Difficult, they say, to pass a family business on to the third generation. Proof of this assertion is the business known as the City of Chicago, run by the Daley family for two generations but now turned over to non-Irish carpetbaggers, with no future Daley in view. In the interregnum between Daley père (Richard J.) and Daley fils (Richard M.), a few interlopers ran the joint: Harold Washington, a machine hack named Michael Bilandic, and Jane Byrne, who got into office because of Bilandic’s failure to shovel the snow from the streets, thus conferring on the city’s only female mayor the quite appropriate title Snow Queen.
Rahm Emanuel, the current mayor, who is ensnared in a runoff election he ardently wanted to avoid, and who vastly overspent his four earlier rivals in seeking to do so, is in some ways symbolic of the new Chicago, at least of its white population. Emanuel grew up on the city’s prosperous North Shore, the son of a physician. After working for various Democratic party causes, then serving on the staff of Bill Clinton, he ducked briefly into finance. After four years (1998-2002) running the Chicago office of an investment firm called Wasserstein Perella, he removed himself from the financial wars. He did so having walked away with a personal profit of more than $16 million, which only goes to show that with the right political connections one need not waste two dullish years acquiring a silly MBA. Emanuel was on the board of directors of Freddie Mac during part of that time, a bad period for the agency, which was visited with scandal. Three quick terms in Congress preceded Emanuel’s hitch as Barack Obama’s chief of staff. Rumor had it that he left the White House because Obama family confidante Valerie Jarrett diminished his effectiveness. A more likely reason is that his own ambitions were too grand to be content with the job.
Now that Chicago has lost much of its industrial base, the city is less and less working class in character. Where Chicago isn’t preponderantly black or Hispanic, it tends to be youthful and prosperous. Young couples have moved into and refurbished drab working-class neighborhoods. The old notion of the city as a collection of ethnic neighborhoods, at any rate of neighborhoods lived in by white ethnics, is now obsolete. Demographically, Chicago isn’t even any longer predominantly white. Roughly 32 percent of the city is black, and another 31 percent Hispanic, along with 5 percent Asian.
In this runoff, Rahm Emanuel’s opponent is a man named Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. (Chuy is pronounced Chu-wee; Chu-wee Garcia sounds like nothing so much as a 10-cent cigar.) Garcia is a man in his late fifties who has been a state senator, a city alderman, and a Cook County commissioner, three great forcing houses of local corruption. A boy with whom I went to high school, after a long and undistinguished career in the Illinois state senate, for example, has been able to finagle himself an annual pension in excess of $170,000. Because of such antics, pervasive in if not part of the system, Illinois has fallen into deep debt, and USA Today has judged it “the worst run” state in the country—do I hear laughter coming out of Mississippi?—while Chicago’s bond rating, owing to $20 billion in unfunded pension obligations, has now fallen a mere two levels above junk bonds.
The Emanuel-Garcia runoff finds Chicago voters nicely divided. Chuy Garcia is no charmer, but in the charm category Emanuel suffers an even greater deficit. His act—a Jewish Jimmy Cagney, with profanity added—has not won him lots of extra friends. Appearing nightly on local television, he resembles nothing so much as that annoying student who is always raising his hand but never has convincing answers. What you see in Rahm Emanuel is what you get, and what you get is raw ambition. In his case you get the strong sense that he wants to succeed as mayor not so much for Chicago but for himself, so he can move on to the United States Senate, to a major cabinet post, to, who knows, keyn eynhore, the presidency. Rahm Emanuel, clearly, is in business for himself.
His campaign counselors recognize Rahm has a humility problem. (How can’t I be humble, he once responded, I live with teenagers and a wife?) In the expensive effort to combat this, a current television ad has him, in cashmere sweater and open-collar shirt, sparse gray hair nicely poofed and moussed, confessing that he knows he sometimes rubs people the wrong way, speaks too quickly rather than listens, comes off as overly aggressive. But, he goes on in the ad to say, he really can’t help it; if he is guilty of all these things, it is owing to his ardor to solve the problems of our fair city.
These problems have been serious. Gang killings have been the most obvious in engaging the media’s attention. In the defining deviancy down department, last year there were fewer murders in Chicago than in a decade, yet there were nonetheless more than 2,000 shootings. Programs to get guns off the streets have been largely unavailing. Putting more police on foot in the more hazardous Chicago neighborhoods hasn’t turned the town into fifth-century Athens. Budget deficits are not easily wiped out. Despite the occasional success story—a public high school with a low dropout rate and a high percentage of students going on to college—everyone knows that Chicago public schools are generally dreary when not outright dangerous.
Emanuel has clashed with the strong Chicago Teachers Union, which took political courage on his part. (Much of the financial support for Chuy Garcia’s runoff campaign is said to come from that union.) He has closed 50 schools he judged not doing the job, and has argued for a longer school day. What the latter will do, apart from keeping kids off ghetto streets and away from stray bullets for a few hours more, is debatable at best. If schools are failing, more of the same seems a less than happy solution; if anything, more wretched education seems merely extending the torture for most kids. These steps—the closing of schools, lobbying for a longer school day—have made Emanuel appear the enemy of unionism, or so he has been relentlessly portrayed in all the Chicago Teachers Union’s agitprop.
Before Richard M. Daley left office he cut a terrible deal with a parking meter company that for the past five years has cost Chicagoans three and four times more to park on city streets than they had earlier paid. The new parking machines—known, bitterly, as Daley boxes—are widely detested. (“Curse you, Richie,” I mutter, every time I load a pound or two of quarters into one of these machines.) Nothing the city can do to break this contract, as Rahm Emanuel has repeatedly said, but he has added insult to this injury by installing red-light cameras round the city that result in $100 fines for what are often the most dubious violations. Everyone knows that the primary reason these cameras are in place is not for safety but for raising revenue, and everyone who has been stung, quite properly, resents them. Under pressure from the Garcia campaign, Emanuel has removed 50 of these cameras. Garcia promises to remove them all.
George Orwell remarked that nothing makes a liberal more nervous than being outflanked on his left. A liberal all his life, Rahm Emanuel now finds himself in this embarrassing -position. He is featured by his opponents as the spokesman for corporate interests, the big money, the famous
1 percent that is now said to control this country. In the opposition view, this election features Rahm the Plutocrat versus Garcia the People’s Friend. Such ultra-progressive outfits as MoveOn.org, the Howard Dean-founded Democracy for America, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee are raising funds and working social media on behalf of Garcia’s campaign. In a standard utterance, Dan Cantor, national director of a group called the Working Families Party, announced: “Rahm Emanuel is betting that he can raise enough campaign cash to hide his record of taking from working families to give to the rich.”
Worse news for Emanuel, Republican (from Illinois) senator Mark Kirk has come out in support of him, arguing that Chicago’s fragile financial condition needs a man with more financial sophistication than Garcia is likely to possess: “The people who are running against Rahm don’t have the gravitas with the bond market. I would worry about the value of the Chicago debt if Rahm was not elected.” Kirk went on to suggest that without Rahm Emanuel at the helm the city could possibly sink into the urban slough of utter despond of hopeless Detroit. Bruce Rauner, the newly elected billionaire governor of Illinois, has all but seconded the motion, claiming he wasn’t endorsing a candidate, but adding, “look at who’s financially sophisticated to deal with the issues, who’s ready to stand up . . . and fight for the taxpayers in the city and take on some of these government union power issues. The voters got to decide . . . but they better look at it [carefully] because Chicago financially is going down the drain.” Given his opponent’s argument that he is already in the pocket of the major corporations and financial institutions, with friends like Kirk and Rauner, Rahm Emanuel needs no enemies.
The most recent poll has Emanuel with a 42.9 over 38.5 lead on Garcia. Garcia’s campaign, let it be said, is less than inspired by great issues. He wants the seats on the city’s board of education to become elective rather than mayorally appointed; he promises to eliminate the red-light cameras; he insists an additional thousand policemen be hired. Where the money for these policemen will come from no one knows, though a wag—me, actually—has suggested it might come from the $16 million the Chicago Bears would save if they cut Jay Cutler, their erratic quarterback.
In the actual election, which takes place on April 7, the assumption is that whites in the city will go for Emanuel, Hispanics for Garcia, both pretty much down the line. If so, this throws the election into the hands of the city’s blacks. The old racial cliché has it that blacks do not cotton to Hispanics who, as a group, have shown more progress than they. Rahm Emanuel is taking no chances that this cliché will hold up, and has been madly pursuing the black vote. He is never shown on television without an ample supply of blacks in proximity. He works southside Elevated stations, greeting black commuters. He is frequently shown kissing black women, doing the Obama shake-and-hug with black men. He has done everything possible to win the black vote but fall into the deathly embrace of Jesse Jackson. There are some things—not, true, many—even politicians won’t do.
Local elections, especially where one’s political party is not involved—and in Chicago it hasn’t been in my lifetime—often leave one with one’s antipathies nicely divided. So many must feel once again this time round. Always pleasing to see strong but empty ambition of the kind that propels Rahm Emanuel go down in flames. On the other hand, no one wants a hack of the low caliber of Chuy Garcia rewarded or put in charge of a great city. Willie Wilson, a black multi-millionaire who never got past the seventh grade in school and was defeated in the earlier mayoral election, said on television that he’ll vote for Garcia but if his supporters wish he might endorse Emanuel. Endorse a candidate but not vote for him? A contradiction? No doubt. If the law of contradictions were enforced, the jails of course would overflow. Yet some elections, such as this one for mayor of Chicago, might just require the suspension of that law.
Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. His latest book, just released, is Masters of the Game: Essays and Stories on Sport (Rowman & Littlefield).
