Soldier for Stroger: the candidate of change helped keep Chicago politics dirty.

WHAT is it like to work for the government of Cook County, Ill.? Simple. If you have the right political connections, you get the job. You get the raise. You get the promotion. You don't need to be qualified. You might not even need an interview. The job might not even be advertised to the public.

If you don't have the political connections, you might get a job, but you don't get the raise. You get no promotions, but you do get plenty of extra work that falls outside your job description. At some point, you're probably assigned to train an unqualified political stooge, sent from "downtown" to take that supervisory job for which you applied and for which you were actually qualified.

This system has a clear purpose. It is the basic building block of a political machine. It allows politicians to maintain a standing army of pamphleteers, door-knockers, fundraisers, and campaign contributors at taxpayer expense. Such an army can make the difference in a close election. More important, it deters serious political opponents from even trying.

This is how the late John Stroger, former president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, allegedly kept himself in power until a stroke forced him to retire in 2006. Nothing has changed under his successor--his son, Todd Stroger--according to a 54-page federal report featuring numerous quotes from government employees' complaints. Cook County's federal compliance administrator, former circuit-court judge Julia Nowicki, received 240 such complaints in the first year following her court appointment to oversee county employment practices.

There's no reason the Stroger machine should still be in power. Not long ago, true reformers from both parties worked to bring it down in two different elections, and with Barack Obama's help might have succeeded either time. Instead, Obama ignored the effort in the primary election, and endorsed the machine candidate in the general.

MACHINE POLITICS

Nowicki's February 2008 report includes the charming story of one politically connected employee who just couldn't contain his excitement:

   On his first day in the department, he told a number of his new
   coworkers he was a "Soldier for Stroger" and he was going to become
   their supervisor.... One witness claims after working at the
   department for a total of five hours, the employee had already
   identified co-workers he intended to impose severe discipline upon
   when he became supervisor.

Sure enough, this individual was promoted to supervisor. Nowicki included dozens of similar complaints--Cook County employees' being pressured into political activities and being denied promotions when they refused. She speculated that more employees would come forward but for their fear of retaliation from the young Todd Stroger and his political allies, who took over in late 2006. She wrote that Todd Stroger's human-resources staff appeared to keep multiple personnel files in order to "cover" patronage employment. Stroger denounced Nowicki's report, but admitted later that he had not read it.

It's clear that, in this case, machine politics worked the way they were meant to. John Stroger faced only token opposition for a decade following his 1994 election. And the nonpartisan, Chicago-based Better Government Association provides the following numbers:

* Between early 1999 and the middle of 2005, Stroger raised approximately $2,413,246 in itemized contributions.

* At least $615,078.99 (25.5 percent) came from county contractors and their owners, agents, and employees.

* At least $624,543 (25.8 percent) came from Cook County employees who ultimately report to his office.

More than half of John Stroger's campaign cash was coming from people whose pockets he was lining with tax dollars. And with tax dollars serving him so well, it's no wonder Stroger liked high taxes. In his final two years in office alone, he endorsed a 2 percent hotel-motel tax, a 2 percent "prepared food and beverage" tax, a $200 "automatic amusement device" tax, increases of 8.5 percent and $1 per pack in the property and cigarette taxes respectively, and a tripling of court fees from $5 to $15. He also helped create "tax districts" to assess various special-purpose taxes.

His son Todd has kept the business going. He rammed a sales-tax increase through the Cook County Board of Commissioners; the hike went into effect in early July, and it gives Chicago the highest sales-tax rate of any major city in the United States (10.25 percent).

The younger Stroger often makes no attempt to hide hirings that most would find suspicious. Immediately upon inheriting his father's office, he promoted his cousin to county CFO and gave her a 12 percent pay hike the following month. He hired a friend's wife and a childhood friend to six-figure jobs. He hired an unqualified friend to a top health job--created just for this friend, apparently. When the newspapers discovered this last hire, the friend got demoted to a position that pays a mere $86,000 a year.

While handing out salaries to his buddies, Todd Stroger claimed the county lacked funds. He shut down several health clinics, laid off hundreds of nurses from the county hospital named after his father, and cut 43 prosecutors from the state attorney's office. In total, 1,700 county workers were laid off. Few, presumably, were "Soldiers for Stroger."

MARCH 2006: OBAMA'S SILENCE

As a presidential candidate, Obama has styled himself a reformer. But in early 2006 he knew exactly how the Stroger machine worked, was the most popular politician in Illinois, and had already become a star in the national Democratic party. Were there any link between style and substance--had Obama lifted even his pinkie finger in the name of a county government "we can believe in"-there would be no Stroger in power today. The problem is, had he endorsed the elder Stroger's serious challenger in the March 2006 Democratic primary, he might have lost the support of some of his most important allies and donors.

That reformist challenger, Forrest Claypool, was a progressive county commissioner. Local politicians of the Left and the Right, weary of corruption, lined up behind Claypool in the kind of post-partisanship Obama extols today. The other anti-Stroger candidate, Democratic commissioner Michael Quigley, dropped out of the race to present a unified reform campaign-he even became Claypool's campaign manager. He declared that Stroger "cynically abuses" the trust of poor people who depend on county government, by "wasting precious resources on the hangers-on-the contractors and the patronage workers."

Media outlets of all stripes joined in. The Chicago Tribune editorialized that "county government works for Stroger's pals, not for the people and businesses that pay taxes. And it certainly doesn't work for the impoverished people who have nowhere else to turn." Days before the primary election, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg framed the voters' choice this way:

   Isn't it enough that Stroger has turned Cook County government
   into a bog of waste, cronyism and incompetence? Isn't it enough
   that a solid, respectable, smart alternative exists? Claypool is a
   longtime reformer who has fought heroically to make Cook County
   better and more effective-if you are voting to try to improve the
   vital Cook County services, the vote is for Claypool. If you vote
   your race [Stroger was black], for any clown, no matter how ignored
   and betrayed you are year-in, year-out, then go for Stroger.

In the last two weeks, it appeared that Claypool might pull off a victory. But Stroger pulled out all the stops, with Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley and even Bill Clinton recording ads on his behalf. The machine organizations worked overtime to turn out the pro-Stroger vote.

Stroger won by seven percentage points--42,000 of 600,000 votes cast. Black voters carried Stroger, which is why it's so important that Claypool's supporters didn't include Barack Obama: By withholding his endorsement, Obama probably saved the machine.

It is no mystery why he did so. A Claypool endorsement would have alienated Emil Jones Jr., the machine politician who claims, not inaccurately, to have "made" Obama a U.S. senator in the 2004 election. It would have angered Mayor Daley, who controls Chicago's political money (and whose machine puts Stroger's to shame). It might have upset Obama's close friend Tony Rezko--who had given Stroger nearly $150,000, who once served as Stroger's finance chairman, and who had business ties to the Stroger family. It would have slighted every alderman, county commissioner, and ward boss who had door-knockers and small donors and family members on the county payroll.

Claypool has been a good sport about his loss, and now supports Obama's presidential campaign. But earlier this year, he became a bit despondent when asked why Obama had failed to help him in 2006. "I don't know," he told television journalist Jeff Berkowitz. "I mean, look, politics is complex. People have multiple relationships and they do the things they have to do and believe in."

Barack Obama has never done or even said anything to help solve Chicago's problem. He cannot do so because he has "multiple relationships"; his political allies-not just the Strogers, but nearly all of the politicians upon whom he depends for support--are Chicago's problem.

NOVEMBER 2006: LIES AND SCARE TACTICS 

There was still a chance, in the general election, to defeat the Strogers. But instead of keeping silent as he had in the primaries, Obama supported the machine.

The elder Stroger, who suffered his stroke just before winning the primary election, disappeared from public view for three full months. He would eventually drop off the ballot, but not before the June 26 deadline for independent candidates to file. That way, he could execute a bait-and-switch without letting the ensuing controversy create an opening for a credible third-party opponent. John Stroger would exit the race, and the friendly Cook County Democratic party would choose his son Todd to take his place. Reform-minded Democrats--including U.S. Rep. Danny Davis--tried to prevent this shady electoral stunt, but to no avail. The fix was in.

Progressive Chicagoans were not happy with this outcome. Conservatives were fuming. Todd Stroger was an underachieving alderman, criticized by one liberal columnist as an "unimaginative legislative drone." Claypool said he would not vote for Todd Stroger. Several Democrats--including Frank Coconate, chairman of the Northwest Side Democratic Organization--went so far as to endorse the Republican candidate (former Democrat Tony Peraica).

The press actually thought Peraica had a chance, even though Cook County had not had a Republican board president in 36 years. Once again, liberals and conservatives came together, this time behind a Republican. But Obama endorsed the young Stroger in a widely publicized letter to supporters, co-signed by Illinois's senior senator, Dick Durbin. They wrote:

   Today we write to urge your attention to one race in particular.
   Our friend, Todd Stroger, former state representative and alderman,
   is candidate for president of the Cook County Board. Please
   consider voting for Todd.... Todd is a good progressive
   Democrat, who will bring those values and sensibilities to the job.

The endorsement disgusted Chicago liberals. Chicago Tribune commentator Eric Zorn wrote of it:

   Obama and Durbin take an epistolary dive into the mud and start
   yammering in the letter about Republican challenger Tony Peraica's
   conservative stance on social issues that almost never come before
   the County Board. In particular, they raise the fear that Peraica
   would unilaterally put a halt to abortions at county hospitals,
   even though Peraica has repeatedly pledged that he will not.

      "We've come too far for that," says the letter.

      And Obama has come too far as an inspiring new breed of
   politician on the national scene to muck around in local politics,
   endorsing machine hack candidates and substituting party for
   principle. Or so you'd imagine.

Welcome to the "new politics." Obama put partisanship ahead of reform, using what both liberals and conservatives recognized as lies and scare tactics. Stroger defeated his opponent in an unusually close general election in November 2006.

Todd Stroger is not the only questionable candidate Obama has endorsed. In the same primary election in which he failed to endorse Forrest Claypool, Obama supported a candidate for state treasurer who, through his family bank, had been personally involved in loans to organized-crime figures--and who misled the press when first asked about it. The following year, Obama would endorse an alderman who once allegedly pulled a gun on her colleagues during a contentious ward-redistricting hearing. (The former candidate won, the latter lost.)

In 2007, Obama endorsed Mayor Daley for reelection--barely two months after three of Daley's top aides received federal prison sentences for fraud in connection with running the City Hall patronage machine, and barely a year after dozens of city contractors and employees had been convicted of trading city contracts for campaign contributions and bribes. These included high-ranking Daley aides and appointees.

Barack Obama's efforts to preserve the Windy City's crooked machine politics are typical of the approach he has taken toward reform throughout his service in both Springfield and Washington. He talks of change, but he simultaneously uses the existing corrupt system to get ahead. It is a far cry from the message that has so impressed his supporters.

RELATED ARTICLE: Present but not accounted for.

IN The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama bemoaned the injustice one faced as a state legislator in a chamber controlled by the other party: "You must vote yes or no on whatever bill comes up, with the knowledge that it's unlikely to be a compromise that either you or your supporters consider fair and or just."

Actually, there's that third option, voting "present"--which accounted for about one of every 31 votes in Obama's legislative career, or 3.2 percent. And while Obama can explain some of his 129 "present" votes in eight years in the Illinois Senate, his frequent use of that third option stands out, even by the usual low standard of politicians trying to dodge tough decisions and cover their backs.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

On seven abortion votes, Obama's explanation was that groups like Planned Parenthood wanted to get as many legislators as possible voting "present." The idea was--this is the Chicago Tribune's paraphrase of the organization's top Illinois lobbyist--to make the votes "look less like a hedge or a cop-out and more like a constitutional concern or other high-minded qualm." (Passing legislation in the Illinois senate takes affirmative votes; all of Obama's "presents" were effectively another way of saying no.) That's what Obama did on two separate attempts to ban partial-birth abortion, two parental-notification abortion bills, and three bills to protect a child if it survived a failed abortion. But Obama's explanation on the last--that it did not include a provision stating the bill was not meant to influence the legal standing of a fetus before birth one way or another--was simply untrue; the bill had been amended to include the exact provision he claimed was necessary.

Beyond that, some of Obama's "present" votes were on pretty straightforward legislation: a bill to prohibit sex-related shops from opening within 1,000 feet of schools, day-care centers, or places of worship; a bill that required mandatory adult prosecution for firing a gun on or near school grounds; a bill to ban the introduction of new evidence to a judge in the sentencing phase of the trial, after a jury conviction; a bill to require teaching respect for others in schools.

A particularly interesting case is a bill that allowed certain victims of sexual crimes to petition judges to seal court records relating to their cases. Obama sponsored the legislation, but before it reached the floor, the Illinois Press Association argued the bill might violate the First Amendment. Thus, Obama voted "present" on a bill he sponsored--and later insisted in a debate with Hillary Clinton that "nobody has worked harder than me in the Illinois state legislature to make sure that victims of sexual abuse were dealt with."

Obama has justified several "present" votes by insisting the bill at hand was unconstitutional. But one might think that violation of the state's constitution would be sufficient justification to vote in the negative. (If that doesn't warrant a "no" vote, what does?)

Obama's fans, including Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan, have contended the "present" votes represent the "exact opposite" of "a lack of leadership." But then again, every other lawmaker in the chamber faced the difficult choice, and the vast majority of them found themselves deciding, "No, because while I support the bill's overall goals, I didn't like this provision" or "Yes, because while I don't like every part of this bill, I think its benefits outweigh the flaws." Only in Obama's case is a refusal to make a yes-or-no decision deemed a sign of leadership.

--JIM GERAGHTY

Mr. Freddoso's book The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate, from which this essay is adapted, is available from Regnery Publishing.