From Daley, No Endorsements or Regrets

From Daley, No Endorsements or Regrets
By MONICA DAVEY
Copyright by Associated Press
Published: September 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/us/12daley.html?th&emc=th


CHICAGO — In this, a city now crawling with would-be candidates for mayor and what appear to be early signs of old divisions — racial, ethnic, geographic — that roiled City Hall in the past, at least one person seems unconcerned about the threat of a new era of political divisiveness.

That person, Mayor Richard M. Daley, who was first elected in an earlier period of just such turmoil, describes a changed city, where blacks and Hispanics have now long held powerful positions and where the City Council’s racial battles of the 1980s (known here as Council Wars) no longer feel particularly relevant.

“This is 2011,” Mr. Daley said in an interview in his fifth-floor office on Friday evening, looking ahead to Chicago’s February election — an ordinarily monotonous event that was transformed into a free-for-all last week when Mr. Daley announced that he would not seek a seventh term. “People have to get on with their lives. People want jobs. They don’t care who it is — they want jobs. And that’s all they’re talking about.”

When he was first elected in 1989, Mr. Daley arrived with support from white voters but skepticism from minorities and so-called Lakefront liberals, who had witnessed years of Council battles after the election of the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington.

In the end, Mr. Daley managed to create unlikely coalitions and a City Council that mainly did whatever he wanted — ingredients that now seem utterly uncertain in a city that has been so dominated by the singular force of Mr. Daley for so long.

“You cannot be a mayor thinking that those who voted for you — that I can only serve those,” Mr. Daley said, recalling his early years in office. “I had to work to convince the African-American community that I had the same goals of what they want to have in life — education, economic opportunity.”

Many people have described Mr. Daley, 68, as calmer since he announced his decision on Tuesday, but in the interview he seemed every bit his usual self — blunt, certain and hardly given to flowery, sentimental reflections. He will soon become the city’s longest-serving mayor, overtaking the other Mayor Daley, his father, for that title.

Asked what his father, who died in office in 1976, might have thought of his choice to step aside, Mr. Daley said his father would not have weighed in at all, having told him years earlier to make his own decisions on politics. Asked whether he regretted any actions during his 21 years in office, Mr. Daley said he never looked back, only ahead. And asked whether he could picture a Chicago with someone not named Daley at the helm, Mr. Daley said he most certainly could.

“I have a lot of confidence in myself and confidence in the belief that I can be replaced,” the mayor said. “Everybody’s replaceable in life.”

Mr. Daley said he would make no endorsement of possible replacements, a long list of aldermen, congressmen and others, including Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, who also once worked for Mr. Daley’s campaign. “I don’t think you can anoint anybody,” he said. “I think it’s something that I have a lot of confidence in the people.”

Mr. Daley added that when he ran against Mr. Washington and lost, he endorsed Mr. Washington the next day. “People didn’t like that I endorsed him,” he said, “but he had won fair and square.”

Though his decision not to run again shocked many Chicagoans, Mr. Daley said that he had made up his mind two months ago — and made it up “easily” — to leave what he considers “the best job anyone can have.”

It was simply time, he said, mocking speculation that recent setbacks might really explain the decision: his wife Maggie’s cancer, the city’s failed bid for the 2016 Olympics, a deficit of more than $650 million in the city budget, complaints over his deal to privatize the city’s parking meters, or approval ratings that sank to 37 percent earlier this summer, according to The Chicago Tribune.

“I had good polls, bad polls all my life,” Mr. Daley said

Mr. Daley expressed pride at his efforts to overhaul public schools and to replace large public housing projects with mixed-income developments. He said he had more to do before he left for an undetermined future in May. Among other things, he said he might call for a long-term look at whether to reverse the flow of the Chicago River, which was reversed more than a century ago in what was then a remarkable engineering feat so that waste could be carried away from Lake Michigan.

By Friday night, Mr. Daley was headed to a public hearing on the city’s budget, which he expected would draw plenty of complaint. “People appreciate the love that I have for the city,” Mr. Daley said. “That doesn’t mean that they agree with you all the time.”