As many of you have seen here with the Blagojevich indictment, the Chicago political scene is a tangled web of back scratching, greased palms and Machiavellian maneuvers and counter maneuvers. Blago is just another in a long line of corrupt politicians emanating from the tenaciously held patronage leaden system that is the City of Chicago, County of Cook and State of Illinois.
Well, the story of the rise (if you want to call it that) and fall of one Mr. Rod Blagojevich must start out with his political and patronage mentor. His own father-in-law, Richard (Dick) Mell, alderman from the 33rd Ward of Chicago and a local politician who can trace his start back to the mid-70's at the end of Richard J. Daley's reign. Follow me below the fold to the sometimes sordid, always twisting and interrelated web that is known as the "Chicago Machine".
The story of Dick Mell and Rod Blagojevich started at what else, a fundraiser. Rod and his future wife, Patricia (Patti) Mell met at a fundraiser for her father in 1988. They were soon married in 1990. Dick Mell, who had been alderman for the 33rd Ward since 1975, was welcoming to his young son-in-law lawyer, Rod Blagojevich. No doubt Mell saw Rod as someone he could eventually push into a political role who would be beholden to him, another chip that he could use to expand his power base and bring patronage jobs to his communit. Rod, as ambitious as he was, seemed more than willing.
Rod's first big break came in 1992 when the existing state representative, Al Ronan, decided to run in the neighboring district after the 1991 redistricting. Ronan and Mell had a particularly interesting relationship up to that point. The following is an excerpt from a local lawyer's blog, Russ Stewart's, about Mell and Ronan's political rivalry/alliance. http://www.russstewart.com/...
Mell and Ronan had a long history, which evolved from bitter rivalry to tenuous accommodation. Ronan was a political organizer for Dan Walker in 1972, and he was rewarded with a high-level post in the state Department of Transportation. His job there was to develop a patronage army of workers that would help Walker, the so-called "reform governor" elected in 1972, get re-elected in 1976. But Ronan's ambition surpassed his loyalty, and instead of focusing on saving the embattled (and increasingly unpopular) Walker, he focused on advancing himself. In 1976, at the age of 28, he ran for state representative as an "independent" in the Democratic primary in the old 14th Illinois House district, which consisted mainly of the 33rd and 47th wards. The incumbents were John Brandt, the 33rd Ward Democratic committeeman, and Bruce Farley, out of Committeeman Ed Kelly's 47th Ward.
Mell, a manufacturer of steel springs and coils, had been a precinct captain for Brandt. In 1972 Mell broke with Brandt, who had been an alderman from 1939 to 1959, and ran for committeeman, losing narrowly. In 1975, after Brandt dumped 33rd Ward Alderman Rex Sande, the 35-year old Mell ran for the spot. Brandt backed John Galvin, his ward secretary, and the hard-campaigning, free-spending Mell, who was endorsed by Sande, upset him by 246 votes.
Mell then began plotting to unseat Brandt as committeeman in 1976. So, as they say, what goes around, comes around. Mell's loyalty to Brandt evaporated when ambition called. Does this sound familiar?
The 1976 primary was a Machiavellian wonder to behold. Mell was running against Brandt for committeeman, but his workers were backing Brandt for state representative because Mell didn't want Ronan to win, and Ronan's army of state workers were backing Brandt for committeeman because Ronan didn't want Mell to win. Under the old multi-member district system, each district elected three state representatives, and each party nominated two candidates. Due to the efforts of Mell and Kelly, Farley got 33,070 votes, Brandt got 27,940 votes, and Ronan was the loser with 25,319. And Mell, of course, as the sitting alderman, easily beat Brandt for committeeman.
So the stage was set for a titanic battle in 1978 between Mell and Ronan to replace Brandt, who clearly was washed up. Mell was a Daley-Bilandic Administration loyalist who was getting city jobs and building a potent ward organization, and he wanted a loyal state representative from his ward. With Walker's loss to Republican Jim Thompson, Ronan's power base at IDOT diminished. But then the potential combatants stunned the political world by making a deal. Erstwhile independent Ronan joined Mell's 33rd Ward organization, and he became the Mell-backed candidate for Brandt's House seat in 1978.
This alliance was maintained rather uneasily, possibly due to Mell's fear that Ronan's influence was becoming bigger and that he may want to unseat Mell as Alderman or committeeman, until 1992 when Ronan decided to run in the neighboring state representative district, the 34th district. Ronan, at that point, was eyeing a statewide run for Secretary of State against incumbent George Ryan. Yes, the same George Ryan, former governor and present felon. Ronan ended up losing, with a little help from our friend Dick Mell, to a woman, Nancy Kaszak, whose main claim to fame at that point was she was one of the neighborhood leaders against night games at Wrigley Field in the mid to late 80's. As a side note, Al Ronan later became one of George Ryan's major fundraisers and was also convicted shortly after George Ryan on mail fraud charges related to bid rigging at McCormick Place, the main convention center in Chicago.
Much of the 33rd ward was now part a different distict, the 33rd state district, which was held by Myron Kulas, a member of the 32nd Ward organization. The 32nd Ward organization was run by Terry Gabinski, a protege of Congressman Dan Rostenkowski from the 5th Congressional District and an alderman there since 1969. We'll get back to that 5th Congressional District a little bit later.
Well, Mell smelled blood and as much as Kulas was a willing "machine" Democrat, he wasn't part of Mell's organization and not as beholden to him. Mell, pushed his son-in-law, Rod Blagojevich, to run for that seat. With overwhelming support from Mell's patronage army in the 33rd Ward, Blagojevich won the seat easily over Kulas despite a hard fight from Rostenkowski's 32nd Ward organization. Needless to say, Blagojevich's tenure as a state representative was not exactly noteworthy. He was a sponsor of exactly one bill in the four years he was there.
Even with that sparse record, another opportunity dropped in his lap and again Mell was there to clear the way for him. Remember I mentioned the 5th Congressional District earlier. Well, in 1994 the dean of the Illinois congressional delegation, Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, was mired in legal troubles under investigation from the U.S. Attorney's Office. His indictment centered on his abuse of the franking privileges of congressman, although it could have been for any multitude of other sins, sort of analagous to convicting Al Capone for tax evasion. Even for Chicago, it was too much and Rostenkowski was booted out during the Republican Revolution of 1994. Much like the congressional seat in Louisiana that Jefferson lost last week will probably turn out, the Republican winner was a one term seat warmer. In 1996, there were many Democrats interested in running for the 5th Congressional District. Even with a Republican incumbent, there was nearly no way the Democratic primary winner wasn't going to be the next Congressman.
The 5th Congressional District Democratic primary in 1996 came down to the two neighboring state representatives mentioned above. Rod Blagojevich from 33rd District and Nancy Kaszak from the 34th District. With the overwhelming vote totals in his favor in both the 33rd and 36th Wards, Blagojevich was able to win by a comfortable margin. Again, Blagojevich with a thin record was able to pull off another victory with the help of his father-in-law. And again, Blagojevich's tenure in the U.S. Congress was underwhelming. He was the quintessential back-bencher. One local pol even said of his accomplishments as a Congressman, "I think he got a post office named after a fallen police officer," http://www.chicagomag.com/... About the only significant vote he made was, of course as it turns out, the wrong one. He was the only Democratic in the House from the Illinois delegation to vote for the authorization for war in Iraq.
When he left the Congress to run for governor in 2002, who do you think succeeded him? None other than Rahm Emanuel and who did Rahm defeat. None other than the same Nancy Kaszak that Blagojevich defeated in 1996. What goes around comes around as they say. Again, Blagojevich was pushed by his father-in-law and Mell promised many of the machine committeemen that "The Kid" was ready to be governor. All the primary candidates were from Chicago with Roland Burris potentially the first black to become Illinois governor and Paul Vallas who had run the Chicago Public Schools. Vallas had lead a mini-revival of CPS through a huge capital improvement program that alleviated many of the schools of its on-going overcrowding problem and he pushed for higher test scores as well. By the way, Vallas has since gone on to run the Philadelphia public schools next and now is running the New Orleans school district now. He was backed by many of the suburban voters who saw him as a reformer and from many of the north lakefront liberals. Knowing that he was going to lose many of the black "machine" committeemen to keep him competitive in Chicago, Blagojevich's campaign decided to concentrate much of their effort downstate. He ended up taking 55% of the downstate vote and barely won the primary by staying competitive in the city in no small part with big margins like the 33rd and 36th wards. He still finished 3rd in Cook County but he won nearly all the other downstate counties. His margin of victory was only about 2% or about 25,000 votes out of about 1,250,000 cast.
He then won the general election when Jim Ryan had the unfortunate problem of having the same last name of the now disgraced former governor. was embroiled in a controversy surrounding his estranged wife, Geri Ryan, of Star Trek Next Generation fame that had started during the Republican primary and played out in the general election. Due to George Ryan's corruption,the right-wing of the Illinois Republican party was now hopelessly adrift. divided from its long standing moderate wing. The party wing that had given them 20 years of reign of the governor's mansion with Jim Thompson and then Jim Edgar couldn't win a statewide race if their life depended on it. It also didn't help that he shared the same last name as the deposed governor who was under indictment (They were no relation, btw).
This is the charmed life that led Mr. Blagojevich to the governorship. He also had both state houses run by his own party, so you'd think they might have gotten things done and worked together. But alas, that was not the case. The past several years, it has been a constant struggle between Michael Madigan, Speaker of the Illnois House, and Governor Blagojevich. As we've seen with the release of the indictment, Blago does not exactly come across as a "team player". Hell, he's even thrown his own father-in-law, Dick Mell, overboard.
http://chicagoist.com/...
Of course, all this is not to say that Mell alone is to blame for all of this, but it is the system (patronage, cronyism) of the Chicago "machine" that allows someone like Blagojevich to get all the way from state representative to U.S. representative to governor without anyone questioning whether he is the right person for the job. The "machine" may get things done. After all, one of the slogans for Chicago was always "the city that works", but I would add - at what cost?