What multiracial politics and its failure look like

The Floyd Protests and the Sanders movement, part II

July 20, 2020 Comments (2) Identity, Politics

[Part I of this article discussed some reasons Sanders lost the South Carolina primary, questions raised by polling, perceptions of the campaign in the Black press, and the role of the Democratic establishment.]

 Sanders ad shown in Midwest, March 4, 2020.

Could different campaign decisions have made a difference?
Black critics, including campaign staff, criticized the South Carolina campaign’s whiteness. Some complained that the national leadership ignored their pleas for more resources; the campaign was focused on winning the first three primaries, all in states without large Black populations.

The ad push on South Carolina TV and Black radio came late, just weeks before the primary, and when you compare ad expenses there to Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, the emphasis is very clear. FiveThirtyEight found 16 ads costing $6.42M in Iowa, 12 ads costing $1.13M in New Hampshire, 7 ads costing $990K in Nevada, but only 3 ads costing $540K in South Carolina (Fivethirtyeight’s estimated amounts). The South Carolina ads focused on issues of special concern to Black voters, but the others — the overall messaging – was on class exploitation and solidarity. Looking at the ads which come up in a YouTube search, the videos which had the most intense emotional content told stories about rustbelt decline and healthcare, or had inspiring messaging about solidarity (“us, not me”; “are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know, as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?”).

Local staffers also said Sanders didn’t give enough “face time” to community leaders; efforts to merge ground work with local campaigns were vetoed; and there weren’t even enough yard signs to give the campaign visibility, so important in rural areas. Ja’Mal Green, who ran for mayor in Chicago and was a Sanders surrogate, criticized the “top aides” carried over from 2016 for making the same wrong decisions. More senior Black staffers were needed, and more money was needed for talking to older Black voters. This all felt like misplaced emphasis, especially when Sanders, rushing to campaign in California, missed the commemoration of the 1965 “Bloody Selma” march he had made a point of attending in 2019, missed a convention of Baptist ministers, and left before the voting results, without thanking his volunteers.

In defense, Nina Turner, national campaign co-chair who had come to direct state efforts, said that these criticisms were from state staff with “the luxury to be singularly focused” while campaign leadership “had to focus on the nation.” State leadership pointed out that Sanders attended some 70 local events and volunteers “knocked on a door a minute” and the field operation was staffed mostly by people of color. The impeachment trial, also, called Sanders to the Senate when he was needed in South Carolina.

“Only one candidate has consistently opposed every disastrous trade deal. And that candidate is Bernie Sanders.” Sanders ad shown in Midwest, March 4, 2020. Narrated by union autoworker Sean Crawford.

Strategic mistake?
The campaign seemingly underestimated the importance of the South Carolina primary, the first one in which Black voters had a clear voice. Local staff complained to reporters about resources allocated to the first three primaries, Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, in predominantly white states, with so few Black voters in Iowa and New Hampshire that exit polls couldn’t even record their preferences. The gamble may have been that the early victories would establish Sanders’ frontrunner status and establish his “electability,” but it turned out that it was South Carolina and the Black vote that was decisive. And then Sanders rushed to campaign in the west and northeast. Was this a tactical miscalculation, or does it reveal a more fundamental strategic failure?

Clearly, efforts were made. There was no rushing of his podium by Black Lives Matter activists, as there had been in 2015. He  admitted his 2016 campaign was “too white,” and promised that this time it would be different. Black senior staff included campaign co-chair Nina Turner. The day after he kicked off his campaign speaking to a multiracial crowd in Brooklyn on March 2 last year, he was in Selma for the commemoration of “Bloody Sunday.” The day after that, he was on The Breakfast Club fielding questions from Charlamagne tha God.

How much meaning are we to draw from Sanders leaving South Carolina the day before the primary to go to Boston, the next day missing the commemoration of the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, or skipping a rally in Jackson, Mississippi, organized by Mayor Chokwe Lumumba? Political Science Prof. Christina Greer wrote that Sanders may have had policies benefiting Blacks, but he didn’t “work to directly address these groups and work for the vote.”  “Optics matter,” she writes in The Grio. “His absence in the state (and at Selma) was a signal to many that Bernie was attempting a path to the nomination by ignoring much of the backbone of the Democratic Party.”

His town hall in Flint, just before the Michigan primary, flew Black surrogates in to share the stage with him. But he decided to drop the speech he had worked on most of the day, written specifically to address Black voters. He left it to Cornel West and other Black surrogates to deliver its message, instead giving his thirty-minute stump speech.

It’s the “optics” again. Sanders speaking to an almost all-white crowd in mostly Black Flint, using Black surrogates “instead of speaking to black people on his own.” When Sanders asked Cornel West to explain why Biden had been winning Black votes, West blamed it on neoliberal Black leadership. But to The Root’s Terrell Jermaine Starr, this was blaming Black voters instead of Sanders own failings: “If you can’t convince black folks not to support the walking dead in favor or you, I’d be looking in the mirror. … My godmother isn’t backing Biden because she is in love with neoliberalism. She is doing so because the Democratic Socialist isn’t doing enough to prove he cares about her as much as he does the white working-class man in Iowa that he, interestingly enough, doesn’t have to ask his white friend to speak to about race.” Sanders, Starr writes, is comfortable talking to racist whites but not to Black people.

Unfair? You can find far worse in Black media, which may have been no less hostile to Sanders than corporate media in general. Still, it’s important to remember that Sanders has a significant base of support among people of color. Votes and polls show he has far more support among Latinx voters than Biden, and sizable percentages of Blacks outside of the South and among Blacks under 39. Polling also shows a sudden shift in Black opinion after the Democratic establishment coalesced around Biden in the few days before and after the South Carolina primary — Biden had been gifted the aura of electability, and exit polls showed how much that mattered to voters. We need also to remember that primaries bring out a small and unrepresentative segment of voters. Perhaps the turnout in the general election would have favored Sanders, but a strategy designed for the general election risks failure in the primaries.

Steadfast Democratic establishment
Could Sanders have won if the campaign had committed more resources in the South? His position was that the Democratic establishment was fixed in its opposition, and that included Southern Black political leaders like Jim Clyburn. In an insightful post-mortem from the left, Paul Heideman and Hadas Thier in Jacobin argue that Sanders’ strategy wasn’t the problem. Other analyses from the left agree that the campaign underestimated the Democratic establishment — so powerful that no change in strategy would have led to victory. This is apparently the view of Bernie Sanders, as well.

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The George Floyd Protests, and why Sanders lost: A progressive campaign that couldn’t win the Black vote

July 2, 2020 Comments (0) Activism, Identity, Politics

Lafayette Square, DC, the day before the police attack. Photo by Geoff Livingston. White House, 5.30.20. Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This is a companion to another article on “Why Sanders Lost,” which looks at the role of the party establishment, why “moderate” voters preferred Sanders’ policies but chose Biden, and misconceptions about voter “ideology” and polarization. This piece aims at a more fundamental problem:  Why the most progressive presidential campaign since the thirties was unable to win over Black voters, and what the centrality of the African American struggle means for the white left.

Soon after Bernie Sanders’ loss in the primary, Black Lives Matter exploded in a wave of rebellion set off by the police murder of George Floyd, a protest movement far surpassing any confrontation with the American system since the sixties. What a disconnect here for progressives:  a cataclysmic multiracial uprising led by Black people in the most profound challenge to white supremacy, and a progressive presidential campaign which rocked the system but then failed first of all because it could not win over Black voters.

In the years following the financial crisis, we saw the rise of one social movement after another, coming together to peak in two extraordinary campaigns. In the first, the Sanders campaign forced the Democratic Party dramatically to the left, mainstreaming progressive demands which were only recently marginal and eccentric. And then in the second, the police murder of George Floyd was like the breach of a dam, a wave of rebellion sweeping over the country unlike any in our history. It is huge, it is sustained, and it is multiracial. It speaks for millions, in a challenge to white supremacy and state violence that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

Our mass movements have been segregated, even when they have shared objectives. The ability of ruling elites to keep us separate has been one of their most powerful weapons. So it is a deep shock to the system when our movements come together in a rebellion against racism, a rebellion led by Black people but with a majority of whites in some of the largest demonstrations, and in some of the smallest in the most white neighborhoods.

The unprecedented multiracial character of the upsurge makes it the more troubling that the Sanders campaign fell so far short in its efforts to unite white and Black voters.

The unprecedented multiracial character of the upsurge makes it the more troubling that the Sanders campaign fell so far short in its efforts to unite white and Black voters. He was a frontrunner — but only until the first primary that had a critical number — indeed a majority — of Black voters. Then he was crushed by the establishment candidate who stood for everything his socialist campaign was built to reject.

In some of the most insightful analyses, two stories were missing: Black voters and social movements. Some of the mainstream reporting was penetrating about Sanders’ failure with Black voters, but ignored or misunderstood the movement character of the campaign. For this you had to go to the post-mortems on the left  — but many of them hardly talked about Black voters, or left them out entirely.

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Why Sanders lost. Immoderate moderates and the hidden power of the party establishment

May 1, 2020 Comments (1) Identity, Media, Politics

The obviously electable candidate

It is obvious to many of us why Sanders lost to Biden, just as it was obvious why Clinton lost to Trump. But we’re still arguing about the lessons of 2016 and I see no end to arguments about the lessons of 2020. Was the intervention of the party establishment the decisive factor? Or was it voter preference for Biden? Was Sanders too “left,” but voters too “moderate”? Could a better campaign have made much difference?  If strategy matters at all, movement activists will need answers to these questions.

When I began my survey of the already massive literature about the campaign, I thought that the Democratic Party establishment had so overpowered the campaign that a different strategy could not have changed the outcome. But this only pushed the question further back: How do you explain why the voters went along with the party’s choice, when polls showed that both Sanders and his signature policies were popular?  Voters wanted Medicare for All, free public college, and a wealth tax, all of them with majority support among all voters, even more among Democrats.

The answer may seem obvious, since everyone seems to agree that the voters chose Biden because he was more “electable.” People talk about “electability” as if it is an inherent attribute of a candidate. Yet in 2016 Clinton was electable and Trump unelectable … until they weren’t. And then there were these two paradoxical developments this year: First, the “unelectable” socialist Sanders became the frontrunner, but then Biden, exposed in the debates as the feeblest of the “moderates,” defeated Sanders in a landslide in one primary after another. Uneasiness about
Biden was reflected in the betting markets — they predicted Biden would be the winner five times, but each time losing to other favorites soon after, according to British political scientist David Runciman.

Only a few days in March

The “electability” of Biden was something created by other people in only a few days in March, just before and just after he won the South Carolina primary 48% to 20%. And within two weeks, his polling tripled. A recap will show how quick — and odd — the reversal was.

Sanders had been the clear front-runner — apparently the most “electable” after winning the popular vote in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada — the only person ever to have won the popular vote in contested races in these first three primaries. In Nevada he won in a landslide,  despite a fierce attack on him and his Medicare for All plan by powerful union leaders. He showed he could win with Medicare for All, and win with Latinx voters; if he could win Black votes in the South, that would clinch the nomination. This was not so unlikely — one Reuters/Ipsos poll showed him ahead of Biden by double digits among registered Democrats and independents, and three points ahead of Biden among Black voters, and Morning Consult had him beating Trump by the same percentage as Biden even among Black voters over 65. The next primary, in South Carolina, would be an important test.

Earlier, the conventional wisdom was that Biden would sew up the Black vote in South Carolina, where Blacks were 61% of Democratic voters in the 2016 primary, and where Clinton had trounced Sanders 86% to 14%. But polls just before the primary surprised observers — Biden had only a “narrow lead” over Sanders.

Then Rep. James E. Clyburn’s endorsement “changed everything for Biden’s campaign.” Clyburn, majority whip and the third ranking member in the House, was a civil rights movement veteran, popular statewide and trusted by Black Democrats. (He also is one of the biggest recipients of pharma money, over $1 million.) Three days after his endorsement, Biden won in a landslide. Over 60% of Black voters said Clyburn’s endorsement was “an important factor” in their decision.

The Umpire Strikes Back!

It looked like the Democratic establishment had finally thrown its support to Biden. What happened, according to observers across the spectrum, is that Sanders had “sent … the Democratic establishment into panic mode” after he won the Nevada caucuses (47% to Biden’s 20%). Moderates “hastened” Clyburn to endorse Biden and “pressured” centrist candidates to leave the race. Then, when Biden won decisively, “the party establishment kicked into full gear.”

Clyburn’s support was a “signal to rally around Biden.”  It brought seven more endorsements before the South Carolina vote, including Virginia’s Sen. Tim Kaine and former governor and DNC chair Terry McAuliffe, although Biden had only a “modest lead” in their state. By the close of voting on Super Tuesday, Biden scored 31 more endorsements  — former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, two former DNC chairs and more office holders from the Senate on down.

Party leaders made their approaches, advising the other candidates to withdraw. Pres. Carter had breakfast and a photo opp with Buttigieg in Plains, “top Democratic donors” urged him to drop out and help unite the party, and Pres. Obama counseled the mayor that this was the moment he had “considerable leverage … and should think about how best to use it.” Meanwhile, Harry Reid was “working behind the scenes” to induce Klobuchar and other  “former candidates” to endorse Biden. And so Biden received the high profile withdrawals and endorsements of Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Beto. Soon to follow was Bloomberg, who was “experiencing intense pressure from multiple sources from inside the Democratic Party.”

Biden had won “the endorsement primary,”one of the key signs of intervention by the party establishment.

“The Party Decides”? The system is rigged? 

After months of panic and indecision, Biden’s win in South Carolina gave party elites the rationale they needed to coalesce around him. Was this a rerun of “the system is rigged,” with the establishment working behind the scenes to throw the election to a centrist? The narrative supports a favored view among political scientists that the party establishment decides on the nominee before the convention. Political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller developed this idea in “The Party Decides” (2008). They put aside conventional focus on the candidates as the authors of their own success or failure, looking instead at the role of the party elites in uniting the various party factions around a trusted, electable candidate — and filtering out the untrustworthy and unelectable.

There had been democratizing reforms of the primaries, with the most recent one reducing the power of the unelected “super-delegates” in 2016. But Cohen et al. argued that the establishment had been able to adapt, through exploiting elite networks and resources to privilege a favorite candidate — or to meet threats from a dangerous outsider like Sanders. During the “invisible primary” before the convention, party elites promote candidates through fundraising and endorsements, while exploiting media and influence networks. Biden should have been the frontrunner, given his early dominance in the “endorsement primary,” beginning with Diane Feinstein and Andrew Cuomo as early as January 2019. But donors had doubts about his viability, no doubt for the same reasons debate watchers cringed at his performances, and so he did poorly in the “money primary.” (His fundraising is still worryingly low.)

This time the party united not around a candidate, but around fear of a candidate — fear which rose to “panic” after Sanders’ crushing victory in Nevada. Journalists reported on a Stop Sanders movement active behind the scenes, and we saw a steady stream of stories about worried insiders, warnings and prophecies by “experts,” freakouts by columnists and talking heads, rumors about phone calls and meetings, pressure and promises. The opposition to Sanders was so extreme that influential insiders felt they could even talk to reporters about damaging the party’s chances rather than allowing him the nomination.

“Objective reporting,” bias, and demonization

Much of this coverage is in the traditional “objective” style of reporting — third-person articles stating the “facts,” with the writer avoiding editorializing  but quoting the negative opinions of others. Campaign strategists, party insiders, big donors, academic experts, voters, various opinion leaders can be quoted “factually,” while the articles reenforce negative stereotypes and promote the perception that Sanders is unelectable. One study showed Sanders and Warren receiving far fewer mentions, and most of them negative, in the cable network with the largest progressive audience, MSNBC. Meanwhile, Biden received far more positive media coverage, with  “nearly $72 million in almost completely positive earned media in the days between South Carolina and Super Tuesday.”

It is too soon to see other systematic research, but the anecdotal evidence gives ample support to claims of corporate media bias. So, for example, the New York Times assigned Sydney Ember to cover the Sanders campaign. What more qualified reporter than a former analyst for BlackRock and wife of a senior consultant at Bain Capital, whose father was Bain’s CEO? Critics called her out for quoting political opponents of Sanders as if they were experts or neutral observers, without mentioning their political or corporate ties (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting’s list is here ).

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A progressive’s guide to the Chicago/Cook County primary

March 11, 2020 Comments (0) Politics

Photo by Nate Burgos Chicago Women’s March  1.21.18 (CC BY-ND 2.0) Flickr

The election flashpoint: Criminal justice reform

People might be tempted to vote for Sanders or Biden and pass over the down-ballot races. But this primary is not just, as usual, about the future of the Democratic Party and the competition (war?) between the party establishment and the progressives. Locally, it is also about the future of criminal justice reform, the flashpoint issue in Chicago. Unusually, in at least one race, the primary transcends the war between establishment and progressive Democrats, since the most important party officials have joined progressives to support incumbent States Attorney Kim Foxx. But her reform administration faces a heavily funded challenge from a billionaire family and from right-wing law-and-order forces. More about this below.

Sanders or Biden? Not much I can say here since readers by now know all they need to know about them. As I write this, Sanders lost heavily in Michigan and other March 10 primaries, after losses in Super Tuesday and S. Carolina, and there is a lot to think about and discuss. But here is my argument for now: 1. For Sanders supporters, it still makes sense to work for his campaign and for Sanders to stay in the race, because the objective is not just to contest the presidency, but to continue to move the party to the left and build a social movement inside and outside the party; 2. Support for Sanders remains a criterion for identifying progressive candidates down ballot; 3. If people you talk have decided on Biden, that doesn’t mean they are not progressives (if you think so, you write off the people you need in your movement for change, and we need to respect the totally progressive fear of a Trump victory). A slogan for the times: Unity … with differences.

“Progressive” or progressive? 

Who are the progressives, and what is progressive? You can argue about who fits the description, since “progressive” is not just a description, it is a politically charged and ambiguous term, and a political marketing label. For example, the progressive community in Chicago was divided in the 2019 mayoral election, with some supporting Lori Lightfoot and others supporting County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. Each had very similar and very progressive, left platforms; each was supported by different networks of people who identified as progressive. There were reasons to support either, reasons to distrust either, but the arguments were sometimes (often?) bitter and divisive. If we can now say the victorious Lightfoot supporters were overly optimistic, we will never know if the defeated Preckwinkle would have unpleasantly surprised her supporters. Perhaps the binaries of progressive – corporate neoliberal, or progressive-Chicago machine oversimplify, at least in some of the contests.*

So how do you identify progressives? Go beyond, beneath and between: Don’t just look at the positions and rhetoric, look at their past words and behavior. But also look at candidates’ connections to progressive activists and organizations. What matters is not just electing people with good policies, but voting to build the progressive movements, identifying the candidates who understand that the transformative social change we need comes not mainly from the right people in government, but also from the disruptive power of broadly-based people’s movements holding officials to account and pushing them to act for the common good. So I’m going to draw attention to candidates who are supported by progressive and left activists and organizations, some of whom have shown they understand the importance of building a movement. No need to talk much about Bernie Sanders — this is his brand, what he means by his slogans “we need a political revolution” and “not me, us.” (more…)

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Scorsese’s “The Irishman” — a masterwork, or a pretentious bore?”

January 15, 2020 Comments (2) Art, Culture, labor, Media

The fate of Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters union is the historical anchor for “The Irishman.” The mob, corruption are there. But here is the part of history left out — the Teamsters as part of the militant working-class movement that “created the middle class.” Here, Teamster truckers battle police in Minneapolis, June 1934. National Archives. 

He is called the Irishman not because he’s Irish, but because he’s not Italian, yet still a trusted hit man for the mafia. Scorsese gives us Frank Sheeran, a hit man who doesn’t have much to say, doesn’t seem to have an inner-life, has no emotion when he kills. He’s asked, Do you paint houses, code for the splatter on the wall after a hit, and he might be painting houses for all the emotion he shows when he shoots people. This lack of affect leaves us with one of the oddest of all gangster movies.

Odd most of all because the main character is a cipher, neither a hero nor an anti-hero, defined as much by his lack of personality as by his peculiar speech and behavior. An incongruous puzzle leaving us to wonder, This is the man who changed history by killing Jimmy Hoffa? You can also wonder, Can a film with characters and story-telling so drained of emotion hold the interest of an audience for three-and-a-half hours?

Just a working class guy, doing a job
Played by Robert De Niro, Frank is a working-class guy, a truck driver, who accidentally connects with mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci). Russell is impressed when he learns that Frank came back from World War II, where he had no problem with orders to kill German prisoners. Clearly, talent to recruit for bigger things.

Frank works his way up through petty crime to become a hit man. Scorsese’s treatment of the murders is unusual. The camera doesn’t dwell on them. They take just a second. Frank will walk by a target and shoot without stopping or even slowing down. Painting houses really is a fitting metaphor for what he does — he’s just a working-class guy doing a job.

Usual suspects, unusual characters
De Niro is joined by Scorsese’s familiar cast of mobsters. Each from iconic crime films, their acting here is flattened — Harvey Keitel and Joe Pesci, no less than De Niro, playing against type in an understated and unemotional style. They convey more than they say, but, really, not much more. What they say is odd also; just as we never saw a gangster movie with the look of “The Irishman,” we never heard dialogue like this. The language is marked by euphemisms as odd, opaque and understated as the characters. Murder is “painting houses,” “carpentry” is disposal of the body, “some people are concerned” means someone might get whacked. “It is what it is” means it’s too late for him, no turning back. This is so peculiar it lends character and authenticity to the film, even if the language could only be found in the book on which the film was based, the dubious confessions the real Frank Sheeran told to his lawyer. (more…)

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Understanding the Chicago school strike … and why it’s different

October 25, 2019 Comments (2) Activism, labor, Politics

 

Chicago’s teachers and staff march, 30,000 strong:  “For the schools we need, not LaSalle Street Greed.” Oct. 17. All photos: Considered Sources (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

You have to go beyond the news media coverage of the school strike to understand its significance. The reporting reduces the strike to a conflict over particular demands, a power struggle between an “interest group” and the city. But this gets it very wrong. Teachers are not just another interest group — and in this respect, they have a unique place in the work force.

It’s true that unions typically will bargain and strike for better pay and working conditions on their jobs. But teachers are unlike most of the labor force, because their personal needs go beyond their personal interests. Chicago teachers need better working conditions, but as their signs say, their working conditions are their students’ learning conditions. In the wave of mass teachers strikes inspired by the Chicago strike of 2012, teachers have made demands for their students’ welfare the core of their bargaining and their message — a strategy called “bargaining for the common good.”

The public knows the schools have been underfunded and starved of funds for decades. They know about the shortages of teachers and other essential staff. Newspaper reporting has exposed the lack of teaching resources and the filth, rats and roaches in the classrooms. So the public has been sympathetic to the contract demands of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the Service Employees Union  (SEIU 73): manageable class sizes; hiring of needed and missing wraparound staff — nurses, social workers, psychologists, librarians, special education classroom assistants, security officers and custodians; and raising the poverty wages of the mostly minority service employees.

Strange and inexplicable … and totally normal

We’re not supposed to use common sense about these demands. It’s quite normal for even wealthy cities to impoverish the schools. But really, if we think about it, isn’t it strange and even inexplicable that teachers should have to go on strike for these things? Shouldn’t cities meet these needs without anyone having to ask for them, let alone fight for them? After all, no one, not the mayor and not even the anti-union editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, would dare deny the justice of the demands. CTU Vice President Stacy Davis-Gates reminds us, when Mayor Lightfoot was campaigning, her bold, visionary education platform “was largely cutting and pasting from the work we’ve been doing over the last decade.”

So naturally, the public likes the strikers demands. The only opinion poll on the strike so far shows that far more voters support the teachers than support the mayor — 49% to 38%.

Now the city is their classroom

Teachers teach … and when they go on strike, the city is their classroom and voters are their students. Their demands draw awkward attention to the city’s excuses for denying them. For example, Mayor Lightfoot says, there just isn’t any more money for reducing class size or hiring nurses. But this focuses our attention on how the city misspends the taxes we pay. (more…)

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Will Mayor Lightfoot keep her promises? Taxes and the progressive agenda

September 19, 2019 Comments (0) Media, Politics

Is it too soon to judge whether Mayor Lightfoot is living up to her campaign promises? One of her first tests is contract negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union. Photo: CTU Local 1.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been in office for a little over three months. Is it too soon to judge whether she is “keeping her promises,” as protesters are demanding? Her “State of the City Speech may be vague on how she will address inequality and racism. But still there is a lot to learn from the speech about her intentions — and from the way corporate media have covered it.

Here are two ways to cover her speech, two ways, of framing “the state of our city and its finances,” as she says, “who we are and, importantly, the kind of city we will be.” One way: Make the story about Chicago’s staggering deficit of $838 billion, and then the pension payments of $1 billion more in the next three years. Make the story about how closing the deficit is the first and overriding priority for … not just the mayor, but for all of us — how we all have to “join together” to solve the problems. This is the way the big three papers frame the story in their editorials and main stories on the speech — the Tribune, Crain’s Chicago Business, and even the (partly) union-owned Chicago Sun-Times. How can the mayor meet the bill, with what taxes and what cuts and savings? Taxes and savings are what the bond market is demanding, and it’s pretty much all the editorials and news stories have been talking about.

But there’s another way to frame the story. Maybe the real story is not the cruel necessity of taxes and how we all need to share the pain. Maybe it’s about who should be paying the taxes and what the revenue should be spent on. (For that story, best turn away from the big three papers and listen to Ben Joravsky, in his Reader columns and recent podcasts.)  Let’s see if the Mayor’s speech “shines a light” on that. (more…)

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What Chicago tells us about the modern urban machine and political reform

June 30, 2019 Comments (1) Politics

“Reform is here!” says Mayor Lightfoot in her inaugural speech, as she turns to face aldermen. Wild applause; certain aldermen take umbrage. But … what kind of reform?

Dick Simpson began a recent talk on the Chicago machine with a quote from Chicago’s first black mayor — and our first and until now only reform mayor in living memory. Harold Washington said, in the euphoria of his mayoral win in 1983, “The machine is dead, dead, dead.”

History replied, too soon, “Not quite.”

Simpson now adds, Not dead, but dying.

Dying? That depends on how you define “the machine.” Simpson is the acknowledged authority — he’s battled the machine as one of the only independent aldermen in the first Daley administration and through his later career as political strategist and academic researcher. Among his books are a history of the Chicago City Council and, with Thomas Gradel, “Corrupt Illinois.” Following an election which is already considered a historic break from machine politics, Simpson then was an obvious choice as speaker, and the machine an obvious subject, for Civic Series’ first Chicago event, “Is the Machine Dead? The future of Chicago Politics.”

We no longer have the classic urban political machine, the machine under the first Mayor Daley. That version of the machine, Simpson said, is defined by patronage hiring and promotion, favoritism, crooked contracts, and nepotism. Chicago still has all of that, but what most characterized Daley’s machine was the armies of patronage workers who could be fielded to harvest votes at election time. Before the Shakman Decrees shocked the system with court monitoring, up to 35,000 patronage workers would flood the precincts to bring in votes for the machine’s candidates. Now there are, Simpson estimates, less than 5,000 political hires in Cook County.

The old machine and the new

The machine adapted. Simpson, who was one of Lightfoot’s early endorsers, points out that she and the reform aldermen were elected without the help of patronage workers. Lightfoot’s main machine antagonist in the first round of voting, Bill Daley, had no army to field either. Instead, he waged a Washington style campaign, putting millions in campaign contributions into advertising, just as Rahm Emanuel and the second Mayor Daley had done before him.   

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Lightfoot’s mandate — and its problems

April 9, 2019 Comments (0) Activism, Politics

Protesters shut down State Street demanding Rahm’s resignation, December 2015. Photo by Cass Davis, all rights reserved. F Newsmagazine December 17, 2015.

Lori Lightfoot won in a “landslide” and has a “mandate” in a “change” election for mayor. Three claims, all thrilling, all need some chilling.

The landslide: Seventy-four percent of voters chose Lori Lightfoot, and she won in every one of Chicago’s 50 wards. What a landslide, what a mandate! But not mentioned enough — only only 33% of registered voters turned out.

The numbers, rounded off: Lightfoot won 74% of that 33% — that means she won only 24% of all registered voters. The numbers are more dispiriting if you remember there are some hundreds of thousands of eligible voters who aren’t even registered.* Yes, this was a historic election, a landslide and a mandate. But as always in Chicago politics, there are the included and the far greater number of the excluded.

Change: It was definitely a change election. And for more than the 24% who voted for Lightfoot. It wasn’t just Lightfoot’s voters who wanted change; plenty of Preckwinkle voters wanted change also. Despite people demonizing her as the machine candidate, she too had a leftist change platform, and she was supported by some of Chicago’s biggest agents of change — the CTU and SEIU Healthcare. But “change” is a powerful slogan partly because it is vague. Lightfoot said she sees herself as “the vessel into which people poured their hopes” — a good metaphor, rather like Obama’s “Hope and Change.”

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Preckwinkle: Reformer in the machine

March 31, 2019 Comments (1) Politics

Progressives in search of a candidate

Diogenes is still looking for the great progressive hoping he can figure out who to vote for, or maybe he’s trying to sell his vote for a Target gift card. The villagers, including the cows and pigs, laugh at him. Jacob Jordaens, c 1642. Photo Hans-Peter Klut, Elke Estel, via Wikimedia.

The more I read about Lightfoot and Preckwinkle, the more I realize I’m less interested in them than in what the campaign is doing to Chicago’s progressives. After the huge mobilizations after Trump’s election and the thrill of the blue wave in the midterm, we not only can’t unite on a mayoral candidate, but tempers have risen uncomfortably. The problem is that we have two candidates who are, somewhat, ambiguously, progressive and somewhat, unambiguously, establishment. Both proclaim reform agendas and claim reform identities, but Lightfoot is a multimillionaire corporate lawyer who worked for Daley and then Rahm, and Preckwinkle, after years of voting against Mayor Daley in the City Council, made nefarious machine alliances to run for president of the county board.

Ben Joravsky as often said it best, in his latest column: “Lori and Toni were missing in action: Lightfoot and Preckwinkle claim to be progressives but they stayed away from the front lines during the great fights of the Rahm years.” In looking at the aldermanic races, you can find candidates who put their time and bodies into progressive causes and have clear ties to progressive organizations, if not active participation in them. They’ve done the meetings and the doorknocking and the demonstrations. Lightfoot and Preckwinkle are not among them. More: As Joravsky said, they didn’t make public comments on even one “showdown issue of the Rahm era”: mental health clinic closings, school closings, teachers strike, and, Joravsky’s righteous obsession, use of TIF funds to redistribute our tax payments to big developers and the financial elites and away from the rest of us.

So while they are both talking big progressive ideas, anyone concluding from their actions and not just their words that they are the progressive hope is doing some seriously wishful thinking. Is there a correlation in politics between wishful thinking and anger at people who take another side? That would explain the intensity of the arguments, as the negative campaigning spills into what ought to be comradely or at least collegial debate.

I’m following up my article on Lightfoot with one on Preckwinkle. You’ve read so much already these articles may be superfluous, but I’m including material on their records that I think has been overlooked or underplayed. And if you’re tired of reading about Preckwinkle’s campaign blunders and patronage hiring, take a look in this article at the two really big things she did in the County … and the details about her voting in the City Council, where there was even some drama in the roll calls. Some of this you’ve read elsewhere, but some of it fill fill in some gaps in the reporting.

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