Old-fashioned, maybe, but some ideas would never go out of style.
SIX
WHERE THE RUBBER HITS THE ROAD
CHICAGO IN THE LATE 1980S was unraveling. The newspapers called it “Beirut on the Lake.”
After Harold Washington’s death, the racial divisions and gridlock he had hoped his election would settle reemerged with a vengeance. It began a week after Harold died, at a raucous City Council meeting at which the white, anti-Washington bloc installed a reliable African American hack, Eugene Sawyer, to serve out the remainder of Washington’s term. The vote came in the middle of the night, with thousands of protesters surrounding City Hall. Mild-mannered and easily manipulated, Sawyer was more figurehead than leader, a mayor under whom the connivers on the City Council would have their way.
As the old racial and ethnic divisions flared up, Chicago’s problems multiplied. Although the city, with its more diverse economic base, was better fortified to withstand the pressures that were eating away at other big cities in the Midwest, we weren’t immune to some of the same disturbing patterns. Our downtown was dying. The school system was floundering. The white middle class was fleeing.
With the city adrift, the 1989 mayoral election loomed as, possibly, the last chance to arrest the slide and resurrect the sense of community and basic decorum necessary to confront these pressing problems. It would take strong, smart leadership, and having covered the genial but feckless Sawyer for years on the City Council, I was sure he couldn’t provide it. His installation as interim mayor was an inflection point for the city I had come to love. So I wasn’t looking for just any client willing to take on a challenging race. I was looking for one who could unite the city and take on these festering problems.
Not that I could afford to be fussy. My third child, Ethan, had come along in 1987. Lauren’s problems were growing more severe. Her seizures were coming relentlessly. The drug regimens were wreaking havoc with her moods, and as she grew, the developmental gap between her and her peers was becoming more obvious. It was heartbreaking, and placed a great strain on our family. Too often, I escaped, justifying my absences by the urgency of campaigns. Yet there was no escaping what had become obvious: we would need significant resources in the years to come to meet the challenges our daughter faced. Given the sorry state Chicago was in, I felt that our choice in the mayoral race had to be more than a business decision. Chicago was now my hometown. I wanted to work for someone who had the stature, the strength, and the savvy to save the city.
I talked to others, but to my mind, the obvious candidate was Richard M. Daley. It was odd to think that the son and namesake of a mayor remembered for his divisive leadership could be a force for reconciliation. Many Chicagoans—particularly black Chicagoans—still remembered Richard J. Daley’s stunning “shoot to kill” order during the race riots of the 1960s, and his heavy-handed effort to purge his onetime loyalist Metcalfe for defiantly shining a bright light on the issue of police brutality.
The younger Daley was, in many ways, unmistakably his father’s son: the same bulldog mien; the familiar running battle with the English language (Royko wrote of Daley’s father that he would rarely “exit from the same paragraph he entered”); the innate sense of how to get things done; and a palpable, unshakable love for the city of Chicago. Yet on issues of race and tolerance, he was a new and different generation of Daley. He understood that love of city in 1989 meant rebuilding community, not tearing it apart.
More than a decade after Richard J. Daley died, the Daley name still carried the patina of competence and strength that Chicagoans yearned for in the midst of the prevailing chaos in Sawyer’s City Hall. And Rich Daley’s role as state’s attorney, crusading against gangs and drugs, bolstered that image. Alongside those efforts, though, he had worked to build strong relationships with religious and civic leaders in the black community. While I knew there still would be some resistance from the lakefront liberals who, more than a decade after his death, still defined themselves in opposition to Daley’s father, I didn’t share their reservations. The son had proven broader-minded than his dad on an array of issues, and had strong support in the precincts where Richard J. was reviled. I had done a few ads for his reelection as state’s attorney in 1988, and began joining strategy sessions chaired by his brother Bill as he and Daley’s top aides contemplated a mayoral campaign.
By December 1988, three months before the mayoral primary, all the pieces were in place for a Daley candidacy. Bill and I went to brief the soon-to-be candidate at his home, where we sat down with him and his wife, Maggie.
“Here, Rich, is a draft of a script I’ve written for a kickoff ad,” I said, shoving a piece of paper across the coffee table. Our plan was to get in with a bang. I’d written a simple, direct-to-camera message for Daley that would introduce his candidacy and frame the race. In it, he would wryly acknowledge the most frequent critique of those who questioned his credentials. “I may not be the best speaker in town,” he would say, “but I know how to run a government and bring people together.”
There was only one problem.
“Script? What script?” Maggie asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Uh, Mag,” Rich said, a little sheepishly, his face flushing. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
Though the announcement was just a few days away, Daley had not yet shared with his wife his decision to run.
“Okay, then,” Bill said nervously, gathering up his papers. “David, why don’t you and I go out for a little walk? I’ll show you around the neighborhood.”
Rich had been reluctant to tell Maggie because he knew she was deeply scarred from the ugly, racial overtones of the last mayoral campaign. Though Daley had refused to play the race card against Washington, many white ethnic Chicagoans had viewed him as the spoiler who opened the doors to City Hall for Harold. Shortly after that election, Daley had gotten into a fistfight with one of his neighbors in a local toy store, after the man blistered him for paving the way for “a nigger” to win. Daley’s seven-year-old son, Patrick, had witnessed the ugly scrap.
“I don’t want to have any part of a racial thing,” Maggie told us when Bill and I returned. “If that’s what this is going to be, count me out.”
I loved her for saying it. I was sure that most Chicagoans were, like me, desperately looking for a candidate who could heal Chicago by leading it past this racial maelstrom—and only Rich was positioned to be that leader. We had data to prove it. The only cards we would play were unity cards, I assured Maggie, who would go on to become one of Chicago’s most beloved figures.
“Okay, then,” she said, in the skeptical tone of a reproving schoolteacher. “I hope that’s the case.”
From day one that became the central theme of Daley’s campaign: a mayor strong enough to lead Chicago beyond racial politics in order to tackle the many tangible challenges it faced.
• • •
We had no illusions about our ability to attract black votes in the primary. Although Sawyer wasn’t the choice of the community, African Americans had fought hard to put one of their own in the mayor’s office and were likely to cast their votes, however grudgingly, to keep a black man there, despite his limitations. This was the cynical calculation the white ward bosses had made when they installed him to replace Harold. Nonetheless, Daley spent much of his time campaigning in the predominantly African American wards. We wanted to send a strong signal that he would be a mayor for the entire city. While this gesture was the right thing to do, it also had the strategic virtue of reassuring white, liberal voters who would make the difference in the election.
Sawyer’s campaign manager, Reynard Rochon, a wily operative from New Orleans, tried hard to embroil Daley in a controversy that would allow Sawyer’s campaign to depict him as a closet racist and drive a wedge between him and those liberals. So Rochon pounced when Daley, addressing a rally on the city’s Sou
thwest Side, mangled a line in his standard stump speech.
For months, Daley had maintained extraordinary discipline, delivering the same stump speech about bringing the city together. At this stop, however, he got tangled up as he reached the crescendo, which always began with the phrase “What you want is a mayor who can sit down with everybody.” On this night, he said, “You want a what mayor who can sit down with everybody.” With this mixed-up construction, a campaign desperate to light a fire could make the argument that Daley was telling an all-white crowd that what they wanted was a “white mayor.” Within hours of the tape’s surfacing, Rochon publicly accused Daley of making a racial appeal.
Daley’s wrestling match with the English language was hardly news, and any reporter who had covered his speeches had heard the line dozens of times and knew that he had simply mangled it. Besides, did it make any sense for a candidate who had pitched his whole campaign on healing the racial divide suddenly to change course weeks before the election, with a ham-handed, public appeal to elect a “white mayor”? It was preposterous. Yet a civic committee that had been formed to police the tone of Chicago’s campaigns deliberated and sanctioned Daley for his remarks. As sometimes happens, the self-anointed good guys wound up inflaming rather than calming. I spent hours urging the group’s leader not to enter the fray, and a few cathartic minutes lambasting him after he did. With one careless press conference, this group, with no doubt the best of intentions, threatened to undermine the premise of Daley’s entire campaign and, to my mind, derail the city’s best hope for bridging the racial divide.
But the people of Chicago were watching the race intensely, and taking their own measure of the candidates. I would see this often in high-profile races for sensitive offices like mayor or president. People watch the candidates carefully and form their judgments based on the totality of what they see. Some gaffes are dismissed as such, if they fly in the face of the impression voters have developed. Yet if a gaffe reflects what voters have come to believe is the true character of a candidate, it can be deadly. In this case, Chicagoans had sized up Daley and his campaign and dismissed the dustup for what it was: a verbal hiccup, not a racial call to arms.
Daley swept to the mayoralty with strong support from white liberals and Hispanic voters and, as we expected, only a sliver of black votes. Yet over his twenty-two years as mayor, he governed as promised, building strong ties to all the city’s communities, working on local problems such as school reform and crime, and assiduously avoiding divisive language or politics. He would be rewarded in subsequent elections with a greater share (even majorities) of the black vote, forged not by a machine, but his own good works. Like his father, Rich Daley was a builder—of parks, schools, libraries, the community anchors that make a city and its neighborhoods strong. His tenure wasn’t without controversy or scandal—and by the end, when the Great Recession hit, the due bills came in for the obligations Daley had pushed into the future. But one legacy no one can deny is that Rich Daley pulled Chicago back from the racial abyss.
Never one to sully or dishonor his legendary father’s record, Daley would never admit it, but I always felt he took great pride in being the Mayor Daley who healed rather than divided.
The Chicago elections—Harold’s and Daley’s—gained a great deal of attention nationally, and made my consulting firm a go-to place for urban politics. Given my experiences as a child of the big city, and the years I spent patrolling Chicago’s fabled City Hall as a newspaperman and consultant, these campaigns were a natural niche for me. They also were my special passion.
Urban politics is the most visceral and interesting, first, because of the ethnic and racial diversity you find in most cities. Chicago’s phone book is like a United Nations directory, rife with names that have roots in every corner of the world. And while Chicago’s ethnic communities are not as siloed as they once were—in homogenous wards commanded by party bosses with names such as Vito Marzullo, Izzy Horwitz, and Paddy Bauler—there still is a distinct ethnic flavor to many of its neighborhoods. Politics requires a general understanding of that vital and complex mosaic. When I was working mayoral races in Chicago, I was careful to use a neutral Colombian voice over talent on Spanish-language ads so as not to offend either the Puerto Rican voters on the city’s North Side or the Mexicans on the South.
To this day, issues of race are still simmering just beneath the surface in Chicago and other big cities, where so many interact in relatively small spaces. Yet there also is a shared sense of community that, despite all the differences, ties people together. I was struck by this when Daley’s wife, Maggie, died after a long bout with cancer shortly after he had left office in 2011. Maggie’s wake was held at the Chicago Cultural Center, on Michigan Avenue, on a drizzly November day. Yet there was a long and continuing line of Chicagoans, from wealthy businessmen to cabbies to waitresses, waiting in the rain for hours to pay their respects. The crowd was as diverse as the city itself. The warm and gracious Maggie had been their First Lady for twenty-two years. She was family, and this was a loss they shared.
Local government is where the rubber hits the road. While state legislators and members of Congress are more remote, local officials are present and visible. They are the first responders of politics. They are held most accountable for fundamental problems, from the education of our kids and safety in the streets to the more mundane but still important issues of daily life. When a sidewalk buckles or you need a business permit or graffiti removed from your garage, the local politicians are the ones to whom you turn. I recall one Chicago alderman who fielded multiple calls from an irate constituent who was steaming because her neighbor’s dog was barking incessantly. After trying several times to intervene, with no luck, the alderman came up with another idea. “I bought a box of dog biscuits, went over there, and threw them over the fence. I figured that would shut her up for a while,” he said, leaving vague whether he was talking about the barking dog or the griping constituent.
There is no buffer between local officials and their constituents. That’s why voters in big cities often relate to their mayors in a very personal way. They know them as people, their strengths and foibles. They watch them closely. They connect with them in much the way Americans do their presidents. No other position in the political galaxy promotes that kind of relationship, or affords an officeholder the chance to make as visible a difference, day by day.
At the height of Daley’s popularity, his name periodically came up in connection with open governor and U.S. Senate races as well as for cabinet positions in Washington. He invariably laughed the rumors off. “Why would I give up this job for that?” said the man who would eclipse his father’s record for longevity in the Chicago mayor’s office. “Here you can actually do things without a bunch of bureaucrats standing between you and actually getting things done.”
Harold and Daley gave our political consulting venture its start. Over the next two decades, we would help elect mayors in many of America’s largest cities, including Cleveland, Detroit, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, Houston, and Washington, DC. Some of these candidates broke racial and gender barriers, but all of them had to negotiate diverse constituencies. To win and then to govern, all had to find a way to reach across the sometimes enormous social and economic chasms that can divide one city neighborhood from the next.
• • •
Shortly after Daley’s election, I got a call from the campaign manager for a long-shot candidate for mayor of Cleveland named Michael White. White had devoted himself to public service, as a City Council aide and then a councilman before winning a seat in the Ohio Senate. In 1989, at the age of thirty-seven, he joined a crowded field to replace George Voinovich, the popular if pallid outgoing mayor.
Like Chicago, Cleveland was racially divided, and the conventional wisdom was that the field would winnow down to a runoff between a black candidate, City Council president George Forbes, and one of the white candidates. Mike Whit
e was a talented and charismatic speaker, but was thought to lack the organization and money to challenge the favorites. He made up for that, in part, by roaming the streets of Cleveland, listening to the radio and driving to the scene of breaking news, particularly when the story gave him a platform to discuss crime, education, or some of the other central issues of his campaign. Yet there was one momentous event that turned the tide in his favor.
It was tradition in Cleveland that all mayoral candidates participate in a luncheon debate at the City Club. The city’s flagship paper, the Plain Dealer, and local broadcast outlets would provide intensive coverage of the event. The debate in 1989 featured five candidates, almost all of them eager to praise the outgoing Voinovich, a low-key, moderate Republican who was highly regarded for restoring equilibrium to Cleveland after the brief and stormy reign of populist mayor Dennis Kucinich. George Forbes, an irascible and incendiary figure as City Council president, depicted himself as Voinovich’s governing partner and the candidate of “continuity.”
Mike White, once an aide to Forbes, had a starkly different message.
“One of my opponents talked about continuity, and I think in some respects we should and must have continuity between the Voinovich years . . . a continuity in conduct that says no matter how we disagree—business community, civic community, and City Council—we will find a way and we must find a way to get along,” White said. “But I want to say to each and every one of you here, ladies and gentlemen, that I do not want continuity on the crucial issues affecting this town.”
As White spoke, passionately and with few notes, about the challenges of the city—drugs, crime, and a shortage of police; population flight; poor schools and a politicized school board; and racial divisions that stood in the way of progress—he slowly rallied the crowd behind him. After each refrain, he punctuated his critique with the same message: “Continuity just won’t do.”
Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Page 11