Corruption Scandal Loosening Mayor Daley's Grip on Chicago
By JODI WILGOREN
Published: January 6, 2006
CHICAGO, Jan. 5 - Mayor Richard M. Daley was explaining away $48 million in overruns for renovation of a terminal at O'Hare International Airport when a regular at his daily news conferences asked if the mayor would be reciting a similar refrain, five or 10 years hence, for busting the budget in his $15 billion expansion of the airport.
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Peter Thompson for The International Herald Tribune
Mayor Richard M. Daley, second from left, last November with, from left, Gary Comer, the founder of Lands' End; Fire Commissioner Cortez Trotter; and Dana Sparks, first deputy superintendent of police.
"I'm coming back in five or 10 years?" Mr. Daley replied. "Thank you!"
It used to be that no one (let alone the mayor himself) questioned the longevity of Mr. Daley, the country's longest-serving big-city mayor whose staggering margins in four re-elections earned him the name originally bestowed on his father, the legendary political boss Richard J. Daley - Mayor for Life.
But mired for months in the most difficult stretch of his mayoralty and with a ballooning corruption scandal swirling ever closer to his City Hall suite, Mr. Daley has lost some of his political luster. He faces opposition on the City Council he long controlled. Ordinary voters lob accusatory questions his way. And for the first time since Mr. Daley took office 16 years ago, a serious and well-known politician from his own Democratic Party, Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr., is doing early legwork for a possible challenge in next year's mayoral race.
"You can fool some of the people for 16 years - the question is whether the people want to be fooled for 20 years," Mr. Jackson said in an interview, sounding every bit the candidate, though he insists that, for now, he is only seeking re-election to his Congressional seat.
For Mr. Daley, 2005 was a year of highs and lows: He relished the World Series sweep by his beloved White Sox, and was celebrated by Time magazine as among the five best big-city chief executives in the country for improving schools, transforming public housing and other accomplishments.
Yet corruption shadows his every step. Appointments of new commissioners in November were blunted by buzz that he is having trouble luring talent to City Hall, and the lobby outside his annual budget address was filled with pickets holding placards demanding, "Funds for people, not for scandal."
A wide-ranging federal investigation into what prosecutors describe as "pervasive fraud" in hiring and contracts at City Hall has led to 30 indictments, including two senior administrators close to the mayor, and a dozen cabinet-level resignations. Mayor Daley himself spent two hours being interrogated this summer, and just last month, local headlines blared about court records showing the head of the Hispanic Democratic Organization, a key Daley ally, helped arrange promotions for politically active city employees and orchestrated campaign work by administration officials.
Prosecutors contend that the city systematically violated a federal court order against patronage by ranking campaign volunteers - including one who was dead and another who was in Iraq while supposedly being interviewed - higher than other job applicants who scored better on exams. The mayor said he never got involved with hiring and moved to separate all personnel decisions from his office, while appointing a new internal watchdog with a fattened budget.
"You just move on; you can't live in the past," Mr. Daley, 63, said in an interview, brushing off the scandal's toll. "What happens, happens. I do things. I'm doing them. I don't let some negative thing overcome."
In a recent budget speech filled with lofty language, Mr. Daley said he had "taken responsibility for the problems that have occurred" and promised to "root out all those who engage in this conduct and hold them accountable for their misdeeds."
Though Mr. Daley is still widely praised for revitalizing the city's public schools and rejuvenating downtown, dissenters who used to be quickly drowned out have, in the scandal's wake, found some traction in the City Council.
An ordinance to ban smoking in restaurants, opposed by the mayor and his business allies, passed in December. During recent hearings on the budget, members of the Council stepped up criticism of the mayor's department heads.
"Some of that bashing would not have happened five years ago," said Alderman Ricardo Munoz, who has spent the past 13 years as one of the mayor's few detractors on the Council. "Five years ago, we would have never gotten a hearing on the smoke-free Chicago ordinance."
Alderman Joe Moore, another outspoken Daley opponent, said his colleagues were "just much more cantankerous, more willing to challenge administration officials" these days.
Outside City Hall, Representative Jackson increasingly goes out of his way to criticize the administration publicly, and recently hired a top Washington consultant, Celinda Lake, to conduct a citywide poll assessing the political landscape.
Mr. Jackson described Mr. Daley's Chicago as "a tale of two cities": the sparkling lakefront downtown and growing North Side neighborhoods that "boast three jobs for every one person," and the South Side sections he represents, "where there are nearly 60 people for every one job."
As for improvements in the schools, Mr. Jackson said, Harper High, in the heavily poor and African-American Englewood neighborhood, has a swimming pool that has not been filled for a decade and a band class of 220 students with 40 instruments and 30 uniforms.
But Ms. Lake's survey showed that even with the mayor's problems, he remains formidable. Mayor Daley's job-approval rating rose to 61 percent in November, after plummeting to its lowest level since he took office, 53 percent, in a Chicago Tribune survey this summer. (Mr. Jackson had a 65 percent approval.) Asked if they would vote to re-elect Mr. Daley in 2007, 38 percent in the poll said yes, 16 percent said they would vote to replace him, and 32 percent said they were open to considering another candidate.
"The mayor himself is an institution; he is the personification of Chicago," Mr. Jackson said. "Changing the mayor of Chicago is like changing Chicago. A lot of people don't want corruption, but they don't want to change the city of Chicago."
After all, Chicago has had a Mayor Daley for all but 13 of the last 50 years: Richard the First, as the father is now known, from 1955 until his death in 1976, and Little Richie, his eldest son, since 1989. Richard M. signs papers and poses for photos behind the huge wooden desk that was his dad's (and a portrait of Richard J. looks out at the long conference table where the current mayor does his real work, jacket off).
The two men share a propensity for malapropisms and reputations as builders - father created O'Hare Airport, son engineered its enormous expansion. Now, it seems as if Daley the Younger's legacy, like the original's, may be marred by similar scandals.
"His fatal flaw is that he hasn't been willing to destroy the old machine to build the new Chicago," said Dick Simpson, a political scientist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and an alderman in the first Daley era. "The people down below still see this as a wink and a nod. They still think you get a promotion at City Hall if you work your precinct; they still think you get a contract if you have inside connections."
Gone is the 38,000-strong patronage army of city workers Richard J. controlled, but it has been replaced by what John Callaway, a political analyst and former host of a Chicago public affairs television program, described as "special forces units," like the Hispanic Democratic Organization, now under federal scrutiny.
"The main trouble he's in is with the federal government," Mr. Callaway said of the mayor. "What are the highest people who have been indicted so far, or subpoenaed, what are they going to say about what Daley knew about what he says he didn't know?"
To Mr. Callaway, the mayor and his father share a major weakness - "They don't trust much of anybody" - so neither took steps to groom a successor.
Instead, the mayor has recently renewed fund-raising and named a new chairman of his campaign committee, and he has been talking about luring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago, a decision that will not be made until 2009, long after the next election.
In early November, at the first of dozens of Christmas parties he gave for all manner of city official and helper, Mr. Daley stood between the American and Chicago flags for a solid hour, posing for no fewer than 342 photographs that his office will give away.
Asked whether he would seek a sixth term - and a tenure outlasting his father's - the mayor would say only, "The day I get tired, I'll quit."> |
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