“The Pappas Papers” will never be confused with blow-the-lid-off exposes such as “The Pentagon Papers” or “The Valachi Papers,” but Maria Pappas’ critical tome on Cook County government probably is a must-read for opponents of gubernatorial hopeful Richard Phelan.
Phelan is the Cook County Board president who is leaving after one term to run for the Democratic nomination for governor. Pappas, his nemesis on the County Board, is a candidate for the Democratic nomination to succeed Phelan.
Pappas has said she kept a diary during an eye-opening, 3 1/2-year introduction to county politics and will release it Tuesday as part of her March 15 primary campaign against County Commissioner John Stroger and Circuit Court Clerk Aurelia Pucinski.
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Pappas has cast herself as the political outsider and reformer in the campaign, portraying Stroger and Pucinski as long-entrenched members of a Cook County Democratic political machine that thrives on patronage and insider deals.
But except for the epilogue, Pappas’ 78-page book makes scant reference to Stroger or Pucinski.
Instead, it is an unflattering recapitulation of Phelan’s administration with a few obligatory chapters on some of the accomplishments of the past three years-such as abortions at County Hospital, a human rights ordinance and electronic monitoring of prisoners-and an outline of how she would change things if elected.
Phelan’s primary opponents, state Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch and Atty. Gen. Roland Burris, will want to plunk down the $10 cover price for “The Pappas Papers: How Cook County Really Runs,” even if no one else does.
“I was itching to carve away budgetary blubber, if only to make a few dollars available for (social) services I considered vital,” Pappas writes, with a studied mix of naivete and cynicism. “We had an opportunity to get Cook County running lean. . . . It didn`t happen.”
In a combination of civics lecturing, newspaper clip rehashing and her own musings, Pappas runs through a litany familiar to anyone who has spent time at some of the marathon County Board meetings since 1990.
Pappas contends that despite his election as a reformer, Phelan’s administration has wallowed in personnel and pin stripe patronage with the bottom line being Phelan’s political advancement.
Pappas assails the administration for excesses in overtime pay to employees, for the county’s bonded indebtedness, for construction costs at refurbished Provident Hospital, and for the County Jail and Cook County Hospital no-bid contracts and consulting deals.
William Filan, Phelan’s chief of staff, said “The Pappas Papers” reflected the administration’s contention that she did not understand county government.
“If we ran government like Maria Pappas wants us to run government, Provident Hospital and three new jails would not be open and County Hospital would not be reaccredited,” Filan said. “That would mean 2,200 prisoners on the streets and no health care for the poor and unemployed.”
In another campaign development, after offering a backhanded apology weeks ago for comments she made about Stroger’s participation in a pair of meetings with gang leaders, Pucinski resurrected the issue Monday.
Pucinski insisted she wasn’t racist for raising the question, even though Stroger claimed she was. She was equally insistent that it was inappropriate for someone like Stroger to take part in a gang summit, even though Stroger said he never did.
“He was the only one of the candidates for president of the County Board who was at that meeting,” Pucinski said during a broadcast on WVON that was peppered with heated exchanges between the two.
But Stroger, who again asserted that neither meeting was a gang summit, said Pucinski’s comments had been part of a carefully crafted campaign by Pucinski and her aides to “destroy” him by portraying him as soft on crime.