Progressives in search of a candidate

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.

Preckwinkle in the City Council, 1991-2010

The Chicago City Council may be one of the most corrupt of any major city. UIC Political Science Professor and former independent alderman in the Richard J. Daley administration Dick Simpson, with teams of researchers, puts together regular reports on council roll call votes. He singles out bills on which some aldermen vote against the mayor and the mayor’s floor leader. Quite a few aldermen actually vote with the mayor 100% of the time or close to that, and without apology or embarrassment. Preckwinkle was one of the most outspoken opponents of Mayor Daley in her council years, with a consistent progressive voting record. Through 2007, no alderman cast more dissenting votes, and she was sometimes the lone or almost the lone dissenter. (Almost all of the following information on the City Council is from the UIC reports.)

Preckwinkle at her best

Her best in those years was her vote with only four others against the most scandalous and unpopular giveaway of our assets to the billionaire class — the parking meter sale to Abu Dhabi investors, enriching bankers, including Bill Daley’s son, along the way. The deal brought in $1.6 billion for Chicago but was worth an estimate $10 billion or more to the investors, over a 75-year period, and hiked meter rates by triple digit percentages. It should be hard to do any future privatizations after this notoriously corrupt deal, but … this is Chicago.

Preckwinkle: “The price of victory is total vigilance.”

Preckwinkle’s worst was also in this period, when the city council voted unanimously to give Daley a blank check in his bid for the 2016 Olympics. It was only by act of a just and vengeful god that Chicago was saved from yet another Biblical-scale disaster of a deal, and no thanks to Preckwinkle. Olympics have proven scandal-ridden projects, with host cities incurring massive debt and uncontrolled gentrification and displacement of the poor. Yet Preckwinkle even drafted the Olympic Committee’s Memorandum of Understanding and sponsored the ordinance in the City Council (Hyde Park Herald, 5/6/09). After early opposition, Preckwinkle decided not to oppose the Olympic bid and worked out a “compromise” to justify support for it — a “community benefits agreement” supposedly guaranteeing a wishlist of affordable housing, minority jobs, displacement protections, infrastructure spending and even high-speed rail. Law professors pointed out that there was “no enforcement and no ability to sue in any of this (Hyde Park Herald, 5/6/09). But after months of community organizing, with demonstrations, meeting after meeting, anger in the street, Preckwinkle and other independents needed this memorandum as cover before voting with the mayor. The council then unanimously authorized Mayor Daley to cover any financial shortfalls and cost overruns. Earlier, in 2007, the council agreed to back the city’s bid with $500 million. Now, without any limit.

Preckwinkle said, “The price of victory is total vigilance.” No vigilante has looked at her role in the Olympics bid during the mayoral campaign. This was a difficult time for Preckwinkle — since 2007 she was preparing her campaign for county board president, in which she gathered contributions from Daley donors such as Elzie Higginbottom; the law firm of the mayor’s brother, Daley and George; Terry Newman, a close Daley friend; and Terry Teele, a former Daley aide. One more: Patrick Ryan, head of the Olympics bid committee. And she was able to campaign without opposition from Mayor Daley.

Chicago may have escaped the Olympics, but is still paying a heavy price for the boondoggle — about $140 million in principal and interest for purchase of property for Olympic Village, and then Rahm spent $885,000 on a study of redevelopment strategies.

Preckwinkle’s better days

Preckwinkle beat Tim Evans in the 4th Ward in her third try in 1991, after the death of Mayor Harold Washington and divisions among black activists allowed her to eke in a narrow victory, by 109 votes. In her first years in the city council, she pushed for Chicago’s first affordable housing set-asides, a ward remap that increased black voting rights, and a 1998 ordinance requiring a living wage for city contractors. (Note: Preckwinkle, unlike Lightfoot, now supports rent control, but her record on affordable housing is at best mixed. Curtis Black quotes Jawanza Mallone, executive director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, who says Preckwinkle backed development policies that displaced thousands of low-income renters. The 15,000 units of affordable housing she claims she brought in were actually not affordable for many existing residents. More detail, here.)

2000-2002 Aldermanic voting records
Preckwinkle was in “agreement with the mayor” on 64% of divided roll call votes — that was the lowest percentage, with Dorothy Tillman at the next lowest, 77%, while 15 aldermen were in 100% agreement with the mayor.

She opposed a gang loitering ordinance, a weapon in racial profiling — and today she opposes the CPD’s gang database, while Lightfoot wants to correct and improve it. She also opposed zoning for Soldier Field renovations and an increase in taxi fares.

Voting record 2003-2006
Three African American women — Preckwinkle, along with Dorothy Tillman(3rd) and Arenda Troutman (20th) — were the principal dissenters in these years — Preckwinkle the lowest at 55%, with Tillman next at 63%. They opposed allowing Lehman Brothers to underwrite O’Hare revenue bonds because the investment bank “lied about their past connection to slavery.” (A 2003 ordinance required contractors to disclose in detail past connections to slavery, the result of a campaign for reparations in the black community that targeted major finance and insurance companies.)

The reparations campaign also contributed to black aldermen’s vote against the deal to privatize the Millennium Park and Grant Park parking garages, another giveaway of city assets. Ald. Tillman called it “a piece of Jim Crow, charging that Morgan Stanley also lied about their profits from slavery. Preckwinkle joined seven other black aldermen to oppose the deal.

These three were the only ones to oppose the $5.1 billion budget in 2005, for increasing the tax burden on the city’s poor and privatizing jobs. This vote was also a protest against the decline in city contracts to African Americans. The report points out, the “lakefront liberal” aldermen didn’t join them in votes on race issues. But Preckwinkle was the lone vote in the council against the 2006 $5.2 billion budget, again in protest of city corruption and the African American share of city contracts.

For the first time, the council majority voted against Mayor Daley and floor manager Ed Burke, in two ordinances brought into the council by antiwar activists. Preckwinkle jointed the majority in voting against the Patriot Act *(37-7), with strong speeches about its threat to civil liberties, and then against the Iraq War (29-9). Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (6th Ward) said the act “solidified racial profiling and declares open season on people of color,” and Ald. Leslie Hairston (5th Ward) said, “This is precisely how Hermann Goering explained Hitler’s takeover of the German Government.” The credit for these votes, which expressed the developing antiwar consensus, should go first to the antiwar movement — on March 20, 2003, 10,000 marchers shut down Lake Shore Drive in protest of the war, with 800 kettled on Oak Street and arrested on orders of a furious Mayor Daley.

Labor support for Preckwinkle dates back to her strong stand for affordable housing, striking hotel workers and a living wage in these years. Preckwinkle proposed an ordinance for affordable housing, shelved in favor of a much weaker ordinance sponsored by Mayor Daley. Even that ordinance was defeated soon after, with Preckwinkle and 19 others voting to save it.

Labor and community organizations had been organizing against Walmart plans to locate stores in Chicago, opposing them for their anti-union policies and low wages. Preckwinkle and independents joined them to oppose plans for stores on the South and West Side. They succeeded in opposing the South Side Walmart, but Ald. Emma Mitts (37th Ward) succeeded in getting enough votes for a store in her West Side ward. Readers will remember that Mitts is leading the council fight against community groups to locate Rahm’s $95 million police academy in her ward.

The next year there was a vote people still remember, after a citywide campaign by labor and community groups — the large retailer living wage ordinance, targeting the “big box” stores like Walmart. The ordinance called for a $10/hr wage and $3/hr in benefits by 2010. Preckwinkle voted with the majority, and then voted for it when Mayor Daley successfully vetoed it. Preckwinkle also voted to notify hotel guests during a hotel workers strike — there had been a strike in 2003 and another was looming. Mayor Daley didn’t opposed that vote and it passed.

Voting record: 2007-2011

In this period, Simpson et al. see a “solid block” of independents forming, with the help of campaigning by labor and community organizations — with the unions pouring in over $2 million. Preckwinkle was one of the founders of the Progressive Caucus, which met regularly to strategize before council meetings. She had the 4th lowest score, at 60%. Only seven aldermen voted less than 70% of the time with the mayor.

From independent to “party boss”

Preckwinkle spent 19 years in a small group of independents in the City Council, with growing influence but without much power. “You know,” she said, “I’m not into being Don Quixote.” As county board president, she would be able to advance her agenda — she would be the county boss and her own. She brought about important reforms, but she may be remembered more for the patronage scandals now dominating the news.

Cook County has been notorious for corrupt hiring of family members and the politically connected. Preckwinkle had promised to “clean up county government by ending patronage and doing everything in our power to root out the waste and fraud that’s cost taxpayers millions of dollars.” She did, over her eight years in office, “reduce the size of the county workforce by 12 percent and convinced a federal judge that anti-patronage hiring oversight was no longer needed.”

But then Ald. Ed Burke, chair of the finance committee — the most powerful alderman and arguably the most corrupt and reactionary — was charged with attempted extortion, and the scandal spilled into Preckwinkle’s campaign. It turned out that a $10,000 campaign contribution was intended for Preckwinkle, then that she had received $116,000 from a fundraiser for her at Burke’s house, then that she had hired Burke’s son, Edward Burke Jr, for a job paying almost $100,000 — as a “training and exercise manager.” And she hired him when he was under investigation for sexual misconduct at the sheriff’s office. More recently, we learned that Preckwinkle spared Ed Burke Jr’s job when she laid off hundreds of county workers to cover a budget shortfall after her soda pop tax was repealed.

Could it get worse?

A few days ago a Tribune team published an investigation of county payroll records, which revealed a pattern of hiring and promotion of political workers, relatives of politicians and former government officials. There were “dozens more people with links to powerful Democratic politicians — including House Speaker Michael Madigan, former Mayor Richard M. Daley and Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White.

The Tribune article points out that “experts on patronage hiring” say the picture is more complicated. One of them quoted in the article is Michael Shakman, the lawyer responsible for the “Shakman Decrees” which were supposed to end corrupt patronage hiring practices. Shakman, in an earlier op-ed, praised Preckwinkle for her commitment to the reforms and detailed some of the ways they were implemented, an article worth reading for its description of the way patronage worked — Shakman called it “serfdom.” He told the Tribune that Preckwinkle ended abuses in the thousands of jobs where patronage isn’t allowed, but pointed out that there are 300 or so jobs which are “Shakman exempt” and “it’s fair for voters to consider whether Preckwinkle hired people with the proper skills or filled the spots to ‘pay political debts.’ “

Yet there was meritocratic hiring

With all attention to the growing patronage scandal, little attention has been giving to her meritocratic hiring. Dick Simpson, who endorses Lightfoot and is rumored to advise her campaign, credited Preckwinkle with beginning to “curb … patronage hiring and corrupt contracts.” His and Thomas Gradel’s devastating exposé, “Corrupt Illinois” (University of Illinois Press, 2015, p. 114), describes “Crook County’s” corrupt patronage hiring in stomach-turning detail. Preckwinkle inherited a county bureaucracy notorious for corrupt hiring and protected employees who did little or no work, but the budget crisis greeting her when she came into office allowed her to lay off many of the patronage hires.

One of Preckwinkle’s meritocratic hires was Ramanathan Raju as CEO of the Cook County Health and Hospitals System, who managed the county’s successful Medicaid expansion (see below). Another was Dr. Stephen Cina, who was hired in 2012 as chief medical examiner after bodies were found stacked up in the morgue’s cooler. Preckwinkle fired coroner Nancy Johnson, who may have been a victim of the corruption, and who blamed Preckwinkle for not providing the needed resources in her first two years as board president. She said that Preckwinkle’s predecessor, Todd Stroger, had staffed the office with patronage workers, even drug addicts, who couldn’t be fired because they were close to the Stroger family. The office had been understaffed and under-resourced, she claimed. Cina thought Johnson was a “victim” in the situation. However Preckwinkle may have shorted the department on resources before, after the scandal broke she spent heavily for modernization. Cina computerized record-keeping (they had actually been using paper ledgers), installed a new cooler for storing bodies, hired more staff, and regained full accreditation from the National Association of Medical Examiners, which had been lost in 2011.

Signal reforms: CountyCare

Preckwinkle is demonized with the label “party boss,” but she deserves recognition for the county’s two most significant progressive reforms of recent years — in health care and criminal justice.

First, health care. She brought the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) into the county, creating CountyCare. This expanded Medicaid to 320,000 uninsured, and she did this two years before its scheduled national rollout. Lives were saved. Talk to any primary care physician — or at least the ones accepting Medicaid patients — and you might get a sense of how many lives this changed. (If my art school friends are reading this, they may know some underemployed artists whose lives were changed.) The Medicaid expansion also brought significant new revenue into the county, since Stroger Hospital, which had the largest uninsured patient population and always operated at a loss, could now get federal funding to pay for treating the county’s poorest patients.

Criminal Justice Reform

In her first year in office, Preckwinkle began her campaign to reduce the overcrowding in Cook County Jail, the largest single-site jail in the country. “Most people in jail are guilty of being poor,” Preckwinkle told Sun-Times reporter Neil Steinberg. “A parade of black and brown persons … though for the most part Cook County is white.” A Tribune editorial praised her for taking the “responsibility” and the political risk while others (viz., Sheriff Tom Dart and Chief Justice Timothy Evans) were passing the buck. It’s a social justice issue, but, again, also a financial reform (it costs $143/day to house an inmate).

Preckwinkle attacked the cash bail system, which keeps low-risk defendants who have not been convicted of any crime languishing in jails for months or even years because they can’t afford the high cash bail recommended by prosecutors and set by judges. Preckwinkle made it happen — in 2013 she asked the Illinois Supreme Court for help in getting it done. The jail population began to decline soon after, with a dramatic decrease after September 2017, when Chief Judge Tim Evans implemented a new cash bail policy.

Two people at the center of decades of campaigning against police abuse, without endorsing her, commented recently on her role in criminal justice issues. One is Flint Taylor, co-founder of The People’s Law Office and one of the most prominent attorneys defending the wrongfully accused. Taylor mentions her a number of times for her supportive city council votes in his just released history of decades-long campaigns against police shootings and torture since the murder of Fred Hampton, “The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago” (Haymarket, 2019). In a podcast discussion, he said, “Toni Preckwinkle has been an ally of the movement for police accountability since the beginning, was tremendously strong with us around the fight against police torture, so I kind of have an affinity for her.” Taylor added that he wasn’t a “supporter, I don’t take positions, I just give you the facts.” (Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers, 3/22/19, at 5:30 minutes.)

Another key figure in campaigns for police accountability is investigative journalist Jamie Kalven, also on Hitting Left (3/15/19 at 43:00 minutes). Preckwinkle had given Kalven the autopsy report on Jason Van Dyke’s murder of Laquan McDonald. The report showed that McDonald had been shot 16 times, with shots in the back, exposing the official police story as a lie. “The first person in my hearing who ever uttered ’16 shots,’ the anthem of this moment of our history and chanted in the streets, was Preckwinkle. I don’t want to overplay it, and I think the ad she released earlier in the campaign did. She did enable me to go forward with my reporting, and that was a time when every other door was closed, complete stonewalling, nobody would answer calls in the police department, in the city. The activists can claim all credit for ousting [States Attorney] Anita Alvarez, but Toni can take some credit for installing Kim Foxx [as States Attorney].” (Kim Foxx had been Preckwinkle’s chief of staff, and when Black Lives Matter groups launched the “Bye Anita!” campaign to defeat Alvarez in the 2016 election, Preckwinkle supported Foxx.)

Kalven said he’s had “multiple occasions … where she’s demonstrated how committed she is on the criminal justice issues.” One was after he published a series in The Intercept on a team of Chicago Police Department tactical officers led by Sgt. Ronald Watts, who “were major players in the drug trade radiating out from public housing developments on Chicago’s South Side” — they planted drugs and framed people, and even are rumored to have killed non-cooperating drug dealers. Kalven said there were over 60 exonerations of people wrongfully convicted by the Watts gang. Two whistleblowers alleged that deputy superintendent Ernest Brown exposed their involvement in the internal investigation, which led to retaliation against them by other CPD brass. Preckwinkle had hired Brown as executive director of Homeland Security for the county.

Kalven says Preckwinkle had read the series and called him into her office, where they talked about the series for about an hour with her senior staff. Kalven told her more about Brown. “She called me next day on her cell phone,” Kalven said, “and informed me she called Brown in, confronted him with the article, was dissatisfied with his response, fired him and had him escorted out of the building. That’s actually what police accountability might look like. There’s more predictive value in that than in the Laquan McDonald story.”

These stories by Flint Taylor and Jamie Kalven are a reminder that Preckwinkle has a relationship to activists and the organized progressive movement. The endorsement by key progressive unions, the Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU Healthcare II, matters all the more because we see no dialogue with or commitment to progressive organizations from Lightfoot. Despite her credible commitment to police reform, Lightfoot has shown no love or respect for the activists in the Movement for Black Lives who have put police reform on the agenda. They, more than any elite saviors, are responsible for the firing of a police superintendent, the defeat of a states attorney, the likely end of Rahm’s career in politics, and, more surprising, the profound shift in Chicago politics which mainstreamed candidates’ platforms that are so progressive we would have thought them possible five years ago.

An inconclusive conclusion …

If only Rahm were running, or some Trump surrogate, we would know who to vote for. It’s easier to sort out the presidential candidates — do they support Medicare for All, or the Green New Deal? But with the mayoral candidates, there is no easy litmus test, and both candidates have similarly progressive platforms.

Another if only — if only the thousands of activists in Chicago came out en mass and marched us to the polls behind a sign for one of them — Lori, Toni, either one, I don’t care. Then maybe the election would mean something different, maybe even to the candidate. Come out, you rebel policers of police, come out you ungentle antigentrifiers and rent controllers, you homeless advocates and street people, you disability activists charge up your wheelchairs, Chicago Symphony strikers invade LaSalle Street playing the Internationale, all you rank-and-filers, close ranks and raise your fists, give us your signs and slogans and moneyless mania for change!

But those thousands are not just divided over the candidates, too many of them are scattered and atomized in not-for-profit community organizations whose tax exempt status and controlling donors keep them safely out of political campaigns.

What the candidates have done, as opposed to what they are saying they will do, may be a better predictor of how they would govern. But their records are not comparable — only Preckwinkle was an elected official with easily observable votes and executive decisions. Preckwinkle supporters may not be so disgusted by the smell of the machine, a cost of getting things done in Chicago. Or they can shrug off the negative campaigning when they think about their candidate’s two big achievements, when they weigh the lives that were saved by CountyCare and the county jail reform.

Lightfoot has the advantage of more obscure service. We have few details about her work as prosecutor and corporate lawyer; she has a somewhat mixed record in city office, but the mix is based on only a few known examples, some of which can be misleading. As Curtis Black wrote, a record “easy to distort.” You can criticize her rule-bound discretion on the Office of Professional Standards, Office of Emergency Management and Communication and the Police Board — she didn’t speak out against the corrupt and ineffectual bodies over which she presided, working within their limitations and adopting a judicial “objectivity” to gain trust as an unbiased adjudicator. Or you can shrug it off, say the Police Accountability Task Force Report shows how she has evolved, a professional who is untainted by corrupt dealings. Most important, her brand — change and ending machine corruption — is persuasive. (We remember what a winning slogan “hope and change” can be.)

But don’t we have to conclude that their records, quite simply, are not comparable, in a way that makes it hard to weigh one against the other? Your choice depends on which mean more to you in their disparate collection of wins and losses, strengths and weaknesses.

We can look at the 2016 elections and think, win or lose, the choice between the candidates was so clear, the decision so objectively made. But in this election, subjectivity reigns. When I began writing about the election, I assumed I would end with a decision, at least be able to offer readers some useful research. But now if I’ve reached any conclusion, I think it’s that we should embrace our subjectivity. Let’s give up on certainty, lower the volume of our arguments, because after the election, we’ll be on the same side again, marching in the streets together, joined in the same causes, fighting the same financial elites, with or without help from our new mayor.

—Paul Elitzik