The real issue, it seems, is ambulances.
”There`s an unequal distribution of ambulance services,” said George Hollich, who lives on the Northwest Side and cares about the availability of ambulances because his daughter is a diabetic.
”All we`re asking for is a fair shake,” he said, ”and we`re questioning if it`s being offered.”
Actually, the Hollichs have never needed an ambulance, but they remember when their neighbors did a year or so ago. ”They waited 20 minutes,” said his wife, Kathy, ”and then what do you think came? A fire truck.”
The complaint is the same in the 50th Ward on the Far North Side, where the alderman, Bernard Stone, was talking the other day about the shortage of ambulances and paramedics. He had written a letter
about it, he said, to the appropriate city official. ”I wrote two weeks ago,” he said. ”I`ve gotten no reply.”
So where have all the ambulances gone? Well, Stone and George Hollich think too many of them have gone to the South Side. ”They had that incident where an ambulance driver wouldn`t go to the top floor of one of the (Chicago Housing Authority) projects,” Hollich said. ”So then they diverted more of the ambulances and the drivers down there, and there`s less for us.”
Of this, there are two things to be said. The first is that most of the people who live where Hollich and Stone live are white, while the people in the projects and on the South Side, the ones Hollich and Stone think are now getting preferential treatment, are black.
According to Michael Holewinski, the mayor`s liaison with the fire department, there is one more ambulance now than four years ago, there are more paramedics and there have been ”no major changes” in where the ambulances are stationed. Perhaps it is only a perception, born of racial bitterness, that ambulance service isn`t what it used to be.
So maybe the real issue isn`t ambulances. Maybe, as so many of the commentators say, the real issue is race.
But it isn`t. Race may be the dominant factor in the primary campaign now approaching its end, but it isn`t an issue at all. An issue is a difference of opinion between candidates over a question of public policy. When Walter Mondale said taxes should rise and Ronald Reagan said they shouldn`t, that was an issue. That Harold Washington is black and Jane Byrne is white is a reality, not an issue.
So what is the issue? The trouble with this campaign has been that if there are issues facing the voters they have not been discussed by the candidates, who, come to think about it, have almost no ideological differences.
In Chicago, almost every politician is really a liberal Democrat, under the old definition of that term, meaning someone who wants to use tax money and public power to provide public services. No one is against extending rapid transit to the Southwest Side or for a free market solution to lakefront erosion. Jane Byrne and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.) could endorse each other a few years ago because their politics aren`t all that different.
There are hardly any issues separating Washington and Byrne. She opposed his property tax increase, but would not try to rescind it. They differ over the gay rights ordinance, which is hardly a central issue to most people. This leaves ChicagoFest. Wow!
Which seems to leave race as the only real matter of contention. Except there is that second thing to be said about the great ambulance complaint of 1987: Maybe it`s more than just perception.
Even if there are just as many ambulances, there are too many tales of 20-minute waits, of fire trucks coming instead of ambulances, for there not to be a real problem.
And it isn`t just ambulances. It`s also park maintenance, library books, clean streets, pot-hole repairs, cops on the beat. In general, the city has no more resources than it did four years ago. No city does. Lyndon Johnson isn`t president. Ronald Reagan is, and revenue sharing is dead. For years, according to black residents and politicians, it was their neighborhoods that never got that ”fair share” George Hollich talked about. If, as they say, things are a bit fairer now, the white areas have to be getting a bit less than they were before.
Beneath all the talk of black and white, the people of Chicago are fighting over what people always fight over at election time: dividing the pie. That the division is along racial lines is not exactly incidental. But neither is it central.
There is nothing new about ethnic politics or about one group resenting the new ascendance of another. ”If he was white, with his record, he could never have gotten elected,” said a North Side voter, referring to
Washington`s old problems with the Internal Revenue Service. ”But the blacks don`t care because he`s one of theirs.”
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True, and not unprecedented. The white Irish Catholics of Boston elected James Michael Curley to the board of aldermen while he sat in the Charles Street Jail. He was one of theirs.
”I`m voting for Byrne,” said Frank Kaminsky, a cigar-chomping, 62-year- old retired county employee, ”because I think she can do something for the ward. We need a few more jobs here in the ward.”
Kaminsky`s ward is the 11th, Mayor Richard J. Daley`s old ward, which was once the most favored of all wards, and now is not. Like most voters, Kaminsky wants his neighborhood to prosper, but he bears neither Harold Washington nor anyone else ill will.
Asked if he hated Washington, he opened his eyes wide, took the cigar out of his mouth and said firmly, ”Listen, I don`t hate anybody.”
”Whenever you have race and politics, it`s always two-thirds politics and one-third race,” said Edward Marciniak, the Loyola University professor of urban affairs who has long tried to improve relations between Chicago`s black and white communities. ”Everyone is arguing over a piece of the pie. It`s about how you divide the resources.”
Not all the resources are as concrete as ambulances, street-cleaners or library books. There are also the psychic resources. According to polling by The Tribune, for example, only a small minority of the poor blacks who live in CHA projects think their lives are better under their city`s first black mayor than before.
But that same polling shows almost all of them will vote for Washington, if only because he is one of their own, because they feel more comfortable with him in office.
Their voting decision, then, is racial, but that does not make it racist. People have always voted for the person they feel more comfortable with, which usually means one of their own.
Why, then, is it so often said that the whites who will vote for Byrne, for one of their own with whom they feel more comfortable, are racist?
”These are people who for years thought they had a protector in City Hall,” said a pro-Washington white liberal, who did not want to be identified. ”Now they want one again.”
”Of course, there`s a degree of racism,” said Northwestern University sociologist Albert Hunter, ”but there are all kinds of tugs and pulls on people. I wouldn`t say it`s out-and-out racism.”
Marciniak said some whites were voting against Washington because of
”local loyalties” to ward and neighborhood political leaders, who in turn oppose Washington not because he is black but because he opposes them, because he threatens their very existence. Chicagoans can argue for years over whether Washington is really a reformer, as he claims, or whether he merely wants to replace one political machine with another. But there is little doubt that he wants to destroy the existing Democratic leadership; so of course that leadership opposes him.
Some observers do see things from a more racially based perspective. Dianne Pinderhughes, a professor of government and Afro-American studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, said it was the political organization`s treatment of Chicago blacks that led to the black political uprising that culminated in Washington`s election in 1983.
”The machine finally created enough dissatisfaction across class lines to create an opening and mobilize the black community,” said Pinderhughes, author of the soon-to-be-published book ”Race and Ethnicity in Chicago Politics.”
According to Pinderhughes, there was ”a consistent pattern of Chicago politics that blacks be subordinate to whites” and that, even now, whites oppose Washington because ”they presume a black person will subordinate their group interests.”
Marciniak disagrees. ”I don`t think you can demonstrate that,” he said. ”All (ethnic) groups had a history of getting pushed around. White voters will vote for a black candidate, and white politicians will support him. Look at (State Rep.) Jesse White. He was put on the ticket in the 42d Ward, which is two-thirds nonblack, as part of a traditional ethnically balanced ticket. That`s the old way political parties work.”
Even Pinderhughes does not argue that Chicago`s blacks and whites are motivated principally by racism or by mutual hatred. ”People are voting their group interests,” she said. ”The name of the game is jobs, contracts.”
Or ambulances?