Rough Side of Chicago Shakes Race for City Hall
Gilda Walker was among those objecting to the candidacy of Rahm Emanuel.
By MONICA DAVEY
Published: January 30, 2011
CHICAGO — The most memorable scene from this city’s mayoral contest would have been inconceivable during Rahm Emanuel’s chapter at the White House, where the public imagery is painstakingly choreographed: Mr. Emanuel, seated in a windowless basement meeting room, being forced to respond under oath to hours of harsh, personal and sometimes bizarre questions from ordinary Chicagoans, some of whom clearly detested him.
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Emanuel, Back in the Race, Is Also Back on the Trail (January 29, 2011)
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Mr. Emanuel faced hours of questioning at a December hearing. The residency battle ended at the Illinois Supreme Court.
From top: Scott Olson/Getty Images; Pool photo by Chris Sweda; Paul Beaty/Associated Press
Mr. Emanuel’s opponents include Carol Moseley Braun, top, a former senator; Gery Chico, middle, a former chief of staff to the current mayor; and Miguel del Valle, a longtime city clerk.
The cameras rolled, and so did the questions. Why had Mr. Emanuel, with his income, needed to rent out his Chicago home while he worked in Washington? Was he involved in the 1993 siege near Waco, Tex.? When had he last attended a Chicago Cubs game? Had he taken part in blackmail or bribery?
As residents begin early voting on Monday for a Feb. 22 election that will set off the largest power shift in decades for the nation’s third-largest city, Mr. Emanuel holds a significant lead in the polls, has raised four times as much money as the next candidate and has survived a serious legal challenge to his qualifications to run (the cause, not long ago, for that basement interrogation). Some political analysts speak of the six-person mayoral race as all but over.
But despite speculation that Mr. Emanuel’s quest to be a local mayor would be far simpler than working as President Obama’s chief of staff in the fractured, partisan world of Washington, this has hardly been the effortless glide that some people, including some among Mr. Emanuel’s supporters, had envisioned.
Roadblocks have emerged. The legal fight to knock Mr. Emanuel off the ballot proved to be a larger threat and distraction than expected. And, with help from Mr. Emanuel’s opponents, the broader issue — not legal but psychic — lingers over whether Mr. Emanuel really has, as one former alderman frames it, “enough Chicagoness.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Emanuel faces unavoidable divisions — not the kind clearly marked with D’s and R’s as in Washington, but Chicago’s under-the-surface sort, tied to race, geography, old alliances and personal promises.
“Chicago is every bit as tough or tougher to succeed in than Washington,” said Representative Mike Quigley, a Democrat, who has traveled in both worlds, having worked as a top aldermanic aide at City Hall. On hearing colleagues in Congress scheming about how they might hurry some legislation through, Mr. Quigley, who represents Mr. Emanuel’s former Congressional district and has endorsed him for mayor, recalled thinking: “You want to play rough and tumble? Please. This is a pillow fight.”
By the time the Illinois Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Mr. Emanuel was indeed qualified to run for mayor, the question had been mulled by lawyers, election officials, judges and ordinary voters for months. That is, ever since Mr. Emanuel stepped down as White House chief of staff in October to run for the job Richard M. Daley, whose family has run this city for 42 of the past 55 years, was giving up.
Two dozen Chicagoans formally complained to election officials that Mr. Emanuel, who was born here and owns a home on the North Side, did not meet a state law requiring candidates for mayor to reside in the city for at least a year before Election Day.
When a panel of the Illinois Appellate Court essentially concurred and ordered Mr. Emanuel off the ballot last week, the decision sent shockwaves through his legal team, which had always believed that the residency question would not be a significant problem.
“Had it not been my case, I would have laughed out loud,” a member of the team said of the appellate ruling. Mr. Emanuel’s lawyers ended up pulling their first all-nighter in years — to write an appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court — and campaign aides raced the legal documents to Springfield, leaving Chicago before dawn to arrive when the court’s offices opened at 8:30.
The State Supreme Court ultimately concluded that intent was at the center of the legal notion of residency and that Mr. Emanuel had never given his up.
“The good news is now that we have the Supreme Court decision, it’s behind us,” said Mr. Emanuel, whose associates described him as relatively calm though edgy while the legal issues were in question. “Hopefully this will be the last question about it for all of us, including myself.”
But the journey left its scars. Mr. Emanuel’s temporary removal from the ballot sent the election into confusion and forced voters to take a real look at other top candidates — among them, Gery Chico, a former chief of staff to Mr. Daley; Carol Moseley Braun, who was the first female African-American in the United States Senate; and Miguel del Valle, a longtime city clerk.
Even before that, Rob Halpin, the man who rented Mr. Emanuel’s Chicago house and refused to end his lease when Mr. Emanuel returned, briefly weighed an unlikely mayoral bid of his own. More than anything, Mr. Halpin’s odd bid reminded Chicagoans of Mr. Emanuel’s residency limbo.
But the entire episode also had another effect on voters: it stirred up sympathy for Mr. Emanuel, who was 23 percentage points ahead of Ms. Braun, the closest competitor in a recent poll. His campaign operation has carried a national polish, complete with appearances from Jennifer Hudson, the singer; Andy Samberg, the actor who mocks Mr. Emanuel on “Saturday Night Live”; and on Sunday, Jeff Tweedy, the frontman for Wilco.
Beyond the legal question, though, some voters have doubts about Mr. Emanuel’s ties to the city. Ask people who live other places where Rahm Emanuel is from, and the answer is obvious. Ask people here, and the answers are far more complex, layered with personal histories and neighborhood biases. He often reminds voters that his grandfather came to Chicago from Europe and that his uncle was a Chicago police officer, but Mr. Emanuel has also spent a lot of time in Washington, and part of his youth, including high school, in a well-to-do northern suburb.
“From a Chicagoan’s perspective, there’s a great doubt over this,” said Dick Simpson, a political scientist. “It has been said that he doesn’t even know the sports teams.”
Voters like Peter Krivkovich, who runs a public relations and advertising firm, regularly liken Mr. Emanuel’s brash style to Mr. Daley’s. “This is a tough city, and the only way to do it is with old school muscle,” Mr. Krivkovich said.
But Mr. Daley’s bond with the city is legendary, setting a high bar for any successor. Mr. Emanuel’s opponents have seized on his large out-of-town campaign contributions (from people like the director Steven Spielberg and the producer David Geffen) and Washington endorsements (on Friday, the campaign issued a radio commercial featuring Mr. Obama’s words of praise as Mr. Emanuel left the White House).
“There’s an arrogance in the way that campaign’s operating,” Mr. Chico said recently. “And I don’t think that’s Chicago.”
Mr. Chico reminds locals that he hails from the Back of the Yards neighborhood, which sat in the shadow of the city’s stockyards, that he pitched baseballs in the city’s dirt alleys and that he grew up riding the Archer Avenue bus. “People feel a certain kinship when somebody has grown up like they have,” he said.
In a city where partisanship matters little (most in power are Democrats), political alliances are often complicated and opaque to the ordinary Chicagoan. Mr. Daley has not endorsed a candidate, though he has ties to Mr. Emanuel, who once worked for his mayoral campaign, and to Mr. Chico. Ed Burke, perhaps the city’s most powerful alderman on a City Council that is expected to shift significantly in this election, has been supportive of Mr. Chico.
Some black leaders, meanwhile, said it was important to unify around an African-American candidate, and they eventually landed on Ms. Braun, who now has supporters like Representative Danny K. Davis (a would-be candidate himself who dropped out to endorse her) and John W. Rogers Jr. (the founder of a money management firm and an ally of Mr. Obama).
Though ties to Mr. Obama have helped Mr. Emanuel among black voters, there have been awkward moments, too. And, in a city once dubbed “Beirut by the lake” for the City Council fights after the election of its first black mayor, Harold Washington, racial tension has sometimes loomed.
In January, former President Bill Clinton, whom Mr. Emanuel had worked for, traveled to Chicago to support Mr. Emanuel at a rally and fund-raiser. Ms. Braun urged him not to — suggesting that his strong relationship with black Chicagoans was at stake.
“The African-American community stood by Bill Clinton when he had his toughest times,” Ms. Braun said. “For him to parachute into Chicago to support a candidate who probably does not live here is just bad.”
And on Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Mr. Emanuel attended a breakfast — along with other candidates — at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, which was founded by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson. But Mr. Emanuel, who later explained that he had another commitment, one at a West Side school that all the candidates had been invited to, left before the Rainbow PUSH forum on education began, drawing scoffs from the other candidates and criticism from Mr. Jackson.
“I don’t feel good about it,” Mr. Jackson said, “but those are his choices and his priorities.”
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