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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Anyone who doubts that a toxic political environment can be overcome should look to Chicago. Are you listening, Senator?
By Dan Conley
Read more: Chicago, Opinion, Barack Obama, 2008 election
Reuters/John Gress
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Sen. Barack Obama and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley at a rally in Chicago on April 16, 2007, after the U.S. Olympic Committee announced Chicago as the U.S. 2016 Applicant City for the summer Olympics.
May 23, 2008 | CHICAGO -- When the words "Chicago" and "politics" collide, a multitude of images arise. From the mythical voters who rose from the grave to elect John F. Kennedy in 1960, to the tear gas that separated hard hats and cops from billy-clubbed war protesters in 1968, most of those images have to do with corruption and conflict.
In the 1980s, Chicago was famous for bad blood and racial friction in city government. There was a series of theatrical City Council disputes dubbed the Council Wars by comedian Aaron Freeman, and then there was the bitter, racially charged 1983 primary that pitted sitting Mayor Jane Byrne against mayor-to-be Harold Washington, and future mayor-for-life Richard M. Daley, a battle of titans that now seems like a precursor to the 2008 Democratic presidential nominating fight.
Various articles during this campaign -- including some in Salon -- have attempted to tie Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to that outdated vision of the Windy City. But over the past 25 years, Chicago politics has evolved. The city is still divided along racial lines, and other layers of government here -- from the Illinois Statehouse to the Cook County government -- feature as much grandstanding and as many ad hominem attacks as anywhere. But anyone who doubts that a toxic political environment can be overcome should look to Chicago. Consensus has become more conspicuous than conflict. Deal-making is more important than showboating. In short, the city's politics has become post-partisan. It's a concept that should be familiar to anyone who has followed Obama's presidential bid.
A line from one of Obama's stump speeches sounds very much like words that could have been spoken in his adopted hometown at the end of the 1980s: "This election is about whether we settle for the same divisions and distractions and drama that passes for politics today, or whether we reach for a politics of common sense, and innovation -- a shared sacrifice and shared prosperity."
They don't sing "Kumbaya" in City Council meetings, but a general sense of civility prevails. In the same chamber that during the Council Wars featured endless parliamentary maneuvers and more than a few fistfights, policies are ratified in generally dull proceedings; details are usually ironed out internally before going public. Ideas hatched at City Hall are floated with community activists, business leaders and aldermen first -- and woe onto any mayoral staffer who presents a plan to the mayor that did not receive the full sign-off before making it to his desk.
It's a far cry from the Chicago politics Barack Obama first experienced when he moved to town in 1984. While this city hasn't been divided along party lines since the New Deal -- everybody's a Democrat -- racial divisions have largely defined Chicago politics. In the 1980s, during the administration of Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor, racial animosities were at their height. In his 1995 autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," Obama tells the story of an asbestos removal problem at the Altgeld Gardens housing project and how the residents came together to make sure the problem was dealt with and that the Chicago Housing Authority heard about other problems in the public housing community.
But just as momentum was shifting toward dramatic change at Altgeld that addressed a wide range of resident concerns, a public event featuring housing residents and the CHA commissioner devolved into a comical media circus that featured the commissioner grappling with a pregnant Altgeld resident for control of a microphone, then the commissioner sprinting out of the hall to his limo, to audience jeers. This led some to conclude that the entire event was set up not by Obama and the CHA residents, but by Mayor Washington's intra-party political nemesis Alderman Edward "Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak, looking to embarrass the mayor.
Chicago in 2008 is a city far more hospitable to community organizers like the young Barack Obama. Community leaders have real power in Chicago today -- and they have the ability to raise funds not only from City Hall, but from a vibrant philanthropic community that includes heavyweight donors like the Chicago Community Trust and the MacArthur Foundation.
Obama knows about Chicago's political evolution very well. In his 1995 autobiography, Obama noted how the petty divisions of the Council Wars made community action difficult -- even with African-American mayors in charge for most of the 1980s. Obama's wife, Michelle, worked in the Daley administration, in his Department of Planning and Development. It has been during the Daley administration, which began in 1989 and will never end, that Chicago has changed. Michelle saw firsthand the transformation of city government to its new model of consensus governing. Obama's team includes Daley stalwarts like Valerie Jarrett, a possible White House chief of staff, and John Rogers, a major fundraiser. And Obama's top political aide -- David Axelrod -- also happens to be Mayor Daley's prime political advisor.
But with Obama's nomination now all but assured and the general election rapidly approaching, Obama's post-partisan politics remains largely undefined. It has led detractors -- many of them loyal, liberal Democrats -- to question whether there is a commitment to progressive policies behind the mantras of hope and change and to wonder if he's a bit too naive, too academic and too "Dukakis" to win -- or if he wins, to govern effectively.
Obama addressed this characterization directly during the MTV/MySpace Forum in November 2007: "The politics of hope ... is not based on us all holding hands and singing 'Kumbaya,'" Obama said. "It is based on the idea that instead of people operating on the basis of fear, instead of people operating on the basis of division, I want people to come together and focus on the problems that we face: healthcare, education, global warming. We are not going to be able to solve those problems if we don't talk about them honestly."
Still doubts persist. And no one has expressed them more forcefully and consistently than New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. In a March 3 column, one of more than a dozen about Obama he's written this year, Krugman says, "Obama, instead of emphasizing the harm done by the other party's rule, likes to blame both sides for our sorry political state. And in his speeches he promises not a rejection of Republicanism but an era of postpartisan unity."
Here's the specific danger that Krugman envisions: "If Mr. Obama does make it to the White House, will he actually deliver the transformational politics he promises? Like the faith that he can win an overwhelming electoral victory, the faith that he can overcome bitter conservative opposition to progressive legislation rests on very little evidence -- one productive year in the Illinois State Senate, after the Democrats swept the state, and not much else."
Next page: When I arrived in Chicago in 1995, I expected hardball
Chicago is Barack Obama's kind of town
The crazy uncles in Obama's attic
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