoring downtown development at the expense of the neighborhoods, they found the mayor still had an unassailable plurality among voters. When the November elections brought a Democratic majority to Congress, Jackson and Guitierrez suddenly decided Congress couldn’t get along without them.
A Campaign To Remember
The two candidates who chose to take on Daley -- Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown and community activist William “Dock” Walls – waged particularly meager and ineffective campaigns. (The best argument anyone made against a sixth term for Daley came from Ben Joravsky in last week’s Chicago Reader, but by then, it was too late.) Their lackluster showing, however, doesn’t take away from the astute way Daley handled his own campaign this time around.
What do I mean by that?
* He played to his strengths. Although City Hall reporters complained that Daley was running a “low key” campaign, he was out on the campaign trail almost every day at neighborhood coffees, ribbon cuttings and program openings talking with voters. In many cases, the mayor’s schedule was not announced in the pressroom so he was not interrupted by reporters grilling him on the latest charges by his opponents or camera crews knocking over furniture to get a “photo op.”
I attended one house coffee in the 32nd ward where Daley spoke for nearly two hours with about 60 community leaders. He was relaxed, forthright and remarkably candid in his assessment of city problems, possible solutions and other politicians, both in his party and out, whom he thought were impeding Chicago’s progress. That candor would never have come out with reporters in the room.
* He acknowledged his problems and took steps to fix them. There’s not a lot you can say when 41 of your employees are convicted of public corruption – except we’ll try to do better. But Daley didn’t shy away from answered his critics in the press corps and in the editorial rooms of the newspapers. He also took the extra step of banning campaign contributions from city contractors (but not lawyers or bond traders) and making the people who circulated his nomination petitions sign affidavits stating they had not been promised jobs or promotions in exchange for political work they did on their own time.
Although neither made much of a difference – Daley still raised $4.8 million in the last three months – they were symbolic gestures that signaled his desire to shake off the mantle of corruption.
* He won without the unions. In an era of ever-rising demands on property taxes, it’s inevitable that public officials will butt heads with the powerful unions that represent teachers, sanitation workers and other public employees. That confrontation has been coming to a head in Chicago for years and it was exacerbated this year by the struggle over the Walmart Big Box Ordinance.
Daley stood his ground against the union pressure and lost valuable foot soldiers who might have worked the precincts on his behalf. But he found new ways to make door-to-door campaigning a non-factor in this race.
* He went around the “old media.” It could have been expected that Daley, the incumbent, wouldn’t debate his opponents. He hasn’t done so since 1989. But this time around, he didn’t bite at any number of opportunities to appear on television (even without his opponents) or stage photo-ops for the newspapers. This one is a lesson for the old media. Watch out, your grip is slipping.
* Meanwhile . . . he found other, more effective ways of getting out his message. He identified and targeted community leaders (the word in vogue is navigators) with special attention; and they, in turn, passed on their approval to their friends. Yes, in the end, his commercials dominated the airwaves. What else was he going to do with all that money? But all his commercials were positive, a welcome relief from the mudslinging of last November. If Daley was not exactly Mr. High Tech on the Internet, he used the localized version of it – direct mail – to target his followers.
What Mayor Daley did most effectively was set the tone for the race, get his issues on the table to such an extent they crowded out all others, avoid the pitfall of confronting his enemies in the press, and project a sense of where he would lead Chicago in the future.
Which is why he won – and deserved to.
And why is that important? Because his chief campaign strategist
was David Axelrod, now better known as the political consultant to Barack
Obama. Stay tuned.
