Last Wednesday was a typical day in the campaign to fill Rahm Emanuel’s vacant Fifth Congressional seat: I got mailings from three candidates blasting Cook County Board president Todd Stroger.
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He’s not even close. Offhand I can think of more than 30 other local politicians with more clout than Stroger, including three mere aldermen—Ed Burke, Richard Mell, and Fritchey’s uncle-in-law Bill Banks. Stroger’s not even the big man on the county board—that role falls to commissioner John Daley. In fact, while he controls more jobs, I’m not even sure he has more influence than his nemesis, commissioner Forrest Claypool, who’s cultivated a cultlike following in the press.
Stroger’s problems start with how he got his gig, in a particularly transparent display of nepotism. His father, long-serving county board president John, suffered a stroke a few days before the Democratic primary in March 2006 but won anyway. City and suburban Democratic committeemen then met in a room at the Hotel Allegro and picked Todd, an inconspicuous south-side alderman, to replace his dad on the November ballot. White folks have been howling ever since.
Yes, I remember that Stroger doubled the county’s share of the sales tax last year—how could I forget? The Tribune‘s editorial page has been reminding me ever since. But let’s put it in perspective. The county budget is about $3.2 billion—a fraction of the money Mayor Daley controls. Stroger’s sales tax hike was estimated to bring in about $426 million in annual revenue; in 2007 Daley raked in about $550 million with his off-the-books tax increment financing program. How come politicians and editorial boards aren’t beating their chests over that?
He claimed it didn’t bother him that his name was being trashed to win white votes, though it’s ironic, since his father was always a bridge between the black and white factions of the Democratic organization. In the 1983 mayoral race John Stroger, unlike almost every other African-American politician in town, endorsed Richard M. Daley over Harold Washington, at great risk to his career. “Before Harold got into the race, Mayor Daley’s mother called my father and asked him to endorse Rich,” Todd Stroger said. “He told her he would, and once he gave his word he kept it.”
I was struck by how stark the contrast was between what I was seeing and what I’d read in the campaign mailings: here in the county building people were tripping over themselves to express gratitude to Stroger and his family’s longtime patronage system; on the north side congressional candidates were bitterly arguing over which of them was most tainted by association with it. And I realized once again how racially divided the city remains, even in the afterglow of Barack Obama’s victory.v
