Despite troubles in the past year, Richard M. Daley holds most of the cards in his city.

14 / March 1998 Illinois Issues

THE STEALTH BOSS

If City Hall scandals represent a mayor in trouble,
it's hard to imagine what success would look like. In fact, one year out
from an expected third re-election campaign, Richard M. Daley
might exercise even tighter control over Chicago
than his legendary father did

Essay by lames L. Merriner Jr.
Illustration by Mike Cramer

If you want to make Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley mad, call him "Boss." Daley's eyes will harden. His mouth will curl. Because, as everyone knows, the era of political bossism is long dead. It was entombed by Mayor Harold Washington in 1983, if not by Mayor Jane M. Byrne in 1979. And Daley is a modern, management- oriented mayor who spurns pretensions of bosshood.

Nonsense. Daley, who has been mayor since 1989, might even exercise tighter control over more public institutions than did his legendary father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, who held the city's reins from 1955 to 1976.

The junior Daley has less raw power, of course, than the senior Daley, who could pick up the phone and dictate events. Still, "Rich" Daley has consolidated power in ways that "Dick" Daley, "last of the big-city bosses," never did. The current Daley's quiet maneuvers to acquire power add up to a kind of stealth bossism. It's a suzerainty seldom examined as Daley shakes up his administration and prepares for a presumed run for re-election in February 1999.

Last year's City Hall bribery and ghost payrolling scandals came close to knocking on Daley's fifth-floor office door and pundits declared his eight-year political honeymoon over.

But the negative publicity has tended to obscure the facts: This Mayor Daley controls the city's schools — something his father never dreamed of — and he has nearly extinguished all opposition in the City Council and the Cook County Board. The Democratic state's attorney is a close ally, whereas his father had problems with Republican state's attorneys. Another close Daley ally, John R. Schmidt, is making a bid for governor. A brother is in President Bill Clinton's Cabinet. Another brother is in line for the Cook County Board presidency.

Meanwhile, the current mayor's performance has won over many critics. "I remember growing up [in Chicago] hearing that Richie Daley was the dumb one and the one with the fiery temper, and [his brother] Bill Daley was the smart one," says Roger Biles, author of Richard J. Daley: Politics, Race, and the Governing of Chicago, which was published in 1995 by Northern Illinois University Press. Now, friends and family in Chicago tell Biles they are "pleasantly surprised and pretty well satisfied with the guy."

If this represents a mayor in trouble, it's hard to imagine what success would look like.

Still, handicapping is inevitable as Daley begins an expected bid for a fourth term. And most assessments rest on comparisons between the father and the son. Leon Despres, an alderman from 1955 to 1975 and parliamentarian under Mayors Byrne and Washington, disagrees that Rich Daley is a boss on a par with his father. However, Despres notes that "the long-range historical movement is in concentrating power in the executive" in Chicago. Biles seconds that notion. The trend began in 1955 when the General Assembly passed a little- noticed bill shifting budgetary control from the City Council to the mayor — "one of the sort of unsung achievements" of the senior Daley, says Biles, who is history chairman at Eastern Carolina University.

So, in the spirit of the political season, we offer this review of the two Daleys' institutional influences:

Public schools. A Republican- controlled General Assembly in 1995 gave Daley direct personal power over the disastrous city schools. "OK," they seemed to say, "they're yours. See what you can do with them."

Far beyond a political event, this was a historic experiment for America's urban centers. Daley promptly put associates Paul Vallas and Gery Chico in charge. They treated the school system as a

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corporation that needed pruning of deadwood and an infusion of the work ethic. Their efforts have won national acclaim and garnered improvement in classroom achievement scores in a system once dubbed worst in the nation by a federal education czar.

Daley understood viscerally that the sorry state of the schools spurred middle-class whites and blacks alike to flee the city. This social phenomenon never was properly understood by his father, who regarded the schools as a political hiring hall.

John J. Hoellen, a former Republican alderman who in 1975 was the senior Daley's last election opponent, says, "Nobody got on the school board unless the old man OK'd it. He had to OK almost every principal, or at least his henchmen did, and every engineer. It was just a cesspool of political activity. That's why it was teeming with incompetence. He didn't give a damn about [educational quality]. He was parochial all the way. Rich has a much broader sensitivity toward his responsibility."

Hoellen and other critics contend the senior Daley didn't care about public schools because his voter base of white ethnic Catholics sent their children to parochial schools. Neither the elder nor the younger Daley or their children attended public schools. But the junior Daley has taken upon himself accountability for the competence of instruction in the public school classroom. His place in history may well rest on this innovation.

City Council. Under the senior Daley, the Republican opposition was always a small and feeble minority, but at least it existed. Then the GOP aldermen were whittled away one by one until Hoellen in 1975 was the last man standing.

The current mayor likewise has one Republican alderman, Brian G. Doherty (41st), but he is not an important figure in the party and Republicans have all but abandoned city politics, meaning, among other things, that Democrats control the election judges.

The mayor is lord over the City Council if for no other reason than that he has appointed so many of its

The younger Daley understood viscerally that the sorry state of the city's schools spurred middle-class whites and blacks alike to flee the city,

50 members. Daley has named aldermen to fill 22 vacancies, 17 of whom are still sitting. Another vacancy is pending. Early in Rich Daley's tenure, Aid. Dorothy Tillman (3rd), a former civil rights firebrand, was a fierce critic. Now she hugs the mayor in the anteroom behind the Council chambers after he leaves the dais.

Steadily, the mayor has trimmed the Council's influence by privatizing city services, grabbing tighter control over contract awards, neutralizing objections to his budgets and transferring supervision of Navy Pier to a city-state authority. This Council is probably more toothless than his father's.

Cook County Board, Patronage was controlled by a Republican Board president, Richard Ogilvie, from 1966 to 1969. The present-day Mayor Daley has had no such annoyance. Democratic County Board President John Stroger is a major ally and favored to win re-election this year. A County Board district was gerrymandered for the mayor's brother, John P. Daley, who is chairman of the Board's Finance Committee and by tradition in line to succeed Stroger in 2002.

State's attorney. Republican State's Attorney Benjamin J. Adamowski (1956-60) gave Richard J. Daley and his Democratic Machine fits. By custom, the state's attorney ignores political corruption, but Adamowski took to issuing subpoenas and indictments. It's alleged Daley stole Illinois for John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election. If he did, Kennedy's margin in Chicago was mostly a byproduct of Daley's determination to unseat Adamowski. Daley later was inconvenienced by another Republican state's attorney, Bernard Carey (1972-80), though Carey resumed the tradition of leaving the Machine alone.

Richard M. Daley was himself the state's attorney when elected mayor in 1989. He tried to name his associate, Democrat Richard Devine, as successor, but the County Board selected Democrat Cecil A. Partee instead. When Partee ran for election in 1990, the Daley organization did not overexert itself on his behalf. Partee was defeated by a Republican, Jack O'Malley Daley and O'Malley honored custom by keeping hands off each other's domain.

A GOP star, O'Malley was favored to defeat Devine in the 1996 election. Larry P. Horist, a Republican public affairs consultant and a close student of the Chicago Machine, warned O'Malley during the campaign, "Jack, they're going to take you out." O'Malley scoffed, but sure enough, the Daley organization quietly helped to put Devine in office.

Devine recently announced he will investigate ethical charges against former Aid. Patrick Huels (11th), a Daley friend and spearcarrier, and Aid. Edward M. Burke (14th), chairman of the Council's Finance Committee. "It's the first time that's ever happened," Despres says, "and people are very skeptical that anything will come of it."

General Assembly. Here the first Mayor Daley definitely has the edge. In his heyday he could deliver as many as 20 of the 59 votes in the Illinois Senate with a single phone call. Daley also colluded with Republican governors when necessary.

With reapportionment reflecting the growth of suburbs, and with the general decay of Chicago Democratic dominance, the current Mayor Daley wields less legislative clout. Nor has he forged a political alliance with Gov. Jim Edgar as his father did with GOP Govs. William G. Stratton (1953-61) and Ogilvie (1969-73). Springfield has thwarted Daley's plans for casino gambling in the city and a regional

16 / March 1998 Illinois Issues

airport at Lake Calumet in the southeast corner of the city. But Daley won local tax increases to expand McCormick Place Convention Center. And again, it was a Republican legislature that handed Daley the schools.

White House. The nation may never again see a mayoral-presidential partnership like that of Dick Daley and President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69). The Chicago mayor visited LBJ's White House so often he was practically a staffer there.

Daley secured a presidential appointment for Edward V. Hanrahan as U.S. attorney with this argument: "He's a great Democrat. He ran for Congress. He was defeated. He's a graduate of Notre Dame. But more than that, Mr. President, let me say with great honor and pride, he's a precinct captain!"

And there was money to be gotten. Under Johnson's Great Society programs, federal aid to Chicago increased by 169 percent in four years.

Rich Daley has far fewer federal dollars to chase. And it's worth noting that, while he did win his $3-a-ticket airport development tax, it came under a Republican president, George Bush.

Initially, his clout with President Clinton was shaky, though Daley campaign aides were crucial in Clinton's winning the 1992 Democratic nomination. Daley wanted the new president to name Devine as U.S. attorney, but Clinton picked Jim Burns. Clinton also publicly embarrassed the Daleys by seeming to promise Bill Daley the post of transportation secretary, then reneging.

But the Daleys rebounded and no other mayor comes close to having Rich Daley's presence in the White House. Today, Bill Daley is the U.S. secretary of commerce. And there is talk that he might become the president's chief of staff when the current chief leaves.

Patronage and politics. RJD's power rested on his twin seats as mayor and Cook County Democratic chairman. None of his five successors dared to attempt this dual coup. RMD

Comparing the relative power of two different mayors from two different eras is an indoor sport with no rules and no clear-cut winner.

is not even a committeeman, having bequeathed his 11th Ward seat to John Daley. The senior Daley controlled some 35,000 city patronage jobs. A court ruling known as the Shakman decree and several follow-up rulings have so severely limited patronage that the current mayor effectively fills, by Despres' estimate, only 2,000 positions for top policy- makers and their underlings.

But this constraint might be deceptive because Daley's critics argue that he has supplanted working-class patronage with "pinstripe patronage," especially in nonbid professional services contracts for public works projects. For instance, a proposed Downtown Circulator trolley system generated $70 million in contracts, even though the plan eventually died for lack of federal aid.

In addition, the mayor decrees the membership, as his father did, of nominally independent agencies such as the parks, schools, libraries and, in most cases, the local judiciary. (The housing authority, though, has been taken over by the federal government.)

As for electoral politics, writers of obituaries of the Machine never tire of declaring that "television is the new precinct captain" and that only six or seven wards still have old-fashioned ward bosses who can determine voter turnout and ballot punches. The modern mayor, as part of his public relations program to eschew bossism, seldom formally endorses or openly backs particular candidates, which his father routinely did.

Often overlooked in this scenario is that those several Machine wards still can swing close elections. In the 1994 primary, for example, Daley forces ended the gubernatorial candidacy of then-Attorney General Roland W. Burris and renominated then-U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski over lakefront challenger Dick Simpson. And Jack O'Malley is back in private law practice where he might reflect on the endurance of vestiges of the Machine.

Boss vs. Son of Boss. Comparing the relative power of two different mayors from two different eras is an indoor sport with no rules and no clear-cut winner. Nonetheless, Richard M. Daley certainly surpasses his father in running the city's schools and probably in controlling the City Council, the County Board and the state's attorney's office. The senior Daley had more power in patronage, the Democratic organization and state government. The junior Daley at least approaches his father's influence in the White House.

Additionally, a significant dimension of the Daley satrapy is their relations with black constituents. Three-fifths of RJD's winning margin in 1955 came from black wards and he never lost a majority of the black vote until his last primary in 1975. RMD has defeated six black opponents in primary and general elections, but he might never gain a majority of black primary voters. However, he has annexed middle-class black clergy and businesspeople to his organization. Moreover, he has soldered an alliance with Hispanic voters that has effectively marginalized black opposition.

These are the moves of a master politician. But the final word will be granted to venerable Chicago author and radio personality Studs Terkel: "He's not the politician his old man was. But no one is."

James L. Merriner, former political writer for the Chicago Sun-Times and a frequent contributor to Illinois Issues, reports for The Associated Press in Chicago and Springfield. His book, Mr. Chairman: Power in Dan Rostenkowski's America, will be published this fall by Southern Illinois University Press at Carbondale.

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