- Rich Hein/Sun-Times
- Former 50th Ward alderman Bernard Stone, who died Monday at age 87.
Suddenly everyone was talking about cleaning up government. The feds had imprisoned leaders of Mayor Richard Daley’s patronage operation and indicted Governor Rod Blagojevich for his pay-to-play politics. Even the mayor was promising reform.
“Boo!” he shouted, literally giving the other aldermen a thumbs-down. “You’re a bunch of stupid dummies!”
He knew who had elected him. He had a ward of longtime residents, many of them Jewish, and he understood that they supported the mayor and wanted good city services. He delivered. As long as he did, he could tell his constituents what they didn’t want to hear, and tell them again and again and again, until they gave up and he did what he was going to do anyway.
“He told it as he saw it,” says 49th Ward alderman Joe Moore, his neighbor, who tangled with him repeatedly over the years. “He didn’t speak from a list of talking points. He didn’t have a consultant frame his language. That’s disappearing from politics, even at the local level.”
What really galled him, though, was his belief that Mayor Daley was actually behind the whole thing. After decades of loyalty to the machine, the mayor and his people were going to throw Stone out like yesterday’s garbage—while hiding behind the reformers?
While Stone often said things that were stuck in another era and worldview, Alderman Silverstein rarely says anything at all. And Mayor Emanuel appears to be just fine with that.
