By LORI GRANGER

Byrne's campaign war chest

The campaign funds amassed by Mayor Jane Byrne for her reelection bid in the Chicago Democratic mayoral primary totaled $8.9 million by October 1. How will she spend it? Where did it come from? And who really finances the mayor's election campaign in Chicago? The author correlates campaign contributions with the city budget in Chicago and suggests the city itself finances the campaign

LET US SPEAK in hushed voices now, for we are approaching the secret, quivering heart of Chicago politics:

Money.

In 1979, the two candidates for mayor in the Democratic primary, Michael Bilandic and Jane Byrne, together spent a little more than $2.1 million. In 1982, with three candidates announced, at least nine and a half million dollars have already been raised.

The money is one more indication of the very real effect that the singular personality of Chicago's Mayor Jane Byrne has had and will continue to have on Illinois politics. Because a whopping $8.9 million of that is money that she has raised since she won that spectacular primary victory over Mike Bilandic in the snow-encrusted February of 1979. Cook County State's Attorney Richard M. Daley boasts only about a half million in funds for his effort so far, and the black independent candidate Congressman Harold Washington says only that he confidently expects to have $750,000. But both are scrambling for more to stand up to the expected avalanche of Byrne dollars.

Of course the late Mayor Richard J. Daley was no slouch at fundraising either, and there are those who say that what Jane Byrne has done is not significantly different from what was done before her. But there are differences, and they are important ones.

For one thing, if Daley really was raking in such spectacular sums — and critics like the independent political consultant Don Rose believe he was — he wasn't doing it in public. He was operating before the campaign disclosure process really got going, and of course the assumption is that he was putting money into some kind of concealed political fund. If so, we'll probably never know.

For another thing, no one has ever spent anywhere near $8.9 million — actually we should speak of a bit less than $4 million, since that was what Byrne had left in her coffers in October 1982 — on a campaign for mayor of Chicago, no matter how stringently you care to adjust for inflation. Daley spent about a million on his last run, and Bilandic spent the record with his million and a half in 1979.

You could argue that in neither case was the machine's anointed candidate really running for office in the sense that there was any thought in their minds that it was possible to lose. Sure you hired a firm and made a few upbeat commercials, and you went "to every ward in the city," as Daley used to put it, meaning the ward organizations mostly, and you put together this huge paper volunteer committee. But

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all that was more long-range morale-building than what the rest of the country understands as political campaigning.

Jane Byrne, on the other hand, is fighting for her political life. What she has done is up the financial ante in mayoral campaigning, and it's going to be very hard to get it down again. Once the precedent of a major, expensive, New York consultant-planned media-style campaign has been set, Chicago politics will never be the same.

For the 1979 primary race, Jane Byrne was only able to raise $125,000 — and $75,000 of that was a loan from herself and her husband Jay McMullen. Though she had moved in wealthy circles as a girl in the Sauganash neighborhood and knew people with money from her years in politics, her status as maverick candidate made her emphatically unattractive to political donors.

But the day after her stunning victory, the money started to roll in. Between her February 27 win and the time her committee filed its May campaign disclosure report, $478,364 had arrived. It included $2,000 from 10th Ward committeeman Edward Vrdolyak, whom she had branded one of a "cabal of evil men," and this quick and politic action showed just why the newspapers have admiringly pinned the label "Fast Eddie" on him. There was $20,000, too, from the Hotel, Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union. That union had given Bilandic $15,000 previously, and before that Daley had received $25,000, but Jane Byrne the maverick candidate had gotten nary a penny.

Richard M. Daley

Harold Washington

And so it has gone ever since. The February 27 victory hadn't warmed Byrne's personality all that much, and yet people were suddenly eager to hand her checks. She altered her view that politicians shouldn't accept donations of more than $1,000. And as she became more tolerant of money, money came more freely to her. What suddenly made her so attractive to donors? The thing that always attracts money. Other money. In this case, city money.

There is a party every fall to raise funds for Jane Byrne. It used to be a dinner, but they decided the overhead costs were just too high, and this year it was a hot dog party. Before the party Byrne's key businessman fundraiser, Merchandise Mart chairman Thomas V. King, heads a businessmen's breakfast to check up on pledges to buy tables. It's an honor to be invited. It can also be expensive.

"It was like a Baptist prayer meeting," one first-time attendee this year told me. "You have to stand up and sort of confess, only what you're confessing isn't your sins but your donations."

It's hardly a secret that the list of Chicago mayoral campaign donors has always been swollen with the names of people who do direct business with the city: realtors, contractors, suppliers, and unions like the hotel employees. A look at records filed by Byrne, Bilandic and Richard M. Daley shows a striking consistency. Even Tom King once headed a dinner for Bilandic. The same names come up over and over.

Start looking like a reasonable possibility for mayor, and some of that money will start drifting your way. Not as much as if you were in the fifth floor office to personally oversee the city's contracting and spending and hiring processes, of course.

There is always a great deal of editorial hand-wringing over this whenever the latest campaign disclosure report comes in from the mayor's committee. But Chicago seems, on the whole, willing to live with it. Illinois law says you have to tell who gave you the big contributions. But they don't limit how much you can get. This year a group of independent aldermen was discussing a campaign expenditure limitation law for the city elections — and they got about as far with it as they get with most things in the machine-dominated City Council.

Jane Byrne often speaks of the City of Chicago as a huge corporation, and that's what it is. Even if we ignore the theoretically separate agencies like the Chicago Transit Authority and the Chicago Park District, where Jane Byrne has more than a nodding acquaintance with those in charge, she is sitting on top of a city budget that ran to $1.81 billion in 1982 — some $5.5 billion total since she took office to October 1, 1982.

With that much city money being spent, she is a much-courted lady. Some of it goes in salaries. In Chicago it's accepted practice for city workers to kick in a little for the boss' campaign chest. The word around the Hall — bolstered by a tape recording somebody slipped WBBM-TV last fall — is that anybody who makes more than $20,000 off the city payroll is expected to come up with at least $100.

Some of it goes to contractors. Well, nobody will be surprised when the firm's chairman appears on the mayor's donor list along with management consultants, lawyers, heads of taxi firms who operate under city license, people who want zoning changes, people who sell and service parking meters.

Mayor Byrne has taken to getting and spending with a unique zeal, so it is probably reasonable to assume that she has come close to wringing every possible campaign penny out of the people who do business with the city. In doing so, she has readjusted the rate structure for getting city dollars and probably changed the emphasis in mayoral campaigning forever.

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Poor old Mike Bilandic, working from roughly the same contributors' list, didn't do anywhere near as well. During the period from the end of December 1976, when he was picked to be interim mayor, until he left office, the city budget was some $2.8 billion total. Over that same period, Bilandic accumulated $2,661,382 in his campaign committees. That was for two campaigns — the election to fill the late Mayor Richard J. Daley's unexpired term and the race against Jane Byrne in 1979.

That works out to only 97 cents on every $1,000 in the city budget appropriations. Byrne's rate — which compared city budget figures from the time she took office until October 1, 1982, with her campaign fund take over the same period — is about $1.63 per $1,000. She has boosted the collection rate by about two thirds.

It's a very rough measure, of course. Some city budget appropriations are obviously more negotiable at the mayor's discretion than others. Some contracts appear to go out at much higher rates. Some city workers escape being hit for campaign funds at all. But the city budget figure is one that everybody can agree on — which is not true when you get into those lengthy discussions of actual city indebtedness and deficits and revolving funds and so forth — and the campaign funds are of course filed with the State Board of Elections. So the index gives us some kind of a rough idea of what it's all about.

It allows us to say, for example, that Jane Byrne's gleanings don't just look unprecedented — they are unprecedented and they may have an unprecedented effect on campaign spending in Chicago.

Jane Byrne has tapped a few sources that were underrepresented before, like brokerage houses, for instance, and those people who contract to put on all her fests. But it's apparent that the main thing she has done is step up collections from the same old sources that dished out for Bilandic, and before him Mayor Richard J. Daley. Only they didn't dish out quite so much — at least for campaign funds — in those days.

She has also provided us with a concrete idea of how the city loses dollars doing business in this way. Businessmen look upon these donations as just another cost of doing business with the city, so they factor in those payments when they set the prices for the services they provide. The city also pays because it is selecting its suppliers according to other criteria than simply who can do the best job for the lowest cost, In a sense, the city ends up footing the bill for campaign contributions to the mayor.

In defense of her record of accumulation, Byrne has so far offered only a claim that she spends "most of it" on charity — a claim disputed in a series of articles in the Chicago Tribune, which found that she had spent, generously, only about 22 percent on charity. But I think if she allowed serious questions on this matter — which she most definitely does not — she might defend it in two ways.

The first says that in spite of her embracing of the machine when she gained office, it has never really embraced her back. She has had to use money as a balance to the generations-old tie her arch-rival Richard M. Daley maintains on the old precinct captains and ward committeemen who still regard her as something of an interloper even though they offer her a provisional loyalty. Money is an offsetting force to counterpoise the entrenched machine — or anyway that part of it Jane Byrne has failed to bring to heel.

The second rationale is that modern campaigning is media campaigning, and that with the death of Mayor Daley Chicago has been propelled willy nilly into the media campaign age. Large sums of money have become an absolute requirement for anyone in a major race like this one.

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The problem with both these arguments in this case is that there are structural limitations on just how much money can actually be spent in a mayoral campaign. It's true that television advertising can cost quite a bit. But Byrne has around $4 million at her disposal now. Ward heelers and media pundits alike believe that a "credible" campaign for mayor of Chicago can be put on the airwaves for about $600,000 — assuming the candidate possesses some name recognition already, and they all do. Ther magic figure can of course be supplemented — but how far can you go and still be getting a worthwhile return on your dollars? Don Rose estimates that his old client, Jane Byrne, could saturate the airwaves all over Chicago for a million and a half — and go on to a little newspaper advertising, generally considered about a tenth as effective.

Not content with that, Byrne jumped the gun in mid-November and started running "informational" television ads at expensive, regular rates — rates up to 50 percent higher than those charged politicians during the "protected period," which begins 45 days before the primary. The ads emphasize the new, drably dressed, statesmanlike image that New York media consultant David Sawyer has been fashioning for her. Byrne's TV campaign bears a double burden: first to project this new image and second to erase the impressions of a shrill, often vindictive and over emotional Jane that were planted in voters' minds during Byrne's first crisis-ridden years in office. To help effect those goals, her money has bought her a whole additional campaign period when she has had the field almost to herself.

In 1979 the Chicago Tribune estimated that Mike Bilandic could spend about $5.10 for every one of the people who voted for him in the primary. He spent money on TV ads and rallies and some $90,000 worth of shopping bags with his name on them. When it was all over he gave $10,000 apiece to city aides Ed Bedore and Tom Donovan, and $5,000 each to city press aide Celesta Jurkovich and his secretary Kay Spear. He still had $101,307 left.

In that same election, Jane Byrne could spend only about 30 cents for each of her voters, yet they turned out in her column in record numbers. This would seem to argue that money doesn't matter — though her behavior since that time suggests she's not convinced.

This year, if we total in all the $8.9 million she has raised, Jane could be spending more than $20 per voter if the turnout runs as expected. The figure is simply staggering.

In fact, it's likely she won't spend anywhere near that. There is nothing in Illinois law to keep her from running a substantial surplus. And if she loses, that money could keep her alive in politics for a long time. A lot of the money that ends up in candidates' campaign chests comes from political committees and other candidates — "recycled money" is Cook County Clerk Stanley Kusper's term for it. If Jane Byrne comes out of a losing primary with a fund of more than a million dollars, it could not only continue to pay Jay McMullen's salary, which has run as high as $74,000 annually, but it could continue to win Jany Byrne friends and people to influence.

There was another theory about Jane's fundraising — that the accumulation of mountains of capital was not the point at all. Instead, it was said that she was aiming at a sort of "chilling effect" on the whole statewide fundraising process which would turn potential donors off to subsequent appeals from other Democratic candidates (she couldn't care less about the Republicans in these terms). The idea was that she would use her war chest to force starving statewide candidates into public postures of support against Daley — but if that was what she had in mind, it had only limited success.

Even Cook County State's Attorney Richard M. Daley is having no problems coming up with the million and a half which he says he needs to run for mayor. Harold Washington, the black independent, was once thought to be a candidate for a secret "spoiler" subsidy from the Byrne forces in an effort

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to direct anti-Byrne black votes away from Daley. But the black vote, with this fall's registration drive that netted so many new voters and prompted a record 75 percent turnout in black wards in the fall elections, has become a factor, in Don Rose's words, "beyond machine, beyond money." Washington has jumped into the race with sufficient pledges of money to allow him to heap scorn on the very suggestion.

The black businessmen who are pledging support to Washington may be the only really new financial force in this year's mayoral race. They have donated routinely in the past to machine candidates, but their financial participation has been limited as their participation in city business has been limited. The winners never wanted to give the black community too many IOUs, and there has never been a black candidate who looked enough like a winner to be worth the investment.

When I mentioned the machine bankroll rumor to a prominent black businessman who is a close friend of

The black businessmen who are pledging support to Washington may be the only really new financial force in this year's mayoral race

Washington, he laughed. "The black community is not poor," he said, and he mentioned the $50,000 donated by Edward Gardner, president of Soft Sheen hair products, to the "Come Alive on October 5" black registration effort.

Another theory about the Byrne money is that it will be spent on small "brush fire" campaigns for aldermen out in the wards where Daley has strong support. (Aldermanic campaigns run simultaneously with the mayoral election.) The idea is supposed to be that Daley committeemen in certain wards — the white dominated 13th, 18th, 19th and 23rd are often mentioned — will be driven to distraction by costly challenges from Bryne supporters and will thus have little time to spend pushing the Daley candidacy. It's a plan that appears to have the stamp of Vrdolyak adviser Victor de Grazia, once Gov. Dan Walker's guru, and it has the characteristic look of being too clever by half. It's admitted by most of the admirers of this plan that it wouldn't do much good in Daley's home ward, the 11th, nor would it seem to be a very good idea to stimulate black turnout, already expected to be massive and independent of the machine in predominantly black wards that will roll up an anti-Byrne vote.

Nor would it use up all that money. Aldermanic campaigns are not traditionally capital-intensive. They are conducted on a local level with little advertising cost. Strategy tends to center around things like promises of special attention from city service departments and new garbage cans. Unless the money starts getting tossed out in the street in bails, it seems unlikely that this will eat up the Byrne surplus.

Vocal Byrne critic Ald. Martin Oberman says that Byrne's hoarding of campaign funds is simply "senseless" and proves only that she is "mean, vicious and greedy." But this is money we're talking about, and the thing about money is its flexibility.

Don Rose remarks that in campaigns you try anything, and that with enough money, maybe you can try enough things. Jane Byrne certainly sees herself fighting for her political life in this campaign. For her the incumbency has meant not only power over the machine, which she has exercised with ruthless skill and persistence, but also a fundraising bonanza surpassing the wildest dreams of less imaginative politicians. For four years she has suffered the potshots of newspapers and the broadcast commentators for her collection methods in the apparent belief that it will all pay off in the end.

That Byrne has felt so pressing a need for tangible financial assets in this race is probably an indication of how insecure she has felt on other fronts. This kind of insecurity — and Byrne's kind of financial response to it — may well be a continuing fact of life in the post-Daley era.□

Lori Granger is a Chicago writer and political consultant who co-authored Fighting Jane, a political biography of Mayor Jane Byrne, with her husband Bill.

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