Cinnamon Bloom, the dog, isn`t much of a campaigner or she would tell the story of how she met master Larry. Seems the 5th Ward alderman felt so naughty about parking in the Humane Society lot while visiting a nearby sporting goods store four years ago that he ducked in to see the pound and ended up with the pooch.
This is, of course, not the sort of news that will help the Bloom for Mayor effort, already so awash in testiments of goodliness and cleanliness that it is starting to resemble an ad campaign for bleach.
”Lawrence S. Bloom is an outstanding alderman who gets good city services for his ward and fights for progressive ordinances and against sleazy ones,” bellowed one of Chicago`s dailies.
”Except for Ald. Larry Bloom, who seems to be afflicted with both honesty and intelligence, those who want to be mayor are a pretty motley crew,” said a newspaper columnist.
”Chicago Lawyer has never before endorsed a mayoral candidate, but Lawrence Bloom`s presence on the Feb. 28 primary election ballot merits breaking with precedent,” the legal journal asserted. ”Bloom stands head, shoulders and chest above his uninspiring opponents . . . Bloom is a man of exceptional abilities whose record is one of consistency and principal.”
No, no, no. What the Bloom campaign apparently needs to break out of its last-place position in the city`s three-way Democratic primary is some evidence that this is a man for ”all Chicago,” as the candidate likes to brag, not, say, for all Minneapolis.
Recently there appeared some promise in a local television station`s claim that it had caught Bloom in a conflict of interest. But when the story aired, reporting only that the alderman had once voted to grant a cafe permit to a restaurant in which he held a financial stake-pretty lame when you`re competing against an acting mayor who admits taking $30,000 from a lawyer seeking a zoning change-it seemed as if Bloom`s was a campaign that could do nothing right.
”What you see with Larry is what you get,” Arnold Wolf, Bloom`s rabbi, observed. ”Intelligence, character, deep religious background, a wonderful family.”
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In April, 1987, on the eve of his re-election, Harold Washington invited a few political allies to join him at his South Shore apartment following his last campaign stop of the election. Among the supporters was Bloom, one of Washington`s first white backers in 1983. When the meeting broke up, Bloom mentioned to Washington that he was in the market for a good book.
The mayor, a voracious reader, retreated to his bedroom, then returned with a volume that he handed to the alderman, saying, ”Why don`t you try this?”
The book was ”The Power Broker,” Robert Caro`s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of former New York City park commissioner Robert Moses, perhaps the most brilliant but shamelessly ruthless urban politician in American history. Bloom spent six months poring over the 1,100 page biography, which he calls ”one of the most disturbing books I have ever read about power and maybe the most important book I have ever read.” He never asked Washington why he selected that particular volume from his substantial library that evening, but Bloom thinks he knows.
”He wanted me to understand what he meant when he said `politics ain`t beanbag,` ” the alderman reflected, recalling one of the late mayor`s favorite aphorisms. ”That there are some pretty tough people in politics and you better understand their motivations.”
If so, it was a lesson chosen wisely for Bloom, a University of Chicago philosophy major and law school graduate whose baptism in the relative gentility of Hyde Park politics and upbringing on the North Shore was not the classic incubation for Chicago mayoral hopefuls, among whom Moses has had his admirers.
Bloom was born into what his mother, Saida, calls ”a nice Jewish home”
in a neighborhood of nice Jewish homes in the Hollywood Park section of Chicago`s Northwest Side. He was the second of three children, the son of a conservatory pianist and a lawyer, Jacob, with whom he now practices out of a small suite of offices on Wacker Drive. Questions to the family about
”Larry” are returned with answers about ”Lawrie” (pronounced
”Laurie”), a nickname Bloom has carried since childhood due to his mother`s stubborn dislike for the common diminutive of Lawrence.
For those who would search for clues to the quixotic drive that propels Bloom, 45, in his bid for that plain paneled office on City Hall`s fifth floor, there is some illumination in his family`s scrapbook of political involvement.
Although the Blooms were not active by Chicago`s traditional ward precinct standards, they were united by what father Jacob calls a philosophy of ”progressive candidates, no dopes allowed.” This was more likely to show up in dinnertime debates than doorbell pushing, but there were two campaigns in which the family did take a special interest. Both were noble, neither successful.
The first was the 1952 presidential campaign, in which Bloom`s father worked for Adlai Stevenson. Pearl Taback, the alderman`s older sister, remembers fanning out over the streets of Hollywood Park with Larry, distributing the Stevenson for President literature that their father brought home in bundles.
”My brother was maybe 8 and I was about 10, and we took our red wagon, Lawrie and I, and filled it with fliers,” said Taback, a New York City school teacher. ”We rounded up as many friends as we could, and the bunch of us handed out the literature that my father kept supplying us with. We could easily get to the mailboxes because there were a lot of three-flats in the neighborhood and you could hit three (homes) at once.”
Two years later, looking for better schools, the family moved to Highland Park, where the anemic Lake County Democratic party jumped at the prospect of a Democratic refugee from the big city. In 1956, Jack Bairstow, a state representative from the district with whom the senior Bloom practiced law, talked his partner into running for local office under the county`s party banner, a mission that turned out to be more kamikaze than quixotic.
”At the time, of course, the Republicans ruled the county and the Democrats were always on the lookout for anyone of their persuasion,” Jacob Bloom said. ”Jack suggested I run for circuit court in Lake County. I did, with not a successful result. It was my first and only attempt at political office.”
If Bloom`s current campaign for office seems to resemble his father`s own ill-fated effort, this has not always been the case. In Hyde Park, where he began cutting his political teeth on some of the activist student movements of the `60s, Bloom found a place where many of those who were politically outside the city`s mainstream could feel welcome.
In 1979, after law school and work for former Ald. Leon Despres, the golden voice of independence in the City Council for 20 years; and for former State Rep. Robert Mann, an independent Democrat, Bloom decided to take his own shot at elected politics. In typical Hyde Park fashion, Bloom attacked incumbant Ald. Ross Lathrop (5th) for not being outspoken enough in pushing the independent agenda on the council floor, winning the hearts of the ward`s liberal establishment and a narrow majority of the votes.
Though Bloom was sent to City Hall as the 5th Ward`s latest in a succession of white liberals come to taunt-usually without effect-the Democratic machine, Bloom played the part differently than had most of his predecessors. ”I didn`t want to be as strident as Despres, though we shared the same beliefs, and I didn`t want to be as predictable as 5th Ward aldermen had been,” Bloom said.
”I tried to be as friendly and congenial with as many different aldermen as I could, I tried to understand their constituences; I tried not to embarrass them when I raised an issue. In the back of my mind I was thinking, `I may have to work with these people one day.` ”
The opportunity came sooner than Bloom thought when, in 1983, a constituent of his ward by the name of Harold Washington ran for mayor and won. Beyond making City Hall insiders out of the 5th Ward outsiders, Washington`s victory convinced Bloom that he could ride the crest of movement politics straight into the Cook County state`s attorney`s office.
But even with Washington`s endorsement, and Bloom`s growing stature in the City Council, running against an incumbent by the name of Richard M. Daley was like . . . well, like a Lake County Democrat running for the circuit court: In his father`s words, Bloom ran ”with not a successful result.”
In Bloom`s 10 years on the City Council he has stood betwixt and between, a Democratic progressive who has been personally liked though not always politically embraced by the party`s regulars; a white alderman who, while aggressively representing a ward that is 75 percent black, has been grudgingly tolerated by many of the council`s black members.
The netherworld position is underscored by three stories.
The first: When Washington died and the City Council was undertaking its greedy search for a successor, Ald. Theris Gabinski (32d), one of the leaders of the council`s old-line party regulars, phoned Bloom with an offer. Gene Sawyer was starting to buckle, and his supporters didn`t know of anyone else who could acquire the necessary 26 votes. If Bloom was willing to cast his own deciding ballot, Gabinski could deliver him the white bloc`s 25 votes for mayor.
Bloom was hungry, but declined the offer unless Gabinski could muster a coalition more representative of the council`s racial makeup, a demand he knew would kill his chances, and did.
The second: A year later, still hungry for the mayor`s seat, Bloom travels to the West Side ward of Ald. Ed Smith (28th) to make an impassioned plea for endorsement before a group of black community leaders: ”I supported Harold Washington by asking this city to, for God`s sake, not vote on the basis of race. I am asking the same of you. If you stood for what Harold Washington stood for, you stand for me. If you stand for what Ed Smith stands for, you stand for me. And if you turn around and endorse Gene Sawyer just because he is black, you will never be able to criticize whites for racism again.”
Ald. Smith, who recalls it as a ”powerful speech,” called Bloom a few days later to say the group had decided to endorse Sawyer.
The third: Shortly after Eugene Sawyer`s selection as acting mayor in December, 1987, Bloom, then chairman of the prestigious Budget Committee, was called to a small summit meeting of City Council members in the mayor`s office to discuss the proposed 1988 budget. Seated around Sawyer`s conference table were the mayor, a few of his cabinet members and about a half dozen aldermen. Nobody can recall precisely what it was that Ald. William Henry (24th), one of Sawyer`s closest allies, said to anger Bloom so, but even those allied with Henry at the time agree it was outrageous.
Ald. Edward Burke (14th) states flatly that it was ”anti-Semitic bull
—-.”
Ald. David Orr (49th) added, ”Whether it was anti-Semitic or just plain stupid I honesty don`t remember,” but, with the rest of the those present-including Henry-he agrees that Bloom was justified in storming out.
”He blew his stack, packed his bags and left in a huff,” Burke recalls. ”He stormed out of that damn meeting, he sure did,” said Henry, who denies making an anti-Semitic slur but acknowledges that he may have offended Bloom ”in terms of the race question,” a frequent theme among some of Bloom`s black detractors on the council who find an easy target as a white representative of a ward that is 75 percent populated by a minority group.
Bloom, curiously, has the weakest recollection of the incident but offers this perspective: ”What I remember is thinking, `Here are these guys who I stood by in the Washington coalition, and now, with the mayor gone and nobody else to keep them in line, they are really beginning to feel their oats.` My impression was of someone who, given a little bit of power, suddenly reveals the real self.”
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On Monday, the man who probably won`t be mayor answered the phone as though speaking through a foghorn. He has known all along that his best shot at breaking out of the pollsters` mid-teen ratings hinged on an impressive showing in Tuesday`s debate, a forum tailor-made for a candidate who, though he may not be able to outspend the other candidates, can generally outsmart them. But with a recently-acquired fever and a bad cold, Bloom was wondering whether the gods, in addition to the campaign contributors, were beginning to conspire against him.
”I ask myself every day, `Am I staying in this race?` ” said Bloom, scratching out the words. ”And every day I can`t come up with a good reason for getting out. Do you have any chicken soup?”
His mother Saida is not making soup for her second son, nor giving him advice.
”I always tell him, You ought to live in Highland Park,” she said recently. ”There isn`t a person who hasn`t come up to me to tell me how delighted they are with his campaign.”
But Bloom and his wife, Ruth, are steadfast Hyde Parkers; she is lab administrator at the University of Chicago Hospitals, and they have two children-Aaron, 11, and Gabrielle, 9-in public school.
”If he lived in Highland Park, he`d be a shoo-in for anything he wanted,” his mother says.”
