Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley stepped down this week after 22 years in office, making way for Rahm Emanuel, the city’s first nonresident mayor.
If you want to understand what’s wrong with Chicago politics, you could ask the state’s Supreme Court why it ignored the residency law and allowed Emanuel to remain on the ballot. But perhaps it would be better to ask Daley about the $1.1 million parachute his campaign donors have furnished him over the years.
Daley is not known for greed. Despite ample evidence that his kin and close friends have cashed in on his dictatorial rule, he has never been credibly accused of taking a dime that wasn’t his. He has always preferred the raw exercise of power — legal or not — over the filthy lucre to which most Chicago politicians succumb.
Still, Daley is now a beneficiary of the benighted ethics rules that govern the Prairie State — ethics rules that then-state Sen, Barack Obama deserves at least some credit for creating.
Like other Illinois elected officials who were in office on June 30, 1998, Daley is permitted to keep for himself whatever amount was in his campaign account on that day — in the mayor’s case, $1.1 million.
That’s not to say that these rules were a step backward. But if they represent a step forward, it’s as step into the 16th century. Previously, Illinois elected officials were allowed to keep for themselves whatever their political donors gave them. It was an open and legal system of bribery.
The ethics law that passed the state legislature in May 1998 was designed primarily to mollify the public. It might remind one of a presidential administration that opens the White House visitor logs to inspection, then avoids scrutiny by meeting with lobbyists at coffee shops.
The Illinois law phased out the bribery loophole so gradually that it is still with us today, 14 years later. The grandfather date was still in the future when it passed, and so it set off a mad dash of fundraising, with at least two legislators going so far as to borrow campaign money just ahead of the June 30 deadline.
Obama’s political mentor, former state Senate President Emil Jones, had about $575,000 on the grandfather date and has more than that today. He retired in 2008 and he has not yet officially cashed out what he can.
Instead, he makes interest-free loans to himself from the campaign account, some of which he pays back. He buys Bulls’ tickets and trips to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. (for Obama’s inauguration) — all perfectly legal, although similar acts could land a federal candidate in prison.
Jones is still taking donations, too. Just last month, according to records from the Illinois State Board of Elections, Hewlett-Packard gave him $4,000 from their headquarters in Plano, Texas. (The company tells me that this is an error and that they are trying to have the records changed to reflect this.)
According to contemporaneous accounts, Jones had helped Obama get some of the credit for the ethics bill that made this possible. As a generation of Illinois politicians retires with the opportunity to take campaign cash-outs (and some have), and as former Democratic governor and state Rep. Rod Blagojevich begins his second corruption trial, we are reminded how little Obama’s ethics reform did to clean up Illinois in its first 13 years. (Maybe we can revisit it in 2024.)
And the bill’s chief co-sponsor, now in the Oval Office, is the same president who said he would hire no lobbyists, then hired about 50 of them. Some things never change.
David Freddoso is The Examiner’s online opinion editor. He can be reached at [email protected].
