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RUSH TO DEFEAT | PAGE 1, 2
"This campaign doesn't represent a reasonable, reusable progressive politics in Chicago," says Larry Bennett, a political science professor at DePaul University, who wrote some of Rush's early position papers. "What defines a progressive alternative within the electoral context of Chicago at this point is an effort to recharge the Harold Washington coalition. That is 15 years too late. The man is long dead. God bless him, because he was a terrific individual, and a good mayor. But aside from Rush's campaign just being a backward evocation of a wonderful moment in history, it's also not at all cognizant of the realities of the city at the present time." After the appearance of the mysterious graffiti, Chicago voters were treated to a series of fresh complaints from the Rush campaign, which, according to polls, now trailed Daley's juggernaut by 48 percent. According to Rush, his campaign was plagued by bomb threats, phone threats and even street crime, as a campaign photographer broke his leg trying to escape from three "politically motivated" assailants. "Pretty soon, they'll be throwing bricks through the windows," Mayor Daley cynically responded. Meanwhile, people were still waiting for Rush to release his first position paper. With three weeks to go in the campaign, he finally did. But by then no one was listening. Not that Daley wanted to help Rush run a credible campaign. When Rush desperately, repeatedly called on the mayor to debate him, Daley declined, saying no debates were part of his "campaign strategy." But there was plenty to debate. On the surface, Daley is incredibly popular. He's made a number of cosmetic improvements to the city. Flower boxes and street art abound. Tourists are visiting Chicago like never before. The Department of Cultural Affairs has won numerous awards. It's a great city to live in, if you're a middle-class white person. But Daley's Chicago is not the urban-renewal paradise that the mayor and his supporters claim. His administration is rife with cronyism and petty corruption. Daley regularly rewards his biggest campaign contributors, many of them old family friends, with enormous construction contracts. There is no effective mechanism in place to punish police officers with histories of brutality. Public transportation is collapsing, and creeping gentrification has created a serious shortage of affordable housing. Poor and working-class people are being increasingly squeezed into smaller and smaller areas of the city. He's a Democratic version of New York's Rudy Giuliani, offering a kinder, gentler version of Giuliani's forbidding urban politics. "He doesn't provide leadership on basic issues of poverty, racial discrimination, affordable housing," Despres says. "Daley has this terrible control of the city council. His father controlled it through patronage. Virtually no alderman dared challenge him. Now this fellow has 20 aldermen he's appointed. He's pursued a policy of tying every alderman to him by giving them autocratic authority in their ward." Thus, the city council routinely passes important bills without debate, often without any opposition votes. Daley's planning commission pushes through big-ticket development projects with even less dissension. The Police Board is independent of the Police Department only on paper. And while Daley may not have his father's thousands-strong army of patronage workers, he can still call out the troops when he needs to. Last November, the Hispanic Democratic Organization, made up mostly of city employees, helped knock out Jesus Garcia, a popular Mexican-American state senator and possible future mayoral candidate. The HDO workers told voters that if they elected Garcia, they would lose city services like street repairs, even though Garcia had no power over such matters. Instead, they ended up pushing through their man, Tony Muñoz, a former cop with no political experience. In this election, the HDO is backing John Pope, a mayoral aide, for alderman of the 10th Ward, an enormous expanse on the city's southeast side and one of the few parts of the city that Daley doesn't control. Anyone who supports any of Pope's nine opponents is in trouble, as a local hardware store owner found out. After he dared to put an opposition sign in his front window, he received an expensive ticket for an "overflowing dumpster" behind his shop. He got the message: Support Daley's man, or you'll be punished. The Chicago Tribune, in a recent interview, asked Daley to describe his political organization. To the paper's credit, it printed Daley's nonsensical response verbatim. "I have thousands of volunteers," Daley said. "That is the key to get the job done. I have volunteers, block clubs, community organizations, you name it. I have people out there, getting the job done in the schools, getting the job done in police, getting the job done at libraries. That is what you provide." That's about as much of an answer as Daley need provide. He's been mayor for 10 years now, will be mayor for at least 14, and probably for as long as he wishes. Defeating him this time would have been impossible even for the best candidate, and Bobby Rush shouldn't be ashamed that he's going to lose. But Rush should be ashamed that he did little or nothing to begin building a coalition that might one day, someday, defeat Daley. The city isn't better off from this campaign. There is still no credible opposition to Caesar, and one is desperately needed. "There comes a time when somebody who's in office a long time gets thrown out," Despres says. "Daley's father was approaching that time in 1976, and he died. You build resentments, and finally the resentments accumulate. You also develop fatigue and lose the ability to make people feel enthusiastic about you. Daley's gotten stronger, and maybe he'll get even stronger still the next term, but not forever. You've gotta look beyond Daley."
Neal Pollack is a staff writer at the Chicago Reader. |
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