By MILTON RAKOVE

The two faces of Jane

SEVERAL months ago, Chicago magazine, in featuring an article about Mayor Jane Byrne, printed two different covers for its readers: One displayed a smiling Mayor Byrne, while the other featured a frowning, serious Jane Byrne. It was probably a journalistic first for a mass circulation magazine. (Interestingly, the copies of the magazine featuring the frowning Byrne outsold the smiling Byrne issue.) Chicago magazine was not first, however, in presenting two Jane Byrnes. Richard Ciccone, the Chicago Tribune's former political editor, would, from time to time, do his Sunday column as a dialogue between two Jane Byrnes, Good Jane and Bad Jane, over matters of public policy in Chicago.

There have been two Mayor Byrnes over the past three years of her term as mayor of Chicago. There was the early Jane Byrne who attacked the old style machine politicians, who took powerful labor unions head-on and who fired top-level bureaucrats in the city government. At the same time, that Jane Byrne was always available to the media — day or night — in her office, in the corridors of City Hall, on the street and on radio and television talk shows. That Jane Byrne was clearly a neophyte as mayor, as a political campaigner and as a City Hall politician. After she had won the mayoralty, she kept campaigning as if she were still running for the office, and she conducted the affairs of her office as if she were a City Hall politician rather than the chief executive of the second largest city in the United States. That Jane Byrne, recognizing the political power of the mayor's office, seized control of patronage from Party Chairman George Dunne, did battle with powerful ward committeemen like Park District Supt. Edmund Kelly, state Rep. Michael Madigan and Aldermen Edward Vrdolyak and Edward Burke, and made headlines almost daily.

But, since about a year ago, midway through her four-year term of office, a different Mayor Byrne has been sitting in the chief executive's office on the fifth floor of City Hall. This Mayor Byrne deals with the media almost completely through controlled press conferences. She refuses to comment to reporters in the corridors of City Hall or on street corners, and instead reads formal speeches to organizations. This Mayor Byrne has come to terms and formed alliances with most of the powerful ward committeemen in what is left of the Democratic machine in Chicago. She has sat down at the bargaining table and worked out deals with the union leadership for the policemen, firemen, teachers and Chicago Transit Authority. The early pattern of firing top-level bureaucrats seems to have come to an end. This Mayor Byrne confronts not the politicians and the bureaucrats, but rather the media representatives who used her for their purposes in the early days. Now she uses them on her terms, and they have difficulty provoking her for a headline or 30-second spot on the 10 o'clock news.

The old Mayor Byrne came to office on the crest of a wave of new politics in Chicago. She ran against the machine she had been a part of in Chicago. She won an electoral victory in a campaign based on street corner campaigning, exploiting the media and appealing to diverse coalitions of dissident, anti-machine elements in the city. And she first attempted to govern the city in the same way she had campaigned for the office of mayor.

The new Mayor Byrne is governing the city now much more as the mayor of Chicago than as a politician campaigning to be mayor. Still a politician, she goes to the neighborhoods, attending the wakes and senior citizen affairs, and she provides a plethora of cultural events, maintaining a high level of civic chauvinism. But her programs as mayor and her techniques and tactics for building support for those programs are very much based on pre-Byrne traditions in Chicago: dealing with and seeking support from the city's power structure — businessmen, labor leaders, politicians and bureaucrats. There are two questions which are , still unanswered about the efficacy and the possible consequences of this new Mayor Byrne's programs and techniques, as she prepares for next year's f mayoral campaign.

First, will the old programs and techniques work in Chicago in a new environment of significantly changed conditions — a declining population, an eroding tax base, a deteriorating national and local economy, a much less controllable and reliable electorate, and the loss of federal and state funds which shored up the old system?

Second, how will Jane Byrne run for reelection as mayor in 1983? Will she in again like the Jane Byrne of '8-79 as a street corner and media politician, appealing to the dissident or dissatisfied elements in Chicago's body politic? Or will she run as Mayor Byrne, backed by the political machine, the bankers and businessmen, the labor unions, and the other traditional elements of the city's power structure? Or, will she try to straddle the fence and do both things at the same time? That would be difficult to do, given the deep cleavages in the city's population between diverse constituencies, especially if the opposing candidate is State's Atty. Richard M. J Daley.

It is going to be an interesting political year in Chicago, both for Mayor Byrne and for the city. ?

2/May 1982/Illinois Issues