Mayor Richard Daley`s honeymoon might have been abruptly canceled last week at a gay and lesbian forum held in a Swedish eatery, but the mayor signaled that if the marriage is to be rocky, he`s willing to fight.
On Monday, gay activists confronted the mayor at Ann Sather`s restaurant on the North Side, and Daley stalked out of the session. A day later, 15 activists were arrested in City Hall where they staged a sit-in protesting the mayor`s treatment of gay issues.
The confrontation with gay activists followed picketing of Daley by Chicago police officers during Polish union leader Lech Walesa`s visit to Chicago. For the first time, a pro-Daley constituency was calling for the mayor`s ouster.
The incidents have disrupted Daley`s generally calm term in office. But they, along with the recent booting of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Joan Harris, have also demonstrated a trait of the mayor: He will play hardball when necessary.
More Top Picks Dutch Ovens Camp
In his first six months in office, criticism of Daley was largely limited to liberals and blacks who had opposed his election. Now the mayor has drawn some heat from people who liked him.
The anti-Daley constituency has watched the first chinks appear in the mayor`s armor with the same quiet smugness that President Bush viewed the cracks in the Berlin Wall. There hasn`t been need for comment.
But they do believe the mayor is finally showing some vulnerabilities, dramatized by television images of clenched-fist cops outside the Chicago Hilton and Towers and a terse Daley abruptly exiting the gay forum.
”Politicians go to these forums and have to take some heat. He should be able to handle criticism better. It`s just a throwback to the old man in terms of personality,” said political consultant Don Rose, who was referring to the late Mayor Richard J. Daley.
”Whether he gets it from (Daley`s brother) Bill or from (consultant David) Axelrod, they`ve been able to keep him in control,” Rose said. ”Now, is he going to learn from these things?”
Some who have known Daley for years acknowledge that he can have a short temper, but he has largely kept it in check through his public career. That made the Ann Sather`s meeting a surprising departure.
Aides said Daley knew he might face a confrontation at the forum, and they had wrestled for several days over whether he should attend. Daley himself made the decision to go.
He has had largely good relations with the gay and lesbian community, which voted overwhelmingly for him in the mayoral election.
Gay and lesbian activists were concerned that the mayor was ignoring his own Committee on Gay and Lesbian Issues, that his new AIDS policy was softpedaling the need for frank advertising campaigns to curb the spread of the disease. They wanted him to appoint openly gay men and lesbians to boards dealing with police and health issues.
Two days after the confrontation, Daley suggested that there should be a curb on creating new commissions representing different ethnic and minority groups and that existing ones should be placed under the blanket authority of the Human Relations Commission.
The coordination of the groups was recommended several weeks ago by Clarence Wood, the new executive director of the Human Relations Commission, and Daley has made efforts to be receptive to Wood. (Mayoral aides also say that several of the groups do little or no work.)
But the timing of Daley`s announcement suggested a slap at the Committee on Gay and Lesbian Issues, and it immediately drew fire from gay and lesbian groups.
”Is the honeymoon over?” asked Daniel Sotomayor, one of the leaders of the Chicago Chapter of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). ”I`d say we are on the verge of war.”
Similar fighting words have been sounded by police union officials who complain that Daley has stalled arbitration proceedings over a new contract. The issue in the contract is money, but the refrain from the police rank and file is similar: The new Mayor Daley treats us as his personal militia, just like the old Mayor Daley did.
Former Mayor Jane Byrne incurred the wrath of firefighters when she played brinkmanship on contract demands in 1980 that eventually led to a strike, and she might never have recovered from the political setback.
The police confrontation is mild by comparison, but the signs are that Daley won`t back down from a good fight despite the potential political consequences.
The first signal of that might have come a few weeks ago, when the administration ousted Joan Harris. Her husband, Irving Harris, had contributed $100,000 to Daley`s mayoral campaign, but she had angered other administration figures who are closer to Daley. When she criticized Daley`s 1990 budget for the arts, she was history.
”If you`re going to be knocked over by every gust of wind, you`re not going to be a very effective mayor,” Axelrod said. ”This was just another week of life in the big city. Nobody`s pouting about this.”
In fact, Daley aides might be a little gleeful that Daley had a chance to show some chutzpah while risking little political capital.
Daley aides said that most of the calls they received after the police protest were from people who were angry that the officers attempted to upstage Walesa. The anti-Daley demonstration also drew criticism from black and Polish police organizations. Unlike the gay rally, Daley handled the police protest with aplomb: He defended their right to protest.
Also, Daley might not have lost much with the gay forum walkout. Gay activists range from militants to the mainstream, and while some predicted war, others anticipated detente.
”We are still interested in playing by the rules and working through the process. We are trying to establish, again, further contact with the administration, going through aldermen and others to try to get to the mayor,” said Robert Adams, a spokesman for Impact, a newly formed gay political-action committee.
While an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 gays and lesbians vote in the city, they aren`t necessarily single-issue voters. Many supported Daley over then-Mayor Eugene Sawyer even though Sawyer had engineered passage of a human rights ordinance that had been sought by gays for a decade.
More Top Picks Irlen Syndrome And Adhd How The Symptoms Overlap
For Daley`s political opposition, the events have buoyed their hopes that he won`t prove to be a Teflon mayor. The confrontation at Ann Sather`s hasn`t turned Daley`s political fortunes, but it did show that the mayor`s feathers will be ruffled a few times between now and the 1991 election.
”Will it happen again? Odds are it will,” said Rose. ”But the worst you can consider it now is a storm warning.”