The Chicago Way

Recently I’ve been engaged in a back-and-forth email chat with some college chums and a former college journalism teacher about a whole host of topics: the future of the media, the nature of information and education, overpopulation and other social topics. You can follow the whole string here, at Rick Seifert’s Red Electric blog.

Yesterday I brought up Rod Blagojevich’s indictment as an aside and today one of the participants commented that during the presidential campaign, there was a yearning for “a little less Harvard Law, a little more Chicago political machine….” This struck a chord with me.

I love Chicago; I have since I moved here in 1997. I read Mike Royko’s Boss before I moved here and thought I understood a little about corruption’s history here. I was even excited to work as a reporter here, and imagined myself breaking big stories on the Machine and winning all sorts of awards.

Eleven years later I’m on my second tour in Chicago, after having served three interim years in New York. While in New York, I read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, in which I learned a little about Tammany Hall and corruption in another big city. But FDR and Fiorello LaGuardia, and even to an extent Robert Moses, helped break Tammany Hall. Certainly there is still corruption in New York. However, Chicago exists today as if Tammany Hall had never been interrupted, as this Slate.com article suggests.

The Chicago Way isn’t cute and there’s nothing nuanced or romantic about it. At its dark heart it is cronyism, money and power. That’s it. The Chicago Way isn’t about “getting things done” for the sake of getting them done; it’s about getting them done so that someone, preferably an entire network of people, benefit personally. If you’re not in the network, any benefit to you is ancillary and perhaps not even intended.

Anyway, all of that is a typically long-winded way of introducing my response to my college friend:

You're far from alone in your Machine thinking. I recall quite a bit of nudging and winking among the national media and pundits during the election about how Obama, Rahm Emanuel and Axelrod were going to bring a little sharp-elbowed Chicago politics to Washington; you know, get things done "The Chicago Way." Make no mistake: Rod Blagojevich, while a fully a creature of his own making, learned from the masters of the Chicago Way. Mike Royko, in his book "Boss" about the first Mayor Daley (that would be Richard J.) suggested that the Chicago motto "Urbs in Horto," or City in a Garden, should instead be "Ubi est Mea?" or "Where is Mine?" And the first Mayor Daley was also famous for saying about city job seekers visiting his 11th Ward offices, "We don't want nobody nobody sent."

The cocktail party stories about Chicago politics are rooted in a much more difficult truth about corruption here. Axelrod is up to his neck in Chicago politics, and so is Emanuel. Obama himself was helped along by Machine hacks like Emil Jones, and has endorsed the likes of the current Mayor Daley (Richard M.) and the nitwit Cook County Board President Todd Stroger and Rod Blagojevich. My hope is that Obama will use the strength of his own brand to elevate himself above those roots and lift Axelrod and Emanuel up with him. I think he will, and I think he will leave the Machine behind. Richard J. Daley refused to run for president, although some thought he should, so the closest the Machine has ever come to having a candidate of its own making in the White House was John Kennedy. Once in power, Kennedy took Daley's calls, but certainly didn't give "da Mare" everything he wanted. But what the hell? Politics is a pay-to-play business, and some people can pay more and play harder than others. If the Bush/Rove reign has taught us anything it's that attaining the highest office in the land doesn't automatically filter out petty political provincialism.

A good site to poke around for another perspective on "The Chicago Way" is the Beachwood Reporter, run by a former Tribune reporter.