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

National Review, Sept 1, 2008 by David Freddoso

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."