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 Illinois politics. 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.")
Cruz was indeed innocent and was eventually pardoned by Republican Gov. George Ryan, who is now serving time in jail for a pay-to-play scheme from his time as Illinois secretary of state. It's hard to know which is worse—turning your office into a shakedown operation or letting an innocent man stay in prison and face execution. I think I'll choose the latter.
By the 1990s, Burris was becoming the Harold Stassen of Chicago politics. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor against Richard M. Daley in 1995 and for governor twice, the last time in the Democratic primary in 2002. Burris's presence in the 2002 race complicated the efforts of the best candidate, Paul Vallas, the Chicago schools superintendent (now running the schools in New Orleans), whose fear of flying kept him from traveling downstate enough. A third candidate, Chicago congressman Blagejevich, had no such reluctance to travel, and his big hair and wiseguy style didn't prevent him from making inroads with Democrats beyond Chicago. With Burris splitting the progressive Chicago vote with Vallas, Blagojevich won the primary, then was elected Illinois's first Democratic governor in nearly three decades. He was succeeded in Illinois's Fifth Congressional District by Rahm Emanuel.
State Sen. Barack Obama endorsed Burris that year even though Vallas was clearly the superior candidate. Obama had to. Two years earlier, in 2000, he had lost in a bid for Congress to former Black Panther Bobby Rush, who painted Obama as not being black enough. Endorsing Burris was essential to Obama maintaining his minimal street cred in the black community. Of course having lost to Rush, the assumption was that Obama's political career was over.
In 2004, the man who had dislodged Carol Moseley Braun from the Senate, Peter Fitzgerald (not to be confused with U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald), retired. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. considered running but declined in the face of well-financed white opposition. Moseley Braun was about to run for her old seat but decided on a quixotic campaign for president instead. That opened the door to the failed House candidate, Obama, to be the African-American in the race. His family and friends thought it was preposterous for him to seek a seat in the U.S. Senate when he couldn't even win one in the House, but Obama sensed that he could appeal to white voters. Even so, he was running third at best in the polls until shortly before the primary.
Thanks to a sex scandal that felled the front runner and an Axelrod ad featuring the daughter of the recently deceased Senator Simon, Obama won the primary. The Republicans couldn't field a candidate against him; even former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka declined. Finally, crackpot Alan Keyes was imported from Maryland. He lost to Obama by 40 points.
By this time it was clear that Blagojevich was a useless governor, prone to fighting with the legislature and anyone else who crossed his path, including the Democratic leader in the state legislature, Mike Madigan, and his daughter Lisa, who now held Burris's old job as attorney general.
But if his record was nonexistent, Blagojevich had cleverly used pay-to-play shakedowns of anyone doing business with the state to raise a huge campaign war chest that scared away strong candidates in 2006. Daley, Obama, Durbin and the rest of the Chicago political establishment knew that Blagojevich was no good but refused to help a smart challenger, Edwin Eisendrath, in the primary. Blagojevich won easily. The first stirrings of an impeachment inquiry began shortly thereafter.
The 2008 presidential campaign exposed Obama's tensions with Jesse Jackson Sr., who couldn't quite get over being eclipsed. The fact that his daughter Santita had been a bridesmaid in the Obamas' wedding didn't seem to make him feel any more familial toward the younger man. The Jacksons became entangled in tape. When Jesse Sr. was caught on TV tape saying he wanted to cut Obama's nuts off, he was rebuked by his own son, Jesse Jr., soon to be caught on surveillance tape in the Blagojevich scandal sounding as if his own ambition to go to the Senate had gotten the better of him.
I heard informed speculation that Fitzgerald arrested Blagojevich as early as he did so as to avoid having to further ensnare young Jackson in the case. He wanted Blago, not Jesse Jr. But this left the gathering of evidence incomplete. That might explain why the indictment of the governor has been delayed for weeks.
Roland Burris, meanwhile, seemed to fall off the edge of the earth. Like a small-time pharaoh, he built a mausoleum at a South Side cemetery with his accomplishments etched in marble and a huge panel reserved for more. When Obama was elected president in November, Burris began campaigning for the Senate seat but no one gave him a chance. Even had he wanted to, he had nothing to offer Blagojevich in return for the job. His $20,000 in campaign contributions was laughably small for the prize. The fact that Burris's business partner may have helped Illinois First Lady Patti Blagojevich get a part-time job was also small potatoes by the pay-to-play standards Blago established. Burris was a has-been until the governor cleverly turned him into a will-be.
The most memorable part of Blagojevich's press conference announcing his appointment of Burris was the hardly coincidental appearance of Obama's old nemesis, Bobby Rush. It was the one-time Black Panther, now battling cancer, who set last week's racial politics in motion. Rush said that for the Senate to reject Burris would be the equivalent of a "lynching."
Obama despises this kind of mau-mauing and he issued a written statement from Hawaii supporting efforts to block Burris's appointment. But he was lucky he was on vacation and not making public appearances. Not offering the statement in person, it was easier to back away from it a few days later.
Why did Illinois politicians at first hang so tough against Burris? After all, Blagojevich had not yet even been indicted, and it was clear that he had the legal authority to make the appointment. The answer goes back to the history of personal relationships. The connection these pols find most important, of course, is to Obama, who was hardly pleased about the Blago distraction. But Burris's decision to accept the governor's offer (Rep. Danny Davis, another longtime African-American politician, had declined) was also an insult to Durbin, who for years has been the best-liked politician in Illinois. It was Durbin who in 2006 did more than anyone else to convince Obama to run for president, a fact that Washington players might want to keep in mind when they deal with him.
Of course there were limits to how closely local Democrats would listen to Durbin, who had called shortly after Blagojevich's arrest for a special election to fill the vacancy left by Obama. With the possibility of a Republican being elected, that was a nonstarter for Illinois Democrats.
Chicago politicians hoped the whole Blago mess would be over by the Inauguration. We know how that worked out. Now, even as the road to seating Burris seems clearer, we'll be treated to a two-to-three week impeachment process in Springfield. That might be bad for Illinois but it's nice for the press. Sure beats covering credit-default swaps.
If nothing else, this bouffe—how about Blago's poetry reading?—might set to rest forever the legend of the Chicago Democratic machine. This time, the gears and pulleys were smashed beyond recognition. All that's left is the residue of rivalry and ambition that characterizes politics everywhere. Chicago, meet Washington.