A few years ago, Justin Kaufmann tried shopping a screenplay around Los Angeles about a fictional Chicago alderman named Ed Bus, a fire hydrant of a man, stocky and coarse, straight out of what Kaufmann calls the “mustache and windbreakers school of Chicago politics.”
The script was about Ed Bus finally being challenged for his office. “Ed Bus has been alderman for 45 years of a neighborhood like Bucktown, sort of like a Rostenkowski,” said Kaufmann, a producer for WBEZ and a part-time performer. “He’s been there for so long he doesn’t realize the neighborhood’s changed. Starbucks moved in and double-wide strollers are everywhere, and before he knows it, things are different. But in the end, of course, old-school Chicago wins. The ward embraces Ed Bus as its alderman.”
Basically, alderman Austin Powers?
“Yes!” Kaufmann said. “Exactly. Where were you when I was pitching this thing?”
Kaufmann found himself on the couches of producers “who actually said stuff like, ‘What do you guys think of Michael Douglas for Ed Bus?’ It was like ‘Entourage.’ It was ridiculous.” But the pitches went nowhere. The script described Ed Bus as less than Douglas-esque (or even Clooney-ish) — as a balding man in short sleeves. Ward politics aren’t particularly sexy. And no one in Hollywood knew what an alderman was.
“Except they knew Daley,” he said. “They all did. They knew what a Daley looked like. They at least had that image of Chicago politics.”
In other words, when non-Chicagoans picture Chicago political leaders, the stereotype that readily comes to mind is of a compact, brusque, short-tempered, porkpie-hat-wearing, Irish Catholic South Side-guy-turned-political-bulldog — the prevailing Chicago political caricature. Never mind that it’s an image probably better suited to Mayor Richard M. Daley’s father, Richard J., personified in Mike Royko’s classic 1971 biography, “Boss.” And never mind that Chicago gave the White House a thin, patient, African-American president. For more than a century, Chicago itself has held that cultural image of Chicago politics — an image embodied for almost half of that time by the Daley family, who collectively occupied the mayor’s office for 43 years.
So when Daley announced last September that he would be leaving office in the spring, it marked more than the end of a political era.
It threatened to disrupt our cultural stereotype.
In fact, the outside world was already wavering between the reality of the Chicago politician — ethnically diverse, relatively fit — and the cliche. A week after the 2008 presidential election, Time magazine ran a piece pointing out that the John McCain campaign ads linking Barack Obama to the “Chicago machine” were hopelessly outdated. When people think of Chicago, the story said, “most Americans no longer make the association with corruption.” A month later, Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested and accused of perpetuating pay to play politics.
These days, said Claire Simon, of Simon Casting, which has worked on everything from “High Fidelity” and “Prison Break” to the new Fox series “The Chicago Code,” directors and producers come through Chicago and think of our politicians and average citizens alike as “white and kind of smushy. Even when we had actresses come in to audition and play workout girls, I would hear, ‘Yeah, OK, but can you get us, you know, Chicago workout girls.’ Those stereotypes arrive from out of town sometimes.”
Yet not one of the major candidates in Tuesday’s mayoral election fits into that classic Daley-esque mold, not Carol Moseley Braun (African-American woman), not Miguel del Valle (born in Puerto Rico), not even Gery Chico, a Latino, who physically suggests at least a slight resemblance to a Daley.
Then there’s Rahm Emanuel. What if, as recent polls suggest will happen, a trim, former ballet dancer becomes our next mayor?
“Then Jerry Seinfeld replaces Archie Bunker,” said Andy Shaw, president of Chicago’s Better Government Association.
“Rahm, aesthetically, you need a shoehorn to fit him into our classic image. A Jewish mayor who grew up in the northern suburbs, whose father comes from Israel. You lose that archetypal image of the scrappy kid from the South Side who becomes mayor,” said Shaw. “Chicago wore the Daleys on its sleeve comfortably. Our iconography has long been City of Big Shoulders, and the Stockyards, brawling neighborhood folks, an image formed intensely in the ’20s and ’30s, when you had this melding of mobsters and journalists and politicians, and they became these swashbuckling cultural figures. As much as the city has changed since then, it’s still our narrative and image. The last time I looked, the current mayor fit that outdated image of a Chicago politician.”
And now? That image of the meat-and-potatoes Chicago politician … fades?
It doesn’t fade, said Kaufmann. But it does gain some competition.
Since 1998, Kaufmann (who, incidentally, is 35 and bald, but not stocky), has been playing Ed Bus as a kind of perverse ongoing work of performance art. His Ed Bus is prototypical political blunt object. Kaufmann created the character for the Schadenfreude comedy troupe, but outside of the theater, Ed Bus holds news conferences, speaks on actual talk shows; during the Groundhog Day blizzard, he posted YouTube videos of himself heroically shoveling the city streets. Last weekend, prematurely, he held an “Alderman Ed Bus Victory Party” at Gallery Cabaret. He is a write-in candidate for mayor, Kaufmann said; if elected, he promises to name Daley his “co-mayor.” Ed is a rubber stamp, a Daley loyalist, pure machine tool. His campaign slogan is wonderfully Chicago: “Keep It Like It Was.”
“Comedywise, Rahm (would enhance) what I do, because there would be conflict between Rahm and the City Council, and the best comedy comes from conflict,” Kaufmann said. “But imagewise, he would mark a huge change (for Chicago). Daley was more of a yuppie than his father but he still carried that classic Chicago image, that he was a couple of smart people removed from being a garbage man, which is what we loved about him. He was not polished. He tries being slick. Rahm is such a reversal of that. He’s trying to relate to us. He doesn’t blow his top, at least publicly. And when he’s talking sports, he’ll say, like, ‘Three and zero.’ Nobody says ‘zero’ in Chicago. His suits are a little nicer. Everything’s just a little leaner.”
His shoulders a little narrower.
Said Philip Molfese, president of Chicago political consulting firm Grainger Terry: “Commenting on appearance is not something I do, but how a leader physically looks has some impact on reputation. Would we be considered sleek with Rahm? Maybe sleeker. When Kennedy was president, the country had more of a Hollywood glamour to it. I think the same kind of thing would rub off on Chicago (if Emanuel is elected). He’s fit, and in pretty good shape.”
Physically, Emanuel would be incongruous to the image of the Chicago politician. And yet his reputation as a foul-mouthed Rahmbo — mailing dead fish to pollsters who irritate him, stabbing steaks and loudly declaring his enemies “Dead!” — does harken to the early 20th century, when Chicago was the “Hog Butcher for the World,” as Carl Sandburg famously wrote, and the city still retained its “frontier edge,” said Dominic Pacyga, a historian and professor at Columbia College Chicago. Back then Chicago had “developed an image as a cold, capitalistic city where people buy their way to power,” a portrait helped along by Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” and Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”
That combines with “the political cartoons of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall politics in New York,” said Peter Alter, a curator and archivist at the Chicago History Museum. “But (those images) became all-purpose in Chicago — the rotund politician with the vest and the pocket watch and an appetite for power, consuming everything. Chicago didn’t invent the machine, or ward politics. We were just a strong practitioner.”
So much so that by the time Neil Giuntoli staged “Hizzoner,” his hit one-man play about the late Richard J. Daley, which ran for 400 performances between 2006 and 2009, the actor and playwright “was really playing Daley as an Irish chieftain. That’s what I was thinking of. I just sped the idea ahead a thousand years. And remember, chieftains are not known for being progressive. If he perceives an external threat to the village, that threat gets crushed ruthlessly.
“I think people came and saw their dead king, which is what they wanted to see.”
When “Chicago Code” creator Shawn Ryan (a Rockford native) was readying the series, he bought dozens of books about Chicago politics, he said. “And a lot of the covers would have this one image, of a Daley, or of a big white Irish guy. Chicago’s changing. It’s evolved beyond that old cultural image of Chicago politics, but I think Chicago still kind of takes this weird, nostalgic pride in those images. It’s ‘the city that works,’ so in the pilot, Delroy Lindo (who plays a corrupt alderman) delivers a monologue about how Chicago works, but in a lot of different ways, how things are just different in Chicago.”
That said, at the Chicago Cultural Center, through March 16, you’ll find the “Your Honor! The Mayors of Chicago 1873-2011,” collection of portraits of mayors, organized by Project Onward, which works with artists with developmental disabilities. Among the paintings are reminders that Chicago has had an African-American mayor in Harold Washington and a female mayor in Jane Byrne. There are the Daleys, the most horizontal of the pictures, their faces floating against a blue sky, the most nimbus of clouds. And lastly, there’s a blank paper on the wall, its subject to be determined — though one instructor said their artists are already working on Emanuel.
Which, after nearly 50 years of the Daleys, is not so easy, artist Jeremy Scheuch has learned. He was co-curator of the popular “Chicago Alderman Project: 50 Aldermen/50 Artists” exhibit last year at the Johalla Projects Gallery; and more recently, he was the curator of “The Daley Show” at the Chicago Urban Art Society, which featured works riffing on the current mayor, from silk-screen portraits to the ornate scepter and crown of a reigning monarch.
Lately, he’s been eyeing the polls and working on his best Emanuel.. But all his Emanuels look like Tony Danzas. Not that it matters, he said with a sigh. “Daley’s always going to be the mayor of Chicago,” he said. “Twenty years from now, he will still be mayor. When people think of the mayor of Chicago, that’s the picture they’ll see in their head, that kind of guy, regardless of who becomes mayor. They won’t forget him, because that’s the way it is here.”
