Raise a bared finger, feel the raw gusts. Fresh winds are blowing across Chicago, across Cook County, across Illinois. And that noise you hear? That just might be the sound of some long resilient political careers, flapping uneasily in the breeze.
Was there ever a time in this city, this county, this state, with so many government scandals, so many corruption trials–and so many clueless politicians nevertheless trying to raise taxes?
Those disparate elements–scandals, trials, taxes–are related. If you reduce the realpolitik of Chicago’s City Hall, the Cook County Building and the Statehouse in Springfield to three sentences, these three would suffice: (1) Entrenched politicians can survive headlines about scandals, or headlines about tax increases. (2) But when headlines about scandals and headlines about tax increases appear in the same day’s paper–day after embarrassing day–then watch out. (3) Because those millions of lamblike citizen-taxpayers who finance the lifestyles of the powerful, the entrenched, just might revolt.
Each week, it seems, citizens learn that still more pols and public officials have heard the words each of them most dreads: “Hello, we’re from the FBI.” Insiders who have long boasted of their clout are now renouncing it. As one prominent Democrat confides, so many scandals are unfolding that it’s never been more in to be out. “Who, me?” you can almost hear the insiders bleating. “Nope, I don’t know any of those people. That indictment was a real surprise!”
And each week, it seems, comes the whine that this or that government wants to raise taxes.
We can’t yet prove there’s a cumulative effect to these relentless waves of political news. But we do believe voters know what the self-absorbed political class sometimes can forget: Change really is possible–particularly when taxpayers have their noses ceaselessly rubbed in government corruption. And with the Illinois culture of political sleaze facing so many challenges these days, we get the sense that some of the old ways are coming unraveled. Consider:
– Once it was lakefront liberals and a few City Council outliers–Leon Despres, Bill Singer–fussing about the need for reform. Now, in the marble corridors where the politically astute gather to kibbitz, a few nervous lips are whispering that Mayor Richard Daley needs to keep the cascade of corruption disclosures at City Hall from evolving into what he’s never had–a vulnerability. One joke making the rounds: “Good thing Barack Obama wanted to be a senator!”
The drumbeat of corruption stories comes at a bad time: The long list of tax and fee increases Daley engineered to balance his 2005 budget can’t help but leave citizens asking if their hard-earned dollars keep thieves on the city payroll.
– Cook County Board members grew nervous this month when Board President John Stroger asked them to support yet more taxation to prop up his $3 billion budget–which, inexplicably, includes money for 1,400 vacant positions. Then there’s Daniel Winship, the county health director, admitting that his bloated bureaucracy could be streamlined–but not too fast.
Several board members grew more nervous when two of their number, Roberto Maldonado and Joseph Mario Moreno, disclosed that they’ve been subpoenaed in a federal probe of a $49 million equipment contract at the county’s Stroger Hospital. Maldonado and Moreno say they don’t think they’re targets of the probe.
What all of the board members recall is that, in 2002, angry voters dumped five supposedly secure incumbents from the board, replacing four of them with true reformers.
The implication for the board, whose 17 members are up for re-election next year: With more voters behaving like independents, your party’s ward bosses are losing their ability to protect you. Tax hikes plus a ridiculously bloated budget plus a federal investigation? Not good for the Cook County Board.
The wildest card on the table is the upcoming federal corruption trial of former Gov. George Ryan. Even as that trial approaches, the current governor, Rod Blagojevich, is fending off charges from his father-in-law that his administration has sold official appointments. And, so far as we know, federal probes continue into allegations that the offices of House Speaker Michael Madigan, Senate President Emil Jones and former GOP House leader Lee Daniels misused government resources. Whew.
Fallout from scandals on Ryan’s watch already have eviscerated the Illinois Republican Party. A long, lavishly covered trial will rivet public attention not just on the defendants but also on the wheeling and dealing in Springfield. No matter the outcome, Ryan’s trial won’t sweeten public attitudes toward Statehouse incumbents. Imagine the bind for legislators if that trial, scheduled to start in March, is in full flower as legislators confront a massive budget shortfall. Inevitably there will be demands that lawmakers vote for higher taxes to erase it. Equally menacing: If Ryan succeeds in delaying the trial for several months, it will loom like a banshee over the primary election season of 2006.
Blagojevich made an apt point during his budget address last February: We can’t raise taxes on citizens who distrust us. We first have to prove to the people that we are worthy stewards.
The real power to clean up governments and keep them affordable, of course, rests with voters. We’ll need an election or two to know whether public corruption, and the suspicion of tax hikes it breeds, really is bringing winds of change. Our surmise, our hope, is that it will. As citizens of Chicago, or of Cook County, or of Illinois, we get the governments we demand. The governments we deserve.
