Joe Gardner tried for weeks for a public opportunity to challenge Mayor Richard Daley to a debate.
He tried to catch the mayor in the City Hall press room during one of Daley’s drop-ins there. Missed him by minutes.
He tried to snag the mayor as Daley entered the City Council Chambers for a meeting, but was a split second too late. A guard stepped between the two.
Finally, Gardner-frustrated and a little embarrassed-simply handed the letter to a guard posted outside the mayor’s office. Daley never acknowledged the letter, and the candidates in the Democratic mayoral primary won’t face each other across a podium before the Feb. 28 vote.
“I never got a chance to put the letter in his hand,” a miffed Gardner said in an interview. “He was too fast.”
Gardner is probably used to such near misses with the public spotlight by now. For the last six years he has been a commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, occasionally making a blip on the political radar screen but mostly toiling in obscurity.
He’s not Harold Washington, bombastic and bigger than life. He’s not Jesse Jackson, poetic and polarizing. He’s just Joe, as in his campaign slogan, “Let’s go Joe!”
But in Chicago at large, it might as well be, “Who the heck is Joe?”
In political circles Gardner is known as a polite, intelligent man who, in another time, might command fear rather than indifference from his opponent. Gardner has been part of the city’s progressive movement since the 1970s, but compared with other local African-American leaders, he is just the kind of middle-of-the-road black candidate who could be chosen mayor by an ethnically diverse electorate like Chicago’s.
But Gardner’s campaign coffer looks like a pauper’s purse next to Daley’s. He has seen big-name black business and political leaders pass over him and flock to Daley’s side. Even Democratic incumbent Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, the first black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate, ignored Daley’s failure to endorse her in the 1992 primary election and now backs the mayor.
As a result, many of Gardner’s friends wonder why he is taking on such a long-shot campaign, when a growing population of blacks and Latinos might make him a more likely candidate in four years.
But Gardner, 49, answers the question “Why now?” with another question: “Why wait?”
“The time is now,” said Gardner, a soft-spoken but sure man. “We can’t wait.”
Progressives and other anti-Daley black and Hispanic activists agree. They just question whether Gardner-a virtual unknown compared with such big names in the black community as U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush and former Illinois Atty. Gen. Roland Burris-is the leader the times call for.
If not for Jackson, Gardner might never have come to public attention at all.
By choosing him as a close aide at his social-action group Operation PUSH in the early 1980s, Jackson involved Gardner in key events leading up to the 1983 election of Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, and launched his public career. As a result, Washington chose Gardner for key roles in his administration.
One story of the period illustrates how low a profile Gardner has had during his career in public service.
In 1982, Mayor Jane Byrne infuriated black leaders by upsetting racial balances on the Chicago Housing Authority board and the Board of Education in favor of a white majority. Angry PUSH leaders retaliated with a boycott of Byrne’s ChicagoFest at Navy Pier.
Gardner said he was a major player in organizing the boycott, publicizing it among neighborhood organizations around the city, working out who would picket and when, and negotiating with the police department for the routes.
But other activists say they can’t recall Gardner’s exact role in this and other causes prior to his appointments to city positions in 1983.
“I don’t know if I can pinpoint a movement he was leader of. Joe has never been in my recollection a-how would you phrase it-a stand-out figure in terms of publicity. . . . He is not a limelighter,” said Lu Palmer, an activist and chairman of both Chicago Black United Communities and Black Independent Political Organization. (Palmer, who supports Gardner in the primary, also spearheaded the effort to get Burris to run in the April 4 general election if Daley wins the primary. Burris has filed to run as an independent in that election.)
“(Gardner) works harder behind the scenes,” said Rev. Willie Barrow, the current executive director of Operation PUSH, who also supports Gardner.
Gardner’s community activism began in the Woodlawn neighborhood, where he lived starting in 1954, when his mother, a single parent, moved herself and her only son to Chicago from Detroit. Gardner wanted to be a social worker.
In Chicago he met the man who would have the greatest impact on him: Tom Gaudette, an influential but lesser-known disciple of radical activist Saul Alinsky.
Gaudette spoke at the University of Illinois in Chicago shortly before Gardner earned his master’s degree in social work there. Impressed by his talk of solving the problems of the poor by empowering them for political and social change, Gardner, then 24, asked Gaudette for advice.
“He said, `Social workers just put Band-Aids on cancer,’ ” Gardner recalled.
Attacking the roots
Gardner never spent a day in social work. After graduating, he went to work for The Woodlawn Organization, one of the grass-roots social-action groups formed by Alinsky. There, he said, he hoped to attack the disease, not the symptoms, of poverty and racism.
In the 1970s, The Woodlawn Organization clashed with the administration of Mayor Richard J. Daley, the current mayor’s father. While there, Gardner organized and oversaw tenant unions and block clubs. Members of the tenant unions would report problems such as rodents or peeling paint to Gardner, and he would work to get the problems fixed.
Sometimes that meant setting up an orderly meeting with a landlord. Other times, he said, it meant taking a group of 100 residents to the landlord’s home or office and making demands. There were about 100 of the clubs and unions by the time Gardner left to work with Jackson in 1980.
Gardner said he took the post as Washington’s commissioner of neighborhoods in 1983 with the same goal of empowering residents.
He set up meetings between utility company representatives and low-income residents who were having a hard time paying their bills. His department also took the money that had been going to the ChicagoFest celebration and used it to set up seven neighborhood festivals around the city. Gardner believed a Washington-sponsored party, at which the mayor was present, would help open the lines of communication between the neighborhoods and the mayor’s administration.
As a result, many residents knew him and knew they could go to him if they had a problem, recalled Artensa Randolph, a CHA tenant and still a member of the CHA board.
Later, as deputy executive director of the CHA, Gardner pioneered the midnight basketball program and hired residents as janitorial aides.
But during this time he was derided by critics for using his public offices to benefit the mayor politically.
Gardner, who ran Washington’s political organization between his two assignments with the city, bristled at the notion that he should have done otherwise.
“There was this prevailing sense in the first year or two that we had to meet after work in a dark corner to talk about using the government to push our political agenda,” said a frustrated Gardner in an interview with Gary Rivlin, a reporter who wrote the Washington biography “Fire on the Prairie.”
Some black leaders say such a politically savvy person could do a lot for the unfocused, confused progressive movement of today.
Rev. B. Herbert Martin, who was pastor of Washington’s congregation and a community leader, say Gardner’s campaign for mayor is a chance to begin to rebuild the coalition that elected Washington. That coalition fell apart after Washington’s death in 1987 and an ensuing power struggle between black leaders.
And Gardner, with his credentials as a foot soldier, could get leaders of diverse ethnic groups talking again, Martin said.
`Covenant’ of proposals
During a recent interview in his reclamation district office, where he sits surrounded by photos of his three daughters (he and his wife are separated), Gardner said he decided to run mostly because he believed Daley could be beaten, and that he was the guy to do it. (Sheila Jones, a follower of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche, also is running in the primary.)
The issues that concern Gardner are those that concern “working people” today, he said.
Gardner talks about a “Community Covenant With Chicago,” a list of proposals he promises to enact if elected. Among other things, he pledges to rebate the city’s head tax for companies that hire unemployed Chicago residents; create 10,000 apprenticeships in the construction, health-care and computer industries; and build and rehabilitate affordable housing.
Further, Gardner said, the mayor should use his office as a “bully pulpit” to improve public education. He should invite business leaders to help rewrite school curriculum so high school graduates are better prepared for the work force.
“Now, that’s not the 1960s, knee-jerk liberal philosophy of, `Let’s deal with the root causes,’ ” said Gardner. “What it is is the 1990s reality that jails and prisons and more police are not as cost-effective as increasing the quality of the public education.”
But even if one concedes that the people can reach the promised land, one wonders if Gardner is the one to lead them there-or if the people even want him to. A recent Tribune voter opinion poll not only showed that Daley was leading Gardner 61 percent to 19 percent overall, but also that Daley was favored by 66 percent of likely Latino voters and 31 percent of likely black voters.
Daley talk predominates
And a recent rally for Gardner seemed to indicate the general indifference of his better-known supporters.
A feisty crowd of 1,500 nearly filled the sanctuary of St. Stephen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church on the West Side. A stream of mostly black politicians and activists marched past the pulpit, each vowing their support to Gardner, who was seated on the stage.
There were stars from every faction of the Daley opposition, united by Gardner because of his status as a progressive, a black and an alternative to Daley. There were progressives, like Rush. There were regular Democrats, like Burris. There were black nationalists, like Conrad Worrill and Palmer. There were even those who have had personal differences with the candidate, such as Ald. Bob Shaw (9th), a Daley critic who trashed Gardner as a Daley plant in the 1991 city clerk’s race. Gardner and then-state Rep. William Shaw (D-Chicago), the alderman’s twin brother, both lost to incumbent Walter Kozubowski.
In the middle of the hub, seated shoulder-to-shoulder with Rush and Burris, was Gardner.
“It’s funny,” whispered a nervous Gardner aide, slightly worried that Burris might say something embarrassing during his unplanned moment behind the microphone. “We didn’t expect them to be up there like that.”
Burris didn’t say anything to embarrass Gardner, and he promised to support him in the primary.
But there was another, subtle message in the rally. Almost everyone who spoke talked about Daley. They discussed the need to beat him. They enumerated what they believe to be his sins against blacks and Latinos.
Gardner’s name seemed an afterthought in the speeches. His friends and supporters belied their hopeful words with their half-hearted delivery.
Said Martin: “Joe is the person right now who is out there. Whether he is ready or not, we are going to support him. . . . He deserves the African-American community’s full support. If there were another candidate, we would have someone else to look at.”
Said Rush: “Is he the right person? He’s certainly capable, committed. Joe cut his teeth on progressive politics. He’s one of our stars. There are others. This is Joe’s moment. He’s fully capable of realizing this moment.”
But quietly, others suggest that Gardner as an unlikely messiah is exactly what is called for.
He hasn’t clashed with the titans of the movement. He comes off as a moderate, especially when compared to nationalists like Palmer and Worrill.
“He’s always interested in getting the job done,” said Barrow. “But he doesn’t care about getting the credit. He is unique in that way.”
While Gardner acknowledges that the progressive movement is fractured, he harbors great hope that it will one day reform city politics.
Its power, he said with a tinge of irony, lies in workers who don’t strive for personal glory, but for unity. And he sees that happening within his campaign, he said. People have stopped complaining so much about being in the wilderness and have focused on how to get to the promised land.
“I think there’s a growing sense of awareness,” he said. “As long as we fight each other, we are not going to win any political objectives.”
The Gardner file
Name: Joseph Gardner
Age: 49
Current position: Commissioner, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.
Education: University of Illinois at Chicago, master’s degree in social work. Loyola University, bachelor’s degree in sociology.
Experience: Deputy executive director, Chicago Housing Authority, 1985-87; commissioner, Chicago Department of Neighborhoods, 1983-84; interim executive director and board president, Operation PUSH, 1982-83; deputy executive director, The Woodlawn Organization, 1971-79.
Personal: Separated from wife; has three daughters.
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In Tempo Wednesday, a profile of Mayor Richard M. Daley.
