The Daley Show
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Letter from CHicagO THE Daley Show Dynastic rule in Obama’s political birthplace. by evan osnos efore Barack Obama considered run- secretary, Jacquelyn Heard, warns him ning for the U.S. Senate or the Presi- when he might get a question about a story. dency,B he wanted to be the mayor of Chi- One morning last summer, Heard was sit- cago, a city so riven by race that the Wall ting in the front seat of Daley’s town car Street Journal called it Beirut on the Lake. when she turned to capture his attention. Obama left for Harvard Law School, where “Mayor, one of the things in the paper he confided to friends his desire to occupy today is about the C.T.A.”—the Chicago City Hall, but by the time he returned Transit Authority—“voting to extend the from Cambridge, in 1991, something im- red, orange, yellow, and blue lines. The portant had happened: Richard M. Daley question is, Why are we doing that?” had been elected mayor of Chicago. “Well, you need vision,” Daley said, but Despite a famous name, Daley was he was more interested in peering out his not an obvious political powerhouse. In window to scan for run-down buildings his first run for mayor, in 1983, his cam- and dirty lots. He held a manila folder in paign hired Irving J. Rein, a communica- his lap, and whenever he saw something tions professor at Northwestern Univer- he didn’t like he noted the location in large sity, to hone the candidate’s delivery. Rein loopy script. That fixation on details has concluded, as he wrote later, that Daley earned him praise as a leader with granu- had a “tendency to misstate the obvious, lar knowledge of his domain, as well as invent words never imagined by linguis- occasional ribbing from rivals. Edward tic researchers, introduce irrelevant mate- (Fast Eddie) Vrdolyak, a former alderman rial, and demonstrate anger at seemingly and longtime opponent, years ago nick- uneventful moments.” Daley lost; the named him Mayor Rain Man. At sixty- Chicago columnist Mike Royko noted seven, Daley looks like a healthier version that he had “all the charisma of a plate of of his father: short, ruddy, and jowly, de- corned beef and cabbage.” spite regular gym visits and a breakfast Chicago, however, forgives syntax; regimen of grimly nutritious shakes. Daley’s father, Richard J. Daley, who died The car pulled up to the Destiny Wor- in 1976, was elected six times, despite the ship Center, a storefront church in the habit of musing about riding a “tantrum Austin neighborhood, a rough patch of bike” and of explaining, as he did when Chicago’s West Side. Daley was there to his police attacked protesters at the 1968 promote his annual Gun Turn-In, a ritual Democratic National Convention, that in which citizens receive gift cards of ten, “the policeman is there to preserve disor- fifty, or a hundred dollars for turning in il- der.” The younger Daley was elected in legal firearms, no questions asked. The 1989, and then reëlected five more times, church was packed with reporters and Mayor Richard M. Daley, at Manny’s. “Rich with breathtaking dominance. Unseat- cameramen, who were standing around a ing him, as the Obama biographer David table holding handguns, an AK-47, and Chicago was paralyzed by infighting and Mendell put it, looks “akin to dethroning ammunition. Daley joined a lineup of mismanagement. In 1987, William Ben- a king.” A Daley has ruled Chicago for local politicians and ministers, almost all nett, the Secretary of Education, said that forty-two of the past fifty-five years. The black or Hispanic, and Alderman Emma Chicago had the worst school system in dynasty endures in part because many Mitts introduced him as “the finest mayor the country—“an education meltdown.” voters remember what the city was like in the world.” The center of the city was a desiccating without them: in the thirteen years be- In the city that Martin Luther King, museum of masterpieces by Mies van der tween Daley I and Daley II, Chicago Jr., called the Birmingham of the North, Rohe and Louis Sullivan. Infant mortal- churned through five mayors. Daley has presided for two decades dur- ity in remote neighborhoods was com- Daley no longer reads the local pa- ing which race has receded, if not into the parable to levels in the Third World. pers—“I don’t take their guff, and they background, then into the din of city pol- In the years that followed, Detroit, don’t like that,” he told me—so his press itics. He took office at a moment when Cleveland, and other former industrial 38 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 8, 2010 TNY—2010_03_08—PAGE 38—133SC.—LIVE art—r 19383—extremelY CRITICAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED throughout the entire press run—please pull kodak proof for press color guidance Daley is a tough son of a bitch,” one politician says. “Not in a bad way but in a very good way.” Photograph by Martin Schoeller. powers continued to wither, but Chicago and L2O, where the chefs Grant Achatz where the Mayor’s father sent police to did not. It has grown in population, in- and Laurent Gras are among America’s arrest antiwar and civil-rights protesters, come, and diversity; it has added more jobs highest priests of the chemically complex Barack Obama celebrated the election since 1993 than Los Angeles and Boston food known as molecular gastronomy. that had made him America’s first Presi- combined. Downtown luxury condos and Chicago is a post-industrial capital of inno- dent from Chicago. He had campaigned lofts have replaced old warehouses and vation from house music to fashion—the with Daley’s endorsement, and with the office blocks. New trees and flower beds Milan of the Midwest, as the Washington benefit of fund-raising by Daley’s brother line the sidewalks and sprout from the roofs Post put it last year. Diverse neighborhoods Bill, a lawyer and Democratic power bro- of high-rises. (Chicago has significantly are so flush with new immigrants that ker who was Secretary of Commerce in more green roofs than any other city in Mexican politicians running for office jour- the Clinton Administration, and who America.) Diners and pizza joints have ney all the way to Chicago to campaign. became a member of Obama’s transition given way to daring restaurants like Alinea In November, 2008, in the same park team. In the White House, Obama is sur- THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 8, 2010 39 TNY—2010_03_08—PAGE 39—133SC.—LIVE art—r19383—extremelY CRITICAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED throughout the entire press run—please pull kodak proof for press color guidance rounded by people connected to Daley’s isolated in what they can do. Everything Turn-In, a secretary leaned in to say that City Hall: Michelle Obama once worked is run by formulas and rules and regula- Bloomberg was on the phone. Daley for Daley as a planning official; Valerie tions. They have no discretion!” picked up and boomed, “Mike, how are Jarrett, a special adviser to the President ya?” Bloomberg was arranging an event and an Obama-family confidante, rose hen Michael Bloomberg be- to promote volunteerism, and he wanted through senior posts in the Daley City came mayor of New York, in Daley to come to New York for the an- Hall, including deputy chief of staff, 2002,W he made a point of moving his nouncement. “Yeah, I’m all for it. When’s planning commissioner, and head of the desk out into a bullpen shared by his it gonna be?” Daley said, before drifting transit board; David Axelrod, Obama’s staff, in order to promote exchange. into family talk. Bloomberg and Daley, Daley has said that, after his father died, “I had to seek not my own identity, maybe, but the things I wanted to take on personally.” chief campaign strategist and now a se- Daley’s office is more like a bunker. despite radically different biographies, are nior White House adviser, was for nearly Visitors to the fifth floor of City Hall united by a fervent love of unobstructed twenty years the Mayor’s political consul- must navigate a series of waiting rooms and authority. “Richie Daley’s philosophy, tant; Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, secretaries before being ushered into the I’ve always thought, is ‘Beg for forgive- was in charge of fund-raising for Daley’s Mayor’s office, a baronial sanctum with ness, not for permission,’ ” Bloomberg first successful run for mayor. wing-back chairs and the vast mahogany told me recently. “He goes and does it.” Moreover, the deeper ranks of the Ad- desk used by his father. The Mayor is rarely In one instance, Daley got sick of de- ministration are as rife with Chicagoans as there. He prefers a windowless unmarked bating the fate of Meigs Field, a small those of its predecessor were with Tex- conference room next door, at the center of waterfront airport that he wanted to turn ans. The morning after Obama’s election, which is a giant table laden with books, into a park. Preservationists and pilots Daley permitted himself a flicker of satis- magazines, and newspapers. His tastes are had filed a suit to keep it open. Late one faction. “It was a homecoming,” he said. erratic: he cites the Financial Times and night in March, 2003, Daley sent bull- “It was a baptism. It was a bar mitzvah.” Scientific American in equal measure.