Harold Washington has been dead for a decade, and if you happen to see one of those famous blue sunrise buttons from the 1983 campaign, it’s likely to be stuck in the back of somebody’s box of mementos.
Next year U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush will be the latest in a long line of people who will try to rekindle the Washington crusade and ride into the mayor’s office. Odds are about 150 to 1 that he will fail.
The Washington legacy can’t carry any old politician who doesn’t have Washington’s charisma. But it can still cause problems for politicians who were on the wrong side of Harold. The legacy has some teeth. It may well bite Glenn Poshard.
Poshard, like any Illinois Democrat, needs a large and solid turnout of African-American voters to get himself elected governor in November.
A few weeks ago Poshard started running radio ads to build up his virtually non-existent support among African-American voters. The ads, which featured Roland Burris, one of the candidates that Poshard beat in the Democratic primary, showed Poshard knows he has a problem. But he may not realize how big a problem it is.
Poshard’s Republican opponent, George Ryan, could be on his way to a record African-American vote for a GOP candidate for governor. That doesn’t mean Ryan will come even close to winning the black vote, but if he gets one vote out of four, he’s a lock for election.
Ryan was helped immensely by the decision of Rev. Jesse Jackson and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. to stay neutral in the governor’s race, denying Poshard their considerable influence.
But now Ryan is picking up support from some of the other influential black ministers in Chicago, who don’t feel the obligation that black politicians do to toe the line for the Democratic Party. Ryan’s efforts are headed by former civil rights activist and Harold Washington operative Rose Jennings, who performed the same task for Gov. Jim Edgar.
Listen to the assessment of Rev. B. Herbert Martin, the respected pastor of the Progressive Community Church, which is in the shadow of the Robert Taylor Homes. Martin delivered the eulogy at Washington’s funeral. He’s still known as the mayor’s pastor.
George Ryan is his candidate for governor.
Ryan “has been hiring minorities for a long time,” Martin said. “He talks about prison reform, giving someone the skills to make a living when he returns to the community. He has a strong commitment to public education, which I really like.”
Martin organized a recent meeting between Ryan and some 25 ministers, and invited Ryan to speak at his church on Father’s Day.
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And Poshard? “I don’t know him. He’s not known here. He has no presence at all in the African-American community. I do think he’s a strong gun lobbyist, that’s a part of him. And with all my work against violence, we need someone who has a different kind of agenda as far as weapons are concerned.”
Ouch.
“I’m not a Republican, OK? But neither am I a Democrat,” said Martin, who also backed Edgar. “I just like strong, positive leadership for people who struggle for a living every day. I’m looking at how African-Americans become party loyalists, and no matter how the Democrats treat us we remain in there with them. If the Democrats aren’t serving us, and they are not in many ways, somebody needs to raise the question about what the Republicans can do for us.”
If Martin or the Jacksons have concern about drawing criticism for not backing the Democratic candidate for governor, they will soon have a new answer.
The newsletter Illinois Politics will be out next week with details of how Poshard helped the opponents of Harold Washington try to keep the mayor from doing his job during the bitter days of Council Wars.
Poshard was a state senator during Washington’s tenure as mayor, and from time to time the political fighting in Chicago spilled over to Springfield. When it did, the rest of the politicians in the state were forced to choose sides. Poshard chose the anti-Washington side.
The most cynical maneuver by the anti-Washington majority that controlled the City Council was to hold hostage dozens of the mayor’s appointments to the governing boards of the park district, the transit authorities, the city colleges, zoning board and other agencies. As long as Washington couldn’t get his people into the policymaking posts at the city agencies, he couldn’t run them.
Illinois Politics investigated three critical votes in Springfield on the hostages. How you voted established your allegiance either to Washington or to his foes. On all three votes, Poshard sided against Washington.
On one vote, Poshard backed a bill to give the opposition the power to stop Washington’s appointments to the board that controls McCormick Place and Navy Pier.
On two votes, Poshard went against Washington allies who were trying to put a time limit on how long the City Council could hold up the mayor’s appointments. That would have ended the hostage situation. Poshard voted against both bills.
Those votes were a political calculation by Poshard, and probably a natural one. The regular Democrats, not Washington, controlled the Illinois House and Senate. And Poshard wanted to curry their favor.
But as Council Wars dragged on the effort to handcuff Washington looked even more contemptible. Poshard likes to talk about principle. If he had voted on principle rather than politics, he would have voted the other way.
It has been a decade since Washington’s death, and it’s possible that the anger over how he was treated while in office has died, too. But my guess is that it still has some life in it. And that could be trouble not only for Poshard, but some others on the Democratic ticket like Dan Hynes, the Democratic candidate for Illinois comptroller.
Now, Hynes was only 14 when Washington was elected mayor–the kid couldn’t vote for or against Washington. But his father, former Cook County Assessor Tom Hynes, ran against Washington in 1987 before bowing out of the race two days before the election.
The biggest problem, though, rests with Poshard. Several of his top campaign allies were closely aligned with the anti-Washington faction. His political conservatism and far downstate roots also will make it tougher for him to win black votes.
If there’s any Democrat who won’t suffer a Harold backlash, of course, it is U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, who was Washington’s floor leader in the Illinois House.
Moseley-Braun says she’s four-square behind Poshard for governor. From time to time they’ll probably campaign together. Maybe late at night, after a long day on the trail, they can kick back, have a drink and swap stories about how they knew Harold.