The Chicago Crowd

I grew up in Chicago, where my mother was an elected official in Cook County. Although I don't live there anymore, I follow Chicago politicians and their fortunes the way my son (who has allegiances to Chicago without living there either) follows players on the Bears, Bulls and Cubs.

These Chicago political players now are becoming household names nationally, but there's a lot of misunderstanding about who they are and how they relate to each other. I figured it might help to sort out some of the tangled and incestuous recent history of Illinoispolitics. The soon-to-be-impeached governor and the soon-to-be sworn-in senator and president are all connected, even if they don't like to advertise it these days. And obscure elections of 30 years ago are suddenly relevant again. There's a symmetry to this family affair, which is more about local politics than race.

Consider Jesse White, the Illinois secretary of state. The failure of White to sign a certificate is the reason offered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Majority Whip Dick Durbin for why Roland Burris is not being seated in the Senate. This is a fig leaf, but also an accurate reflection of the attitude of Illinois politicians toward this matter. They are furious that their goofy governor is raining on their parade of their very own Barack Obama.

White is black, which is hardly irrelevant. Even though he isn't sure himself if his signature is necessary (the Illinois Supreme Court ruled Friday that it is not), he knows one thing: Rod Blagojevich taints everything he touches. And even though White and Burris have known each other for three decades, it was an easy call for him to side with Durbin on this one.

White has an unusual background. He was the inspirational coach of a local tumbling team, almost all black, that performed around town. I still remember the day, nearly 40 years ago, he showed up at the school I attended on Chicago's North Side. We didn't see poor kids very often and weren't sure what to expect. They turned out to be amazingly talented. When Jesse Jackson was wearing a dashiki and leading demonstrations, White was working in the trenches turning around the lives of young people through gymnastics.

Roland Burris wasn't demonstrating either, though he spent a year, 1977, as the chief financial officer of Operation PUSH, Reverend Jackson's organization. It's hard to know if PUSH's finances were as sketchy then as they were later, but probably so. Burris was a bank examiner who decided to go into politics. In 1978, with the help of a biracial coalition (which included my mother), Burris was elected comptroller of Illinois, the first African-American elected statewide in Illinois and one of the first in the country.

Burris's election would have been a bigger deal if he wasn't Caspar Milquetoast, so bland it was easy to forget he was in the room. This was partly born of necessity. Like Jackie Robinson in baseball, he had to be on his best behavior at all times if he had any hopes of getting elected in a largely white state.

In office, he wasn't bad, but he wasn't good, either. When he ran in the 1984 Democratic primary for Senate, he was beaten soundly by bowtied Rep. Paul Simon, one of the shining lights of postwar liberalism. Shortly after the primary, a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune named David Axelrod quit the paper to work for Simon, who won the Senate seat that fall and ran unsuccessfully for president in 1988 (Axelrod was his main aide) against Jackson among others.

After 12 years as comptroller, Burris was elected Illinois attorney general, where he supervised hundreds of lawyers and again seemed to leave little mark. But sometimes being a passive placeholder can bring disastrous results. Evidence surfaced that a 19-year-old death-row inmate named Rolando Cruz was convicted based on scanty evidence; another man had convincingly confessed. When Burris ignored the new evidence, Assistant Attorney General Mary Brigid Kenney quit in protest, saying "I had been asked to help execute an innocent man." (Burris at the time said: "It is not for me to place my judgment over a jury, regardless of what I think.")