Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (12 page)

Beyond that, he had the ebullient, larger-than-life quality that suited Carl Sandburg’s “City of the Big Shoulders.” Even if they didn’t support him, Chicagoans delighted in Harold’s joyful rants, such as when he took off after his “antediluvian dodohead” opponents. They loved his exuberant, if off-key, renditions of “My Kind of Town.” They laughed when he only half-jokingly boasted of improving Chicago’s image from the corrupt old days of Al Capone: “Now anywhere you go in the world . . . you know what they say to you? They ask, ‘How’s Harold?’”

As the mayor barnstormed the city, we mounted a dual media strategy, highlighting Washington as a “mayor for all of Chicago’s neighborhoods,” while reminding voters—two-thirds of whom had voted against Byrne in the last election—what life was like under Calamity Jane. Slowly but surely, we moved the needle. Chicago’s newspapers backed Washington, giving a timely nudge to wavering white voters. On primary day, Washington defeated Byrne by 80,000 votes, or seven points, lifted by a familiar formula: the nearly unanimous support of the black community, a solid Hispanic majority, and more white votes than he needed to make the difference.

The next day, a few of us gathered at the mayor’s office to help prepare him for a postprimary press conference. The group was gleeful, relieved to have put Byrne and the primary behind us, but the normally garrulous mayor was pensive.

“Say, what percentage of the white vote did I get?” he asked.

“About twenty-one percent,” someone replied. “But that’s a lot better than last time, when you only got eight percent!”

“Twenty-one percent?” Harold said. “You know, I’ve probably spent seventy percent of my time in those white neighborhoods. I think I’ve been a good mayor for those neighborhoods. I’ve reached out to everyone in this city. And I get twenty-one percent of the white vote, and we’re all happy?”

Harold smiled and shook his head.

“Ain’t it a bitch to be a black man in the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

Despite any disappointment, Harold attacked the general election like a pile driver, and with particular enthusiasm in the final days, when Vrdolyak emerged as the leading challenger. Though both Vrdolyak and Burke were ringleaders in the acrid Council Wars, it was only Vrdolyak whom the mayor loathed. I asked him why.

“Because I think Burke is the product of his upbringing and environment. He is an honest racist,” said Harold, who didn’t live to see Burke later adopt an African American son. “But Vrdolyak isn’t a racist. He’s an opportunist. He’s
using
race, whipping people up for his own political purposes. And that I can’t forgive. That’s evil.”

On Election Night, Harold polished off Vrdolyak and the field. He had run the gauntlet, and now a sense of calm settled over the city. Harold was the mayor and could no longer be dismissed as a historical accident. And Chicagoans seemed eager for an end to the constant strife at City Hall.

That night, at a boisterous postelection reception, we were confronted by a logistical problem. Two inveterate camera hogs, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and boxing impresario Don King, were on hand and would almost certainly try to flank Washington at the lectern for the “hero” shot in the morning papers. It wasn’t the photo we wanted, as Harold worked to bring a diverse city together. So we decided to flood the stage with a multiracial crowd of supporters, who would provide the backdrop for Harold’s acceptance speech. To ensure that Jackson and King were not in the picture, we would provide catnip by asking them to do out-of-town media interviews that would keep them busy almost right up to the moment Washington took to the stage.

It seemed like a good plan, but we underestimated the skills Jackson and King had in navigating their way to the limelight. Though the reverend and the impresario reached the stage after the backdrop crowd was in place, each worked his way to the lectern from opposite sides, like knives through butter. By the time Washington began speaking, they were, just as we feared, flanking him, nearly jostling the mayor’s fiancée out of the way. When Washington finished his remarks, Reverend Jackson, who was planning a second race for president in 1988, grabbed the mayor’s left arm to hoist it in the familiar victory salute. Yet Harold was a strong man, and his arm didn’t budge. He kept it plastered to the lectern while he waved to the crowd with his other hand.

“I’ll be damned if I was going to let that SOB lift my arm up,” Harold whispered, as he left the stage. “This isn’t
his
night.”

Sadly, this victory night, which held out such promise, would be Harold’s last.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, I was flying home to Chicago from New York. Upon landing, I found several urgent messages from Mike Holewinski, a former state legislator who was one of Harold’s top aides. “The mayor collapsed at his desk,” Holewinski said quietly. “They took him out of here on a stretcher, but it doesn’t look good.”

Seven months after his resounding victory, Harold Washington was dead, the victim of a massive heart attack.

Chicagoans formed long lines outside City Hall to view his body, reflecting a cross-section of the diverse city he led. For all the tumult Harold’s ascension had provoked, Chicago appeared united in its grief. I felt the loss acutely. Harold was as interesting, authentic, and fearless a character as I have met in politics. I thoroughly enjoyed working with him and appreciated the historic role he played with such brass and verve. I miss him to this day.

When I got home the night of his funeral, my son, Michael, just four, had set up his own tribute, creating an open “casket” in which he placed a teddy bear to signify the mayor. He had been watching the news with Susan and, touchingly, had somehow sensed our loss.

 • • • 

Yet in the fall of 1987, I had little time to dwell on my feelings. My old boss Paul Simon was running for president. I wasn’t crazy about the idea, and I told him so. In the little more than two years he had been in the Senate, Simon had gotten off to an admirable start, leading fights to address illiteracy and to combat influence peddling in Washington. He even worked with Reagan on a balanced-budget amendment, though they had vastly different ideas about
how
the budget should be balanced. He was having an impact. Yet I worried that a failed presidential race might jeopardize his reelection in 1990, and with it his chance to do more. Also, I frankly doubted America was ready for a jug-eared, bow-tied liberal as president.

Still, Simon’s reasoning wasn’t entirely crazy. Hart began as a front-runner, but was forced out by news of an alleged tryst. Reagan was retiring, and the field was open. The presidential race would begin in Iowa, a state with a huge Illinois border. And Paul’s small-town, midwestern liberalism was well suited for a caucus that tilted left. If he could win there, he would have momentum and a legitimate shot at the nomination.

I loved Paul, and despite my concerns, once he decided to run, I was very much in the thick of the race. I produced an unusual two-minute biographical ad, a minidocumentary that told Paul’s compelling story in his unscripted words and the words of others. The ad featured a valuable testimonial from Harold Hughes, the crusty former senator and governor of Iowa, revered by his state’s party activists. “I look at Paul Simon,” said Hughes, “I trust Paul Simon.”

Authenticity is an indispensable requirement for any successful candidate, but particularly a candidate for president. Biography is foundational. More and more, I had become convinced that voters were inured to slick, highly produced media, and the antidote was this more genuine, documentary-style approach. Part of that might have been defensive, since I felt more comfortable, and proficient at, telling stories than I did creating the ads that were the state-of-the-art in Washington. The documentary style also particularly suited Simon, with his Orville Redenbacher looks and Capra-esque story.

I ended the ads with a silent challenge, words on the screen that went to Paul’s authenticity and his defiant belief that government could still be a force for good: “Isn’t it time to believe again?”

And for a while, Iowans did. After an early flurry of media, Simon vaulted into the lead. Yet leadership also makes you a target. Paul had an abundance of warmth and decency, but his heart sometimes led him to positions that were hard to square. He had insisted on including in his platform hefty new social spending as well as the balanced-budget amendment. What neither he nor we had entirely figured out was just how to square the two. Now that Simon had emerged as the putative front-runner in Iowa, this stubborn math problem was fodder for the news media and his opponents.

In a debate in early December, Congressman Dick Gephardt, a Missourian who also was banking on a shared border with Iowa to jump-start his own campaign, scored with a potent line comparing Paul’s suspect plan to the dubious assumptions by Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics. In deeply cutting taxes, Reagan had said that dynamic growth would more than make up for the lost revenues. It hadn’t.

“Simonomics is really Reaganomics with a bow tie,” Gephardt said.

It was a killer line. Then, as Simon’s poll numbers began to spiral, Gephardt launched new ads that delivered a hard, populist message on trade. Gephardt had introduced an amendment in Congress that would slap deep tariffs on imported Korean cars in retaliation for the prohibitive taxes placed on the sale of American-made autos in Korea.

“When that government’s done, a ten-thousand-dollar Chrysler K car costs forty-eight thousand dollars in Korea,” Gephardt said in a brilliantly manipulative ad. If the Koreans didn’t relent under a Gephardt administration, he concluded, they would be “left asking themselves how many Americans are going to pay forty-eight thousand dollars for one of their Hyundais?”

The ad, tagged with a new slogan, “It’s Your Fight, Too,” struck an immediate chord in Iowa, where thousands of auto and factory workers feared losing their jobs to plants overseas. Gephardt surged, and we faced a dogfight. The lead shifted from day to day, but on caucus night, Gephardt barely edged out Simon—a murky result, which Simon privately disputed until the day he died. Still, a narrow loss on what was viewed as Simon’s home turf was enough to doom his candidacy.

Even in defeat, I found the experience of producing media and strategy for a presidential contest heady stuff. I hoped I would get the chance again. The cost, at least in the short run, was my relationship with Simon. When Paul ran for reelection in 1990, he retained Gephardt’s consultants—my old friends Bob Shrum and David Doak—to do the race, concluding that they had the secret sauce he had lacked in 1988. I was disappointed but not surprised. Candidates place their trust in their consultants and expect these highly paid geniuses to deliver, much as if they’ve retained a lawyer to win a big case. If you lose, they look for the next genius.

Still, I owe Paul a great deal. In the biggest race of his life, he entrusted his media to me and my fledgling firm. Just three years after we opened our doors, we got to play, albeit for a brief time, on the presidential stage.

In the end, Paul might not have been the best messenger, but there was power in his message. A lot of folks
did
want to believe again that we had a stake in one another as Americans. They wanted to believe again that we still could act together to build a better future in which everyone had a place. They wanted to believe again in a politics of conviction, and not just calculation. They wanted to believe again in hope.

Old-fashioned, maybe, but some ideas would never go out of style.

C
HICAGO
IN
THE
LATE
1980
S
was unraveling.
T
he newspapers called it “
B
eirut on the
L
ake.”

After Harold Washington’s death, the racial divisions and gridlock he had hoped his election would settle reemerged with a vengeance. It began a week after Harold died, at a raucous City Council meeting at which the white, anti-Washington bloc installed a reliable African American hack, Eugene Sawyer, to serve out the remainder of Washington’s term. The vote came in the middle of the night, with thousands of protesters surrounding City Hall. Mild-mannered and easily manipulated, Sawyer was more figurehead than leader, a mayor under whom the connivers on the City Council would have their way.

As the old racial and ethnic divisions flared up, Chicago’s problems multiplied. Although the city, with its more diverse economic base, was better fortified to withstand the pressures that were eating away at other big cities in the Midwest, we weren’t immune to some of the same disturbing patterns. Our downtown was dying. The school system was floundering. The white middle class was fleeing.

With the city adrift, the 1989 mayoral election loomed as, possibly, the last chance to arrest the slide and resurrect the sense of community and basic decorum necessary to confront these pressing problems. It would take strong, smart leadership, and having covered the genial but feckless Sawyer for years on the City Council, I was sure he couldn’t provide it. His installation as interim mayor was an inflection point for the city I had come to love. So I wasn’t looking for just any client willing to take on a challenging race. I was looking for one who could unite the city and take on these festering problems.

Not that I could afford to be fussy. My third child, Ethan, had come along in 1987. Lauren’s problems were growing more severe. Her seizures were coming relentlessly. The drug regimens were wreaking havoc with her moods, and as she grew, the developmental gap between her and her peers was becoming more obvious. It was heartbreaking, and placed a great strain on our family. Too often, I escaped, justifying my absences by the urgency of campaigns. Yet there was no escaping what had become obvious: we would need significant resources in the years to come to meet the challenges our daughter faced. Given the sorry state Chicago was in, I felt that our choice in the mayoral race had to be more than a business decision. Chicago was now my hometown. I wanted to work for someone who had the stature, the strength, and the savvy to save the city.

I talked to others, but to my mind, the obvious candidate was Richard M. Daley. It was odd to think that the son and namesake of a mayor remembered for his divisive leadership could be a force for reconciliation. Many Chicagoans—particularly black Chicagoans—still remembered Richard J. Daley’s stunning “shoot to kill” order during the race riots of the 1960s, and his heavy-handed effort to purge his onetime loyalist Metcalfe for defiantly shining a bright light on the issue of police brutality.

The younger Daley was, in many ways, unmistakably his father’s son: the same bulldog mien; the familiar running battle with the English language (Royko wrote of Daley’s father that he would rarely “exit from the same paragraph he entered”); the innate sense of how to get things done; and a palpable, unshakable love for the city of Chicago. Yet on issues of race and tolerance, he was a new and different generation of Daley. He understood that love of city in 1989 meant rebuilding community, not tearing it apart.

More than a decade after Richard J. Daley died, the Daley name still carried the patina of competence and strength that Chicagoans yearned for in the midst of the prevailing chaos in Sawyer’s City Hall. And Rich Daley’s role as state’s attorney, crusading against gangs and drugs, bolstered that image. Alongside those efforts, though, he had worked to build strong relationships with religious and civic leaders in the black community. While I knew there still would be some resistance from the lakefront liberals who, more than a decade after his death, still defined themselves in opposition to Daley’s father, I didn’t share their reservations. The son had proven broader-minded than his dad on an array of issues, and had strong support in the precincts where Richard J. was reviled. I had done a few ads for his reelection as state’s attorney in 1988, and began joining strategy sessions chaired by his brother Bill as he and Daley’s top aides contemplated a mayoral campaign.

By December 1988, three months before the mayoral primary, all the pieces were in place for a Daley candidacy. Bill and I went to brief the soon-to-be candidate at his home, where we sat down with him and his wife, Maggie.

“Here, Rich, is a draft of a script I’ve written for a kickoff ad,” I said, shoving a piece of paper across the coffee table. Our plan was to get in with a bang. I’d written a simple, direct-to-camera message for Daley that would introduce his candidacy and frame the race. In it, he would wryly acknowledge the most frequent critique of those who questioned his credentials. “I may not be the best speaker in town,” he would say, “but I know how to run a government and bring people together.”

There was only one problem.

“Script? What script?” Maggie asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Uh, Mag,” Rich said, a little sheepishly, his face flushing. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

Though the announcement was just a few days away, Daley had not yet shared with his wife his decision to run.

“Okay, then,” Bill said nervously, gathering up his papers. “David, why don’t you and I go out for a little walk? I’ll show you around the neighborhood.”

Rich had been reluctant to tell Maggie because he knew she was deeply scarred from the ugly, racial overtones of the last mayoral campaign. Though Daley had refused to play the race card against Washington, many white ethnic Chicagoans had viewed him as the spoiler who opened the doors to City Hall for Harold. Shortly after that election, Daley had gotten into a fistfight with one of his neighbors in a local toy store, after the man blistered him for paving the way for “a nigger” to win. Daley’s seven-year-old son, Patrick, had witnessed the ugly scrap.

“I don’t want to have any part of a racial thing,” Maggie told us when Bill and I returned. “If that’s what this is going to be, count me out.”

I loved her for saying it. I was sure that most Chicagoans were, like me, desperately looking for a candidate who could heal Chicago by leading it past this racial maelstrom—and only Rich was positioned to be that leader. We had data to prove it. The only cards we would play were unity cards, I assured Maggie, who would go on to become one of Chicago’s most beloved figures.

“Okay, then,” she said, in the skeptical tone of a reproving schoolteacher. “I hope that’s the case.”

From day one that became the central theme of Daley’s campaign: a mayor strong enough to lead Chicago beyond racial politics in order to tackle the many tangible challenges it faced.

 • • • 

We had no illusions about our ability to attract black votes in the primary. Although Sawyer wasn’t the choice of the community, African Americans had fought hard to put one of their own in the mayor’s office and were likely to cast their votes, however grudgingly, to keep a black man there, despite his limitations. This was the cynical calculation the white ward bosses had made when they installed him to replace Harold. Nonetheless, Daley spent much of his time campaigning in the predominantly African American wards. We wanted to send a strong signal that he would be a mayor for the entire city. While this gesture was the right thing to do, it also had the strategic virtue of reassuring white, liberal voters who would make the difference in the election.

Sawyer’s campaign manager, Reynard Rochon, a wily operative from New Orleans, tried hard to embroil Daley in a controversy that would allow Sawyer’s campaign to depict him as a closet racist and drive a wedge between him and those liberals. So Rochon pounced when Daley, addressing a rally on the city’s Southwest Side, mangled a line in his standard stump speech.

For months, Daley had maintained extraordinary discipline, delivering the same stump speech about bringing the city together. At this stop, however, he got tangled up as he reached the crescendo, which always began with the phrase “What you want is a mayor who can sit down with everybody.” On this night, he said, “
You want a what
mayor
who can sit down with everybody.” With this mixed-up construction, a campaign desperate to light a fire could make the argument that Daley was telling an all-white crowd that what they wanted was a “
white
mayor.” Within hours of the tape’s surfacing, Rochon publicly accused Daley of making a racial appeal.

Daley’s wrestling match with the English language was hardly news, and any reporter who had covered his speeches had heard the line dozens of times and knew that he had simply mangled it. Besides, did it make any sense for a candidate who had pitched his whole campaign on healing the racial divide suddenly to change course weeks before the election, with a ham-handed, public appeal to elect a “white mayor”? It was preposterous. Yet a civic committee that had been formed to police the tone of Chicago’s campaigns deliberated and sanctioned Daley for his remarks. As sometimes happens, the self-anointed good guys wound up inflaming rather than calming. I spent hours urging the group’s leader not to enter the fray, and a few cathartic minutes lambasting him after he did. With one careless press conference, this group, with no doubt the best of intentions, threatened to undermine the premise of Daley’s entire campaign and, to my mind, derail the city’s best hope for bridging the racial divide.

But the people of Chicago were watching the race intensely, and taking their own measure of the candidates. I would see this often in high-profile races for sensitive offices like mayor or president. People watch the candidates carefully and form their judgments based on the totality of what they see. Some gaffes are dismissed as such, if they fly in the face of the impression voters have developed. Yet if a gaffe reflects what voters have come to believe is the true character of a candidate, it can be deadly. In this case, Chicagoans had sized up Daley and his campaign and dismissed the dustup for what it was: a verbal hiccup, not a racial call to arms.

Daley swept to the mayoralty with strong support from white liberals and Hispanic voters and, as we expected, only a sliver of black votes. Yet over his twenty-two years as mayor, he governed as promised, building strong ties to all the city’s communities, working on local problems such as school reform and crime, and assiduously avoiding divisive language or politics. He would be rewarded in subsequent elections with a greater share (even majorities) of the black vote, forged not by a machine, but his own good works. Like his father, Rich Daley was a builder—of parks, schools, libraries, the community anchors that make a city and its neighborhoods strong. His tenure wasn’t without controversy or scandal—and by the end, when the Great Recession hit, the due bills came in for the obligations Daley had pushed into the future. But one legacy no one can deny is that Rich Daley pulled Chicago back from the racial abyss.

Never one to sully or dishonor his legendary father’s record, Daley would never admit it, but I always felt he took great pride in being the Mayor Daley who healed rather than divided.

The Chicago elections—Harold’s and Daley’s—gained a great deal of attention nationally, and made my consulting firm a go-to place for urban politics. Given my experiences as a child of the big city, and the years I spent patrolling Chicago’s fabled City Hall as a newspaperman and consultant, these campaigns were a natural niche for me. They also were my special passion.

Urban politics is the most visceral and interesting, first, because of the ethnic and racial diversity you find in most cities. Chicago’s phone book is like a United Nations directory, rife with names that have roots in every corner of the world. And while Chicago’s ethnic communities are not as siloed as they once were—in homogenous wards commanded by party bosses with names such as Vito Marzullo, Izzy Horwitz, and Paddy Bauler—there still is a distinct ethnic flavor to many of its neighborhoods. Politics requires a general understanding of that vital and complex mosaic. When I was working mayoral races in Chicago, I was careful to use a neutral Colombian voice over talent on Spanish-language ads so as not to offend either the Puerto Rican voters on the city’s North Side or the Mexicans on the South.

To this day, issues of race are still simmering just beneath the surface in Chicago and other big cities, where so many interact in relatively small spaces. Yet there also is a shared sense of community that, despite all the differences, ties people together. I was struck by this when Daley’s wife, Maggie, died after a long bout with cancer shortly after he had left office in 2011. Maggie’s wake was held at the Chicago Cultural Center, on Michigan Avenue, on a drizzly November day. Yet there was a long and continuing line of Chicagoans, from wealthy businessmen to cabbies to waitresses, waiting in the rain for hours to pay their respects. The crowd was as diverse as the city itself. The warm and gracious Maggie had been their First Lady for twenty-two years. She was family, and this was a loss they shared.

Local government is where the rubber hits the road. While state legislators and members of Congress are more remote, local officials are present and visible. They are the first responders of politics. They are held most accountable for fundamental problems, from the education of our kids and safety in the streets to the more mundane but still important issues of daily life. When a sidewalk buckles or you need a business permit or graffiti removed from your garage, the local politicians are the ones to whom you turn. I recall one Chicago alderman who fielded multiple calls from an irate constituent who was steaming because her neighbor’s dog was barking incessantly. After trying several times to intervene, with no luck, the alderman came up with another idea. “I bought a box of dog biscuits, went over there, and threw them over the fence. I figured that would shut her up for a while,” he said, leaving vague whether he was talking about the barking dog or the griping constituent.