As hundreds of enthusiastic Democrats packed the UIC Pavilion on Sunday to join President Obama’s get-out-the-vote rally in the upcoming do-or-die midterms, Mayor Rahm never looked so irrelevant.
First, let’s deal with the narrative, as Rahm made use of it in his final budget address on October 17. Bragging about a budget that calls for no new property taxes, Rahm did what he does best—patted himself on the back. He reminisced about the dark days of 2010, when he came home from the Obama White House to run for mayor. The city, he said, “had reached a boiling point”—”many believed our best days were behind us.” Some, he warned, even predicted “Chicago would be the next Detroit.”
“Daley took office at a moment when Chicago was paralyzed by infighting and mismanagement,” the story begins. “In 1987 William Bennett, the Secretary of Education, said that Chicago had the worst school system in the country—’an education meltdown.’ The center of the city was a desiccating museum of masterpieces by Mies van der Rohe and Louis Sullivan. Infant mortality in remote neighborhoods was comparable to levels in the Third World.”
And former alderman Bill Singer, pointing to all the buildings sprouting up on the west side, proclaimed, “with wonder in his voice” that “people want to live here.”
Daley had a bad habit of pushing off debt to future generations, or trying to pay our bills with such scams as the parking meter deal. Anything to avoid raising property taxes. So Rahm ultimately had to deal with the backlash of raising taxes and fees—after having wasted his first four years in office trying to avoid property tax hikes.
Clearly, Mayor Rahm was still planning to run for reelection when he crafted this budget. At the very least, he didn’t want to make his loyal aldermen have to vote on a tax hike before they run for reelection. So he resorted to a good-news budget that any incumbent would want to use in a reelection campaign.
