Anatomy of a stalemate

...In early 1984, for example, the Washington administration suddenly decided that the legal business connected with one development project would be taken away from a Vrdolyak-alhed law firm, and given instead 15 November 1985 645 to a firm with close ties to Washington's Corporation Counsel The council, not surprisingly, responded by killing the project Political philosophers who have urged that government powers be divided and balanced have presumed that all sides were committed to a basic core of values, programs, and principles In Chicago, whether such a commitment exists remains an open question That a large city with Chicago's diverse population should be divided along racial lines is neither surprising nor unprecedented Most black mayors in the U S have had to struggle to gain the confidence of the white electorate, and where white voters are suspicious or hostile, white leaders will inevitably rise up to champion such views But two factors set Chicago's experience apart from that of other cities The first is the strength and unity of the opposition Vrdolyak and Burke, whatever their other failings, are undeniably vigorous and effective leaders, the existence of the machine (which is stronger than some reports suggest) has given them a structure and a tradition around which to build They have insured that the opposition to Washington is not just a vague and formless discontent, but a coordinated and coherent political faction The second factor is more unexpected — and for many Chicagoans, more frustrating In the 1983 general election, many civic leaders and both city newspapers endorsed Washington on the specific premise that he was a more experienced political leader who could better heal the city's divisions Instead, he has proven to be a remarkably fumbling, clumsy, paralyzing politician In countless incidents, he has invested his political resources poorly, and has needlessly alienated potential supporters Undoubtedly there is racial prejudice in Chicago — but there is also prejudice in Los Angeles and Philadelphia and Birmingham, and the black mayors in those cities have coped with it much more effectively As one of the strongest Washington supporters I know conceded to me, ' 'Washington inherited a very difficult situation, and has made it a lot worse " A variety of explanations have been put forward to account for Washington's political troubles Some local columnists have attributed it to general administrative and organizational chaos Good politics requires planning and follow-through, and on both counts Washington has fallen short Beyond faulty execution, however, there is a larger problem since becoming mayor, Washington has tried to fill two political roles He wants to be "mayor of all the people", he also wants to be a recognized and explicit' 'black leader '' But in the context of current Chicago politics — with whites anxiously scrutinizing his every move — such roles are largely incompatible The ambivalence persists The mayor has pursued a heavy schedule of appearances at forums, ribbon-cuttings, and neighborhood festivals in the white areas of the city But he has also continued to show signs of special commitment to black political empowerment He has traveled all over the country campaigning for other black mayoral candidates, he has talked about leading a national dnve to help register blacks in other cities, his inner circle of close advisors contains very few whites, in the presidential nomination race, he backed Jesse Jackson to the very end, and refused to respond to repeated overtures from the Mondale camp, and he has said he looked forward to the day when blacks would outnumber whites in the city electorate No one would argue that such actions, considered m the abstract, are illegitimate or condemnable The point is that they only exacerbate his basic political predicament Washington has shown an almost obsessive concern with protecting his base — when his problem is a lack of allies outside the black community WHAT WASHINGTON'S record reminds us of, in short, is that the mayor's job is inescapably a political one, and that good politics is especially critical in a racially tense environment White voters — in Chicago and elsewhere — are neither saints nor villains They are ordinary, ambivalent human beings, coming to grips with changes they don't understand, struggling to reconcile some very good instincts with some very bad prejudices Their suspicions cannot just be labeled "racist" and then dismissed, as though that solved the problem Fears and anxieties need to be recognized and treated with sensitivity, just as Wilson Goode has done in Philadelphia, just as John Kennedy did with the religious issue in his campaign and presidency So where will it end7 The least likely resolution of the present stalemate is that the two sides will simply stop fighting and learn to get along better As anyone in the Middle East or Northern Ireland can testify, ethnic and racial hostilities, once inflamed, take a very long time to cool Thus, the stalemate will continue, and the next two years will be pretty much like the last two If they agree on nothing else, both sides have accepted that reality, and have set their sights instead on 1987, when both the mayor and the city council are up for re-election At the moment, two big question marks surround that contest how many opponents will Washington have7 Who will they be7 The answers would seem to be favorable to Washington Given the mayor's solid base of support in the black community, a candidate hoping to beat him must win at least 90 percent of the white vote, and that appears increasingly unlikely The city's white politicians will probably not be able to unite behind a single candidate, and the two persons most often mentioned — Vrdolyak and Byrne — both possess so many negatives that many whites would probably vote for Washington, his many mistakes notwithstanding But Washington also has a number of potential weaknesses At the top of the list is the level of black political mobilization Washington's victory in 1983 was due in large part to a spectacular increase in black voters 200,000 blacks were added to the registration rolls, and black turnout levels, which had lagged 20 percent behind white turnout for the previous fifteen years, rose to a level of essential equality Washington won 99 percent of the black vote in the 1983 general election, and it is extraordinarily unlikely that any white candidate will cut very far into that solid bloc support It is very possible, Commonweal 646 however, to envision a scenario in which black turnout falls back to its previous levels, as blacks become disillusioned by Washington's failure to bring about any real changes in the conduct of city government As Washington contemplates the future, however, he might think about the experiences of two other cities Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles was first elected in 1973, after a campaign in which racial issues were prominent and divisive But in four years as mayor, Bradley managed to defuse the tensions and win the confidence of the white community In doing so, he has rewntten the political culture of Los Angeles He was easily re-elected in 1977,1981, and 1985, and in 1982, he came within an eyelash of being elected governor Today, there is no area in the country where black candidates run so well among white voters as in the city of Los Angeles Washington might also reflect on the experiences of Cleveland under Mayor Carl Stokes Stokes's victory in 1967 was widely heralded as the beginning of a new era But in retrospect, that election marks not the beginning, but the end of black politics in Cleveland In four years in office (he was re-elected in 1969), Stokes never succeeded in gaming much white support, nor did he deliver on many of his promises to the black community The result is that, since 1971, Cleveland has had three different mayors, all of them white For Harold Washington in Chicago, the opportunities are clear, but so, increasingly, are the danger signs 15 November 1985 647...

...HAROLD WASHINGTON & THE POLITICS OF LEADERSHIP Anatomy of a stalemate WILLIAM G. MAYER IN ITS OUTLINE, the story is a simple one At the end of a wild and bitter campaign in the spring of 1983, a sixtyyear-old congressman named Harold Washington won legal title to the office of mayor of Chicago In almost every other respect, the election settled nothing It was only a bell that signaled the end of Round One The coalition-building processes that are normally such an important part of a political campaign — in which a candidate is required to present a mixed and moderate platform appealing to a diverse cross section of the electorate — simply never occurred By the time it was over, Harold Washington was hero to the Chicago black community, and anathema to most of its whites And in the succeeding two years, the battle lines have only stiffened Since at least 1980, the race for City Hall had been seen as a showdown between incumbent Mayor Jane Byrne and Richard M Daley, Cook County State's Attorney and eldest son of the man who had been Chicago's mayor for twenty-one years But WILLIAM G MAYER, a PhD candidate in government at Harvard, is a life-long resident of the Chicago area, and a free-lance writer on politics in the summer of 1982, Byrne's political manipulation of the Chicago Housing Authority led to a massive voter registration drive and a movement to draft a black candidate for mayor What needs to be emphasized, however, is the complex and multifaceted role that race played in these proceedings Most black candidates in the United States have made a strong effort to downplay the racial base of their campaign to portray themselves as the leaders of a coalition, and to insist that they are not' 'the black candidate," but a candidate who happens to be black Harold Washington was a different story From the very beginning, he consciously sought the title of "black candidate," and he wanted everyone to know it Though they would later complain about the media's use of that phrase, Washington and his supporters had been using it repeatedly in the four months before he announced his candidacy, in public statements such as the following ' '(Jane Byrne) has made it necessary for the black community to get behind a strong black candidate for the sake of political survival She has created a climate which gives a black candidate the strongest chance ever '' "There is no question that we are going to have a candidate for mayor from the black community " "I am one of several viable black candidates, hopefully, Commonweal 642 who are looking hard at the issue (of whether to run or not), and one of us will be in the arena " Just in case anyone hadn't gotten the message, within a week after announcing his candidacy in mid-November 1982, Washington summed it up in the slogan ' 'It's our turn " To a nearly all-black audience in a South Side church, Washington declared "Every group, when it reaches a certain population percentage, automatically takes over They don't apologize They just take over And so no w it's come to the point where we say, 'Well, it's our turn It's our turn ' And we don't have to make any excuses for it You don't even have to explain it " To be sure, there was another side to the Washington campaign His rhetonc, while calling black voters "the base," also included an invitation to Hispanics, women, and poor and progressive whites to join him He also tried to attract a wider following by talking about issues of common concern such as schools, police, taxes, and jobs But as in most campaigns, the details of Washington's policy statements were lost amidst the images and the hoopla On February 23, 1983 with the white vote split almost exactly in half, Washington squeaked through to a narrow 36,000-vote victory Exit polls showed that Washington had received over 80 percent of the black vote, but only 6 percent of the white vote, and 13 percent of the Hispanic vote The general election campaign only complicated Washington's problems Having won almost no white support in the primary, he now made surprisingly little attempt to reach out beyond his narrow, core constituency While many white committeemen openly told the press that they were waiting for his call or hoping that he would organize a umty meeting, Washington made no phone calls and organized nothing Instead, he made a series of public statements that suggested that he didn't care, or that he was taking their support for granted There is a striking contrast between Washington's behavior, and that of Wilson Goode, the first black mayor of Philadelphia, who was elected seven months later Though Goode's victory in the Philadelphia Democratic primary was vastly more impressive — Goode won 53 percent versus Washington's 36 percent — on the day after the election, Goode called up the party leaders who had opposed him and asked for their support As a result, Goode led a united Democratic party into the general election, and coasted to an easy victory notable for its lack of racial overtones BY MID-MARCH, Washington's brief opportunity was over, and the campaign slid straight into the mud The early polls had shown Washington ahead of Republican Bernard Epton by twenty-eight points By election day, April 12, that lead had dwindled to only 4 percent Still, it was enough, and Washington was elected mayor by 48,000 votes Again the exit polls told an important story Washington had received 99 percent of the black vote, but only 19 percent of the white vote, and much of that in a handful of North Side liberal wards Washington claimed that the election results had given him a mandate to recast the shape of city government But had he looked more closely at the composition of the new city council, whose members had also been elected in 1983, he might have had some second thoughts They, too, had a mandate, and it was one very different from his Of the fifty aldermen, elected from wards on a nonpartisan ballot, Washington had a natural base of twenty votes sixteen blacks and four antimachine whites To get a working majority, he needed only six more votes — but he had to get them from notably unpromising raw material twenty-nine whites and one Hispanic, almost all of them closely affiliated with the Regular Organization Traditionally, Chicago mayors assemble their council majorities by dishing out jobs, favors, and contracts — but as a reform candidate, Washington had promised he wouldn't do that sort of thing Nor could Washington gain votes as Ronald Reagan has for his programs, by holding over the heads of uncooperative congressmen the threat that voters would turn them out at the next election The thirty aldermen knew full well that Washington had been clobbered in their wards, and that their constituents were more likely to be upset if they sided with Washington But race was not all that divided Washington from the council majority Questions of power were also at stake For the previous fifty years, most of the city's political power had been held by the officeholders of the Regular Democratic Organization, now here was Harold Washington, who was not just an outsider, but who was actively pledging to destroy it Questions of race aside, most politicians are usually reluctant to support a candidate running on a promise to strip them of their power As one alderman had said dunng the campaign, "Why would I give him the guillotine with which to chop off my head...

...In a (pre-Murdoch) editorial, the Chicago Sun-Times stated, "Race is not the issue, clout is The Old Guard would have reacted just as strongly to a white mayor who threatened to reduce its power '' This might be something of an exaggeration, but not much of one A more accurate description is that the racial division had reinforced the dynamics of the power struggle, and made it easier for both sides to maintain a united front against the opposition A number of black aldermen are not particularly fond of Harold Washington, and are privately critical of the way he has performed in office Many white aldermen feel that the Organization has done very little to help Commonweal 644 them In the absence of racial tensions, there would be numerous defections on both sides, and rather than having two solid factions, the council would probably be governed by a series of shifting coalitions that would form around different issues (Who would wind up as the net beneficiary of the switching is difficult to say ) But as it is, both Washington and his opponents have used race to club the recalcitrants into line In short, there were all the ingredients for a major confrontation a population sharply divided along both racial and ideological lines, a mayor closely identified with one side, and a city council elected primarily by the other side Enter now the ringleader Edward R Vrdolyak, alderman from the Tenth Ward Though both men would probably resist the comparison, Vrdolyak's political career bears a number of striking similarities to Harold Washington's Both men got their start in politics by working for the machine, and shot up the ranks by being smarter and tougher than the competition Both have also had problems with the law in Washington's case, a forty-day pnson sentence for income tax evasion, in Vrdolyak's, a score of state and federal probes for questionable business dealings and campaign finance violations Vrdolyak, like Washington, had no illusions about what was at stake in the '83 elections Speaking before a group of white precinct captains several days before the primary, Vrdolyak called the election "a racial thing" between Byrne and Washington "Don't kid yourself I'm calling on you to save your city, to save your precinct We're fighting to keep the city the way it was " The showdown came at the very first city council meeting of the new administration, held on May 2,1983 In a pattern that would become all too familiar in the months ahead, the Washington forces started out in a difficult situation — and men did everything possible to make matters worse For weeks before that meeting, Washington's top aides had been telling the press how they intended to dump Vrdolyak and other top Organization aldermen from their committee posts — all the while having no firm strategy about how to acquire the twenty-six votes necessary to organize the council Vrdolyak was a better vote counter By working the phones through a couple of long days, Vrdolyak managed to come up with an organizational scheme that gave an important committee chairmanship to every one of the Regulars, and then got twenty-nine aldermen to sign their names to it So the mayor and the Chicago city council were at war with one another In the last two years, Chicago has never moved beyond this basic stalemate Chicago has traditionally been known as a city of strong mayors, but unfortunately for Washington, the power is concentrated almost entirely in patronage and the party structure On paper, Chicago is usually classified as having a strong council/weak mayor form of government Unfortunately for Vrdolyak, however, the mayor does have veto powers, and a two-thirds majority is necessary for an ovemde On most major issues, the mayor cannot act without the cooperation of the council, and vice versa Although Chicago's internal squabbles no longer make the national news, the lack of coverage does not mean that the nft has somehow been healed Actually, the city has now settled into a cold war phase Much like the United States and the Soviet Union, the hostile antagonists have recognized that total victory is, at least for the moment, impossible, and so they glare and snarl, and try to eke out some small advantage from each minor governmental or political squabble Politics has become more petty Issues are scrutinized less for their substantive content, and more for the minor political advantages they provide to either side In October 1983, for example, Washington vetoed a measure passed by the council, for the sole apparent reason that it would have built a new athletic field in Vrdolyak's home ward To get even, in May 1984 Alderman Edward Burke, Vrdolyak's aide-de-camp, called attention to the fact that Washington had been three weeks late in filing a financial disclosure statement required by state law, Burke declared that Washington was no longer legally mayor, since the law stated that anyone who violated the deadline forfeited his office Burke's lawsuit was dismissed, and Washington kept his job but was sorely embarrassed by the incident IT is important, however, not to overstate Chicago's woes Though few local commentators have made the comparison, the basic alignment of political forces in the city is no different from that which has confronted all of the last four Republican presdients who have been forced to work with a House (and until 1980 a Senate) organized by the Democrats Indeed, in a city where the population is so sharply polarized, there may even be a certain wisdom in placing the legislative and executive powers in different hands, thus forcing the two sides to compromise before city government can act An area where the power-shanng arrangement has worked relatively well has been the enactment of the 1984 and 1985 city budgets In the old days, Mayors Daley and Byrne had prepared the budget in secret, introduced it one day, and rammed it through the council a week later while a handful of independent aldermen scrambled madly to offer a few lastminute amendments This process tended to limit the influence of special interests, it also, especially in the Byrne years, meant that the budget never received the kind of public scrutiny that might have prevented waste and financial gimmickry Today, by contrast, the mayor and the city council each prepare their own budget, and then the two sides sit down and negotiate It has come as a distinct shock to most Chicagoans that city budgets can actually be discussed and debated, judged by its product, the arrangement has worked quite well The city' s record in economic development is a more woeful tale Investors and managers, thinking about where to locate or expand a business, require minimal guarantees of stability Instead, Chicago has offered them something resembling a three-nng circus To make matters worse, city-sponsored economic development projects have emerged as the principal hostages in the council wars...