It's been just one year since Brandon Johnson took office as Chicago's 57th mayor, delivering an exciting vision and set of promises. He made frequent reference to the “spirit of Chicago” and declared that “a brand new Chicago is before us. I can't wait to continue leading this city toward the rebirth of its spirit.” He told his inaugural audience: “I campaigned for change, you voted for change and I plan to deliver.” Change”.
In the months since, Johnson has had some modest accomplishments to speak of. Raise the minimum wage for tipped employees. He opened two new mental health clinics. He began taking steps to return to the network of neighborhood schools that his predecessors had despised or ignored.
But a different event casts a pall over the city's mayor's position and may define him for years to come: his embarrassing failure to implement “Bring Chicago Home,” a plan to raise $800 million in tax revenue to create a massive program to help the city's residents. Homeless people. The plan was defeated by 21,000 votes in a citywide referendum last March, but was blocked by opposition from the city's real estate establishment and most of Chicago's business community. Johnson says he'll try again, but “Bring Chicago Home” appears to be on hold for at least the near future.
Real estate interests spent more than $600,000 on an advertising campaign that included the slogan “The city wants more for your money” and focused on a new property transfer tax that would have brought in at least $100 million. They described the $800 million in proposed spending as a slush fund for Johnson's supporters, especially the teachers union, where he once worked.
Johnson's tax was supposed to target the wealthy, but his initiative failed in almost all of the city's working-class and middle-class neighborhoods. A group of progressive city councillors, most of whom supported Johnson's scheme, admitted after the defeat that “voters had real questions about whether or not they could trust the government to spend money the right way.” In one poll conducted after the vote, Johnson's approval rating in the city was 27.1 percent.
The details of Johnson's plan were new, but the idea was not. His predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, used the phrase “bring Chicago home” in expressing her commitments to a greatly improved Chicago. “For many years, they said Chicago was not ready to reform,” Lightfoot told her opening audience. “Okay, get ready, because the fix is here.”
But that wasn't the case, at least not her version. Lightfoot never tried to do anything like “Bring Chicago Home.” As her four-year term continued, she fought incessantly with almost every important precinct in the city, and by the end of the term she was so unpopular that she finished a distant third in the primary, failing to reach a runoff.
Why did Johnson and Lightfoot fail so miserably to reach consensus on what they wanted to do? What are the building blocks for mayoral success, in Chicago or any other large American city? These are questions that indicate a decline in a few decades in the history of the mayor's office.
The simplest answer is that the more the new mayor promises to deliver, the more likely he is to disappoint. Lightfoot and Johnson essentially pledged to create a new Chicago, but reshaping the city is not something any new mayor is likely to accomplish, especially in one four-year term.
It's an old truism of Chicago politics that the city gets two types of mayors: reformers and builders. Reformers promise extravagantly and face obstacles at almost every turn; Builders are easy on promises and focus on physical progress. This often embodied a greater or lesser degree of corruption, not necessarily involving the mayor personally but allowing job-based graft at lower levels of the political system.
(Chicago Tribune/TNS)
Going back to the Great Depression, Mayor Edward Kelly, who served from 1933 to 1947, presided over a city notorious for corruption; He also oversaw the construction of an extensive subway system that remains functional nearly a century later. Richard J. Daley (1955-1976) was clean-cut in person, but he tolerated graft in the building process that helped him revitalize downtown after decades of stagnation and create a housing boom near the urban core that became the engine of the city's late-century prosperity. His son, Richard M. Daley (1989–2011), did not talk much about reform but did bring about physical changes, exemplified by the restoration of the Chicago River and the popular Millennium Park, that made Chicago a truly thriving cosmopolitan city. All his term.
By contrast, two of the most determined change agents of the modern era, Martin Keneally (1947-1955) and Jane Byrne (1979-1983), were the least adept at effecting change. The most successful Harold Washington (1983-1987) is sometimes described as a reformer, but that is not entirely true. Washington's campaign slogan (“It's Our Turn”) reflects a desire to give the city's African-American community the share of traditional political influence they have been denied throughout Chicago's long history.
Perhaps the most important political move any Chicago mayor must make is to reach a compromise with the 50 members of the City Council. Chicago is often described as a city with a strong mayor — and in many ways it is — but an obstinate council can cause enormous problems for an ambitious mayor of any kind.
In the early 1900s, council members were ridiculed in the press as “gray wolves” – and Lincoln Stevens called them “grey wolves” – for the color of their hair and the greedy, greedy cunning of their nature – and fled. Their wards as personal fiefdoms, regardless of whether the mayor approved or not. Mayor Anton Cermak managed to tame the wolves with a newly made machine for two years before his death in a failed assassination attempt on Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. The mayor's control continued, with periodic interruptions, for the rest of the century.
Use Richard J. Daly uses patronage tools to keep the council under his control. He also removed some of the council's most egregious powers, such as the power to extort bribes to obtain passes for homeowners. Much of the patronage network disappeared when his son became mayor, but Richard M. Daley got most of what he wanted from the council, largely because he appointed a large percentage of its members to the vacant seats.
But mayors who failed to heed Daley's lessons suffered at the hands of councils. This includes the most ambitious and incompetent reformers, Keneally and Byrne. This also includes, in large part, Harold Washington, whose goals as the city's first black mayor were thwarted by a powerful bloc of council opponents—although the council's obstructive behavior became so offensive that Washington was able to win a second term.
Recently, Lightfoot's council relations have been so toxic that a second term as mayor was out of the question for her. Brandon Johnson has been more effective in dealing with council members, but he has failed, so far at least, to build a citywide constituency large enough to enact his most enthusiastic goal of significantly raising taxes to support programs for the homeless.
The first Mayor Daley was fond of offering some pithy advice to his political allies. Daly used to say: “Never get into any fights you can't win.” “Don't get into any fights you don't need to win.” Mayors who understood this were always the most successful.
Somewhat more famously, the late New York Governor Mario Cuomo offered some wisdom about the nature of modern statecraft at all levels of the American political system. “You're running a poetry campaign,” Cuomo declared. “You rule the prose.” This is easy to understand, but difficult to practice. The city's newly elected mayor is finding it difficult these days to resist the temptation to repeat his extravagant campaign promises and declare that a new day has dawned, and that the city will change dramatically under his leadership. But the beginning of a new mayoral system is the time to change course and start governing by prose. And Brandon Johnson, unlike some of his predecessors, seems to understand that. And he still has time to practice it.
