The mayor has won the respect of his peers from across the country for his city’s role this past week. But when the party’s over and he returns to his City Hall office, Daley, like the rest of the big city mayors, will find his in basket loaded.
Next week, when the convention is gone, the public schools will open in Chicago. Soon afterward, City Hall forces will launch a long-planned attack on the system’s ineffective curriculum, forcing a jobs conflict with the teachers union.
And real life begins again.
Mayor Richard Daley will be stuck between the desires of the local Democrats to use the Chicago Teachers Union to regain control of the state legislature from the Republicans and his own promise to the city that he will take the risks necessary to reform public education.
The usual attacks will dominate the news. Children who get substandard educations will be used in the political rhetoric by all sides. Enemies will press for advantage.
This is what being a mayor in America is about.
It is not about this giant cocktail party, this Democratic National Convention, where the mayor is whisked from one telegenic event to another, fawned over by the Democrats who want to use him, and his spruced-up downtown Chicago, as the backdrop for their own personal political ambitions.
Yet it is this image of Daley–presented by the party as the mayor with answers to some of the toughest problems of inner-city America–that prevails on the national stage, at least for now.
As a political icon, Daley fits the image the new Democratic Party wants to show the nation.
Conservative and pragmatic, he helps the Democrats appeal to the voters with whom they have lost touch: white ethnics in the city and suburbs who were the Reagan Democrats. And as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, a post he ascended to earlier this year, Daley has a national public forum to press his urban agenda.
That is in part why he has emerged from the media glow as a political deity this week. Los Angeles and New York have Republican mayors, and the national Democrats like to think that Daley is one of their own, even though he often acts more like a Republican.
But the perception of Daley, filtered through the Democratic perspective, is best viewed from afar, in San Francisco or Boise: a man who presides over a city of political peace, a place of civic calm, where things look good.
Chicago is a wonderful city, and has proved to be a dazzling backdrop for the convention. But cities are also the places that present America with its most serious problems. The litany is well known: Drugs. Crime. Racial tension. And there’s less and less federal money coming to City Hall to help–even with a Democratic president.
On Tuesday, White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta announced at Navy Pier that if President Clinton is re-elected, the White House will deliver a $3.4 billion jobs package directly to America’s cities. “We don’t want to do it through the states, we want to do it through the mayors!” Panetta said, and the mayors roared their approval.
But once spread around, that amount won’t make up for the federal budget cuts that big cities have taken for years.
As Daley and his big-city mayoral colleagues meet around town this week, the talk is light, but they all know that any one of them is only a few bad cops and an ugly beating away from disaster. A teachers’ strike, a budget crisis, a slip of the tongue, and soon you’re looking for work.
“It’s tough running a city, and you’re always thinking about what’s going to happen next, and some of it’s good, and a lot of it is not so good,” said Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell, a close friend of Daley’s.
Rendell and his colleagues know that this week is a party, and next week in their hometowns comes work.
Still, they have a professional’s measure of respect for Chicago’s mayor, because he has protected, at least temporarily, his own political flanks at home. After all, since the Democratic mayors last convened at a political convention, they’ve lost important turf to Republicans, including New York, Los Angeles and Gary.
What intrigues the mayors is Daley’s near-absolute control of the local political landscape, and of that they are envious.
Part of it is the luck of his name and the patience that he has shown. As has happened in New York and Los Angeles, Daley succeeded a black mayor after the black electorate had fractured.
Since his election in 1989, he has co-opted almost all of his opposition. The city works, at least in political terms, at least for the white politicians, for now.
“They come up to me asking about him, about how he does it,” Rendell said before joining a panel discussion by mayors on urban issues.
Mayor Bill Johnson of Rochester, N.Y., himself the beneficiary of a friendly city council, sees political control as the first key to running a city.
“Especially if you have enemies right on your flank, putting their own politics together, chipping away at you,” Johnson said. “I’ve been a political scientist. And I’ve been a mayor for a few years. In order to get things done you have to protect your flank.”
So far this week, the mayor has been judged largely on his abilities as host. Even his few remaining political opponents haven’t found much to criticize.
“Chicago is doing a great job; he’s doing a credible job as host,” said U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), one of only a few independent black political voices in Chicago.
“He’s trying. I’m not sure he’s succeeding,” Rush said. “I would much rather see a real Chicago transmitted to the nation, as opposed to a Chicago that’s only clean in the front room, and the rest of the house is deplorable, filthy, broken down.”
Whether Chicago is Daley’s garden or Rush’s weedpatch will be debated as they measure each other for a likely matchup in the 1999 mayoral race.
Meanwhile, the party leaders angling for a presidential opportunity in the year 2000 have courted the mayor; in turn Daley has volunteered himself as photo prop.
Earlier this week, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) sat on a barstool, a microphone in his hand like a talk-show host at a staged town meeting, asking the mayor about how Chicago’s leaders have helped families and children.
On Tuesday, Vice President Al Gore, also thinking ahead, joined Daley for an interfaith prayer breakfast.
Daley sat back, in support of Gore, as the vice president sought to connect with black ministers by adopting their preaching style and talking about the prophet Ezekiel.
In the background, Daley rolled his eyes at the political theater, but kept his mouth shut.
For months, Chicagoans have watched the delirious transformation of the city, particularly the West Side, as crews have spruced up streets and planted banks of trees and flowers.
On Wednesday, Daley pulled reporters aside and joked about yanking them out when the conventioneers leave so the city could revert to normal.
“When this is over, you know, I’ve got to go back to work,” he said.
