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17. A Midterm Blunder
- Temple University Press
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17 A Midterm Blunder E verything was going well for the twenty-nine, mainly because things were going so poorly for Harold Washington. As the midpoint in his term approached, the prevailing image of Washington was that of a terribly outmatched bumbler up against craftier opponents. One political writer likened him to Jimmy Carter, sincere but inept, a good-hearted man unable to find the levers of power to actually accomplish anything. Washington could rant about the underhanded methods of his foes. But that seemed to only further ingrain the image of an oversized Vrdolyak manhandling a child-sized Washington, as if Vrdolyak were able to lean a palm against Washington’s head and hold himself just out of reach so that poor little Harold could only flail wildly, throwing aimless punches that didn’t come close to tagging his opponent. Snafus like Washington’s missed deadline on his ethics statement seemed all too common. Blame it on people too busy paying attention to the big picture to notice the small stuff, blame it on so many newcomers. A fairer mix of people running government—more women, more minorities, and more protesters mingled in among the career bureaucrats and ward heelers—also meant a less experienced crew was in charge. There was also more internal fighting than in the past. We were like a newly married couple, said Art Vasquez, a deputy in the Economic Development Department. “We had to learn to get along but, maybe more important, we also needed to learn how to fight.” The media were proving another impediment. The administration was making progress overhauling government, but that was largely overshadowed 198 Chapter 17 by an emotional and persistent political fight. “No one wants to deal with that nitty-gritty stuff of government,” Washington told the Reader, the city’s alternative weekly “The news is not Vrdolyak calling me a bastard and me calling him a son of a bitch.” Devoid of content, Council Wars seemed a loud and meaningless fight between two strong personalities. Yet only his performance as chief executive would win Washington new white converts. People within the administration were not helping the cause through foolish missteps. By most accounts, Jim Montgomery was doing a terrific job reforming the corporation counsel’s office. It was not so long ago known as “the worst law firm in town,” a former Sun-Times beat reporter wrote in Chicago magazine, but under Montgomery the department “has made perhaps the biggest improvement, with almost half the 160 lawyers replaced by merit hiring.” Montgomery, according to the Chicago article, had wooed “first-rate litigators” to the department and initiated a long list of other much-needed reforms. Yet that was the stuff of sidebars compared to Montgomery’s penchant for travel. He traveled to France on the city’s dime, ostensibly to look into the lightrail system being considered for O’Hare. The project represented a huge dollar investment, but it was never satisfactorily explained why the city’s top lawyer needed to travel abroad to study engineering designs. A family trip to Mexico arranged through Waste Management, Inc., generated more headlines. Montgomery claimed he repaid Waste Management for the cost of the trip; still, a vast disposal firm doing business with the city seemed an odd travel agent. The extraordinarily high expectations of the black community presented another challenge. (“Being the first black mayor,” Atlanta’s Maynard Jackson once said, “is what you wish on your worst enemy.”) It didn’t help that Washington took office at a time of shrinking federal dollars. Staff and single-issue policy groups floated innovations that were pointless in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s reelection. Washington’s transition team had found that Chicago’s health budget, for instance, ranked not only near the bottom among all major U.S. cities, but also that its per capita expenditures were half that of the median. AIDS was only starting to stretch an already thin budget. Yet could Washington survive a tax hike? Who knew what to make of all the allegations of sabotage. It was probably not as endemic as some Washington loyalists suspected but common just the same. The majority of the city’s forty thousand employees, after all, were connected to one local ward organization or another. There were reports of worker slowdowns among city crews from the Streets and Sanitation yards working in white communities and anecdotal accounts of city employees deliberately acting rudely. “We get reports of people calling...