Ego brought down to Earth – Stroger to seek water district, not county president

Todd Stroger, the one-time state legislator and alderman who will forevermore be remembered for his stint as Cook County Board president and his effort to raise the county portion of the sales tax, will go about thinking to himself that he could have been re-elected to that post – IF ONLY.

STROGER: Water dist., sted of president

Stroger on Facebook this weekend was boasting of the Sunday night campaign event where his nominating petition circulators would gather together the results of their work.

THAT WOULD ALLOW Stroger himself (or more likely some flunk on his behalf) to file the petitions Monday to get him a place on the ballot for county board president come the March 20 Democratic primary.

But instead, Stroger on Monday decided to instead file the nominating petitions he had originally collected to get himself on the ballot for a seat on the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.

Which under typical circumstances could be considered a government post of some significance – one that would allow Stroger to go around thinking of himself as a government official. Rather than a political has-been – which is what he’s been in recent years.

Stroger aides were honest in admitting he was unable to get enough signatures of support to get himself a place on the ballot with just over 8,200 valid signatures of support. There wasn’t enough time, since he only began his county board president talk just over a week ago.

WHEREAS HE HAD been using the past several months to gather signatures for the ballot slot for the water district.

If Stroger had gone ahead and sought the county board president post, there’s a very good chance that his petitions would have had the appearance of a rush job; as in sloppy and flawed.

It happens, particularly since the rules governing the process are so vague that who’s to say what will ultimately be determined to be a flawed signature.

PRECKWINKLE: One less primary challenger

Meaning it would have been likely that some supporter of incumbent Toni Preckwinkle would have filed a challenge to Stroger – and he likely would have suffered the ignominious embarrassment of being kicked off the ballot!

IT’S MORE LIKELY that his water district petitions are more legally sound and less likely to be challenged.

Although it’s always possible that someone motivated by spite will go ahead and challenge Stroger’s water district candidacy on the grounds that he had a hell of a lot of nerve to think he could run against Preckwinkle.

If that line of logic sounds incredibly petty and absurd, keep in mind we’re talking about electoral politics. It’s all about the egos for these people.

Including for Stroger, who probably has some resentment that voters dumped on him for his sales tax initiative that was meant to stabilize the county government finances – but instead caused resentment because the increase in the county portion of the sales tax caused the overall tax in Chicago to exceed 10 percent.

THEN AGAIN, THERE are others for whom Stroger’s real offense was being picked by his father, the late John Stroger, to succeed him as county board president.

Todd may have been a one-time state legislator and alderman, but the people who were somehow willing to accept all the generations of Daleys, Madigans, Cullertons, Lipinskis, etc., who have been a part of the local government scene were somehow unable to accept it when the Stroger family tried to follow suit.

John Stroger must settle for county hospital named in his honor, rather than being a political family like the Daleys

I don’t doubt that a Stroger candidacy for Cook County Board president would have drawn a certain amount of negative energy. He would have been a long-shot to win, regardless of what he thinks about Preckwinkle and her ‘pop tax’ effort to balance the county budget.

Although I wonder if his couple of weeks as a Preckwinkle challenger will merely elevate Todd’s profile to the point where the people who eight years ago chanted “Don’t Vote for the Son” as their mantra will suddenly take an interest in the water district race to ensure he doesn’t win that seat either.

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Fire the family?!? Those are ‘fighting words’ to some Chicago politicos

“If a man can’t put his arms around his sons and help them, then what’s the world coming to?” – Richard J. Daley

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DALEY: You know what he said!



Of course, there was another part of that exchange involving Richard Joseph and his attempt toward the end of his mayoral stint to direct some city insurance business to a firm run by the one son of his who didn’t get into electoral politics.

And I’m sure that part, which we’re all thinking about in our heads, is what Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios wishes he could spout off these days without creating a further stink.

TIMES HAVE CHANGED. We have come a long way since those early 1970s days when Mayor Daley, the first, questioned why he couldn’t use his government influence to benefit his family.

After all, if the insurance firm being developed back then by his son, Michael, had provided legitimate service to the city government, then where’s the problem? Somebody had to benefit financially from getting the city business?

Why not keep it within his family, within people he believes he can trust? I’m sure that back then, there were some people who would have accepted that line of logic. For all I know, there may still be a couple.

But I’ll bet that even those couple of people are disgusted with Berrios these days, who is getting national attention after the Associated Press picked up on a Chicago Sun-Times story about Berrios’ hiring practices.

FOR A COOK County ethics board has found that not only were a couple of Berrios hires within his office ethics violations, they may well also be fiduciary violations as well. Meaning the county may be losing money because of these deals.

BERRIOS: Not the whole problem

For the record, that ethics board wants Berrios to fire his son, Joey, and his sister, Carmen. The former is a residential assistant, while the latter is director of taxpayer services.

Joe Berrios, the former county Board of Review member who in 2010 got elected to the post of Cook County assessor, has become the face of political nepotism in Chicago.

Which really is a joke, when you think about it. In a city where families named “Daley,” “Cullerton,” “Madigan,” “Stroger” and “Jackson” (just to name a few, there are many more) have developed political influence that spans generations, it’s la familia Berrios that is “the problem.”

WHICH IS WHY I really wonder if Berrios wishes he could channel Richard J. Daley in responding to the Cook County ethics board request. He really is just doing things the way they have long been done.

The “Chicago Way,” if you want to be flippant about it, with your lamest attempt at a Sean Connery Scottish accent.

Personally, I think some of the Berrios babble is a bit much, particularly since none of us should be the least bit shocked he would operate in such a manner. This was the man who won his 2010 campaign despite the best efforts of the goo-goo element of our society to demonize him as a political hack.

Should we really be surprised to learn that he would see his election as an upholding, of sorts, by the voters of his way of doing things? He probably figures that if voters really cared about such things, we’d have Assessor Forrest Claypool these days.

I JUST CAN’T be “shocked, shocked” to learn that nepotism is taking place within the assessor’s office. Anybody who is shocked is seriously naïve, or else faking indignation to cover up some other hang-up.

Yes, a part of me wonders if some people think that nepotism is acceptable if the name is “Daley,” but not someone who appears much more ethnic. Although I don’t believe that’s the only (or even dominant) factor at work here.

I am curious to see how this situation plays out. Because I expect an act of defiance on the part of papa Joe before he ultimately has to kick his son and sister off their current spots on the payroll.

Only, in all likelihood, to have them turn up on someone else’s part of the payroll – someone who owed Joe a favor. That, if anything, is the real “Chicago Way” of doing things!

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, I voted for Joe Berrios in that last election cycle. I stand by my line of reasoning.

Lipinski really among 20 most corrupt?

I’m starting to wonder if Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., is going to become some sort of poster child for political nepotism. No matter what he does with his career as an elective officeholder, he’s going to be singled out as a hack for who his daddy is.

I’m inclined to think that the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is engaging in political hyperbole when it releases a list this week declaring 20 members of Congress to be the “Most Corrupt” – and includes Lipinski on the list.

FOR WHAT IT’S worth, Lipinski is the only Chicago-area politico who made the good government group’s list – which includes some political heavy-hitters such as William Jefferson, D-La.; Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; and Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.

By comparison, Lipinski is a fairly anonymous part of the Washington set, although I knew a political science professor who always claimed that the quietest political people were usually the most corrupt – their meekness was an attempt to draw as little attention as possible to themselves.

Yet for Lipinski, he’s going to be the political person who can never truly be anonymous because there are the people who will always be offended at the way in which he gained elective office.

His father, former Chicago alderman and later Rep. William Lipinski, garnered a local reputation in Congress as a mass transportation expert who used his influence to get much federal aid for the Chicago Transit Authority and other mass transit programs.

YET WHEN HE decided to retire from electoral office, he waited until after he had already won a primary election. That allowed him to orchestrate the proceedings so that his son (then a political science professor at a Tennessee college) could move back to the Chicago suburbs (Western Springs, to be exact) and take the seat in Congress.

He got elected, and has managed to win re-election in the past couple of election cycles on his own, which means he likely has built up the kind of seniority (and the perks that go with incumbency) that he can no longer seriously be challenged at the voting booth – unless he does something incredibly stupid.

That is what is behind the activist group’s inclusion of Lipinski on their “most corrupt” list – they’re trying to create the perception of “something stupid” that could be used as an issue in future elections. Not this one – I don’t know of anyone who seriously thinks Republican challenger Art Jones (a one-time would-be Nazi sympathizer who now calls himself a “white racialist”) can win come Nov. 4.

For the record, the good government types are offended by Lipinski’s hiring of Jerry Hurckes to be his chief of staff.

IN ALL LIKELIHOOD, Hurckes got the job because he had also worked for the elder Lipinski as the retired member of Congress’ district director. Which means he knew the home district on the Southwest Side and surrounding suburbs, and Dan was likely comfortable with him.

Yet Hurckes is also a member of the village board in southwest suburban Oak Lawn, and he has made statements about how his hometown does not need a lobbyist because he can act as a “de facto lobbyist.”

Kind of a stupid boast for Hurckes to make, and it drags Lipinski into the muck of good government types who would like to believe in an idealized civics textbook approach to government – possibly similar to what Dan Lipinski once taught his students at the University of Tennessee.

In a prepared statement, the activist group implies that Dan Lipinski is deliberately paying Hurckes a salary at a specific level to avoid having to comply with government disclosure rules.

“GIVEN THAT MR. Hurckes is the most highly paid staff member in Rep. Lipinski’s office, that his position is a full-time job and is generally considered a ‘senior staff’ position, the fact that Mr. Hurckes’ salary is just under the figure that would make him ‘senior staff’ suggests that Rep. Lipinski is paying Mr. Hurckes a slary under this limit precisely so that he can earn a substantial outside income,” the group wrote.

They would love it if a House Ethics committee were to investigate the congressman.

What is more likely is that this issue will continue to come up in future campaigns, out of some hope that it will eventually stick.

I don’t know that it will. The Lipinski name seems to carry some clout in those South Side neighborhoods where jet noise from Midway International Airport is a reality of daily life. In fact, anyone who has ever read the Mike Royko book about Richard J. Daley entitled "Boss" remembers the portion of all the "begats" by which dozens of families were multi-generational Chicago politics. So this trend is not limited to the one congressional district.

IT EVEN SEEMS to overcome the fact that Lipinski himself has little influence yet in D.C. circles. One study by the Roll Call newspaper that covers Congress ranks Lipinski as the 227th most significant Democrat in the House of Representatives, and the 359th most significant member overall).

That’s pretty low.

But this also comes at a time when people seem to be thinking more and more about what had become an accepted political practice in Chicago and Illinois – passing along political influence to one’s children, creating many multi-generational families that have been involved in electoral politics.

Illinois House Minority Leader Tom Cross, R-Oswego, and his Republican allies are pushing for a measure in Springfield that would require special primary elections if someone retires or drops off the ballot for other reasons. Currently, party committeemen in the district back home get to pick the replacement, and they have often picked the political child.

COULD DAN LIPINSKI become the guy who takes the ultimate hit from people who are determined to keep the kids of politicos from having any kind of career in public life? It would be ironic if his case gets cited by proponents of this measure (which is a long-shot to go anywhere, since Republicans currently are irrelevant to the Statehouse Scene).

As a federal officeholder, he technically would not be impacted by a law designed for state and municipal officeholders.

But it would be sad if Lipinski, when the day comes that he is finished with electoral politics, never gets any more significant legacy than who his father was.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: I don’t know that I consider “corrupt” to be the most appropriate word to describe Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill. (http://www.crewsmostcorrupt.org/node/428), but this deal does raise questions.

How significant a figure (http://congress.org/congressorg/bio/id/151645) under the Capitol dome does Lipinski cut? And where (http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00027239) does he get his campaign finances from?

Although the Illinois General Assembly may consider measures to make it harder for retiring political people (http://www.wbez.org/Content.aspx?audioID=28784) to pass along their offices to relatives, that would not have impacted Lipinski since he is a federal office holder.