Chicago By MILTON RAKOVE

Time to face up

BY THE TIME this column appears in the current issue of Illinois Issues magazine, the results of the Chicago Democratic mayoral primary election will be inscribed on the pages of the city's political history and the next mayor of Chicago will have been chosen. The formal election of the mayor will take place on April 12, but, given the pathetic state of the Republican Party in Chicago, the victory of the Democratic nominee is a foregone conclusion. At the time of this writing (mid-January), however, the result of the Democratic primary mayoral race is still an unresolved question.

What is not debatable or unclear, however, is the extent of the problems that the incoming mayor will face in the next four years. The city's community structure, political system and governmental apparatus are all in a state of transition, decline or drift, as Chicago enters the fourth quadrant of its bicentennial history as a legally constituted municipality. As a consequence, the process of formulating public policies for dealing with the city's contemporary problems is going to be difficult at best, and possibly insuperable at worst. When the verbiage, the sound and fury, the charges and countercharges, and the promises and pretensions of the mayoral primary campaign have faded away, the harsh realities of the city's present status and future prospects will have to be faced up to and be dealt with.

The object lesson of Illinois' last gubernatorial campaign will be replicated in Chicago's body politic. Gov. James R. Thompson's campaign rhetoric about the excellent state of Illinois' financial condition proved, after election day, to be a chimera that had to be faced up to by the governor and the legislature, after Thompson and the state's legislative leaders bamboozled the electorate with a see no evil, hear no evil, head in the sand, tail to the wind program of obfuscation. The three Chicago Democratic mayoral candidates — Mayor Jane Byrne, State's Attorney Richard M. Daley and Congressman Harold Washington — either offered up myths about the excellent state of Chicago's finances, or danced around the tax issue, and preferred policies which were politically safe for the candidates' constituencies, but which were generally irrelevant to the real roots of the problems. But, as of now, not only are the ides of March upon the citizenry of Chicago, but the realities of the city's condition will have to be brought out in the open and faced up to, if the city is to be a viable and livable community.

What are those realities?

The community is in a state of deterioration and decline. The city has lost 600,000 people in the last 30 years, has lost much of its taxpaying, property owning middle class to the suburbs and has picked up a substantial population of untrained, unskilled, uneducated people who have come to the city which no longer offers the economic opportunities Chicago did in the heyday of the great white ethnic migration to the city. Public prating and chauvinism about Chicago as a world class city that is on the move to bigger and better things will not disguise that reality. Employment opportunities in Chicago are geared more and more to service industries, with lower salaries than exist in manufacturing, much of which has left for the suburbs or the sunbelt. The promise of a new high tech industry is open to challenge in a city whose population and educational system offers little hope for an environment and labor force needed for such activity. The public schools are bad and are getting worse. Hardly anyone pays attentionto what the schools are doing, and the political leadership is happy when they can get the schools open in September, keep them open until June and at least keep the kids off the streets during the day. Major retail stores are closing. Public transportation is offering worse services at higher fares. In housing, the only real building going on is in new Loop office buildings and condominiums for wealthy occupants. Public health care is bad and shows no signs of getting better for those who can't afford private care or adequate insurance coverage. The unions bleed the city's coffers dry with their demands on the transportation, housing and educational systems of the city. And bankers and businessmen generally remain silent and quiescent, as long as they get their fair share of the largesse the city government dispenses to the private sector.

The political system which, for a quarter of a century, was stable, fairly representative and somewhat responsive to the needs of the population and to its leadership under the late Mayor Richard J. Daley is in a state of drift, out of touch with the electorate, fragmented as an organization and confused about its role in the city and its relationship to its leaders.

The city government, reflecting the deterioration of the community and the instability of the political system, limps along, behaving as if things were well in the community and as if the political system was functioning. It is dominated by powerful private interests and subservient to political pressures as it pays lip service to communal needs. Public officials try to survive as they lay the blame elsewhere and tell the public that the state government, or the federal government, must solve their problems at a time when those governments are pulling in their own horns, cutting their budgets and refusing to raise taxes.

It is not a pretty picture. But, now that the elections are over, is it not time to lay the cards on the table, stop bamboozling the public and accept the responsibilities that go with major public office at both the state and local levels?□

March 1983 | Illinois Issues | 36