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For the inaugural posting on Clout Fairy it is only appropriate that we feature Mayor Daley. No person has done more to further the myth of the Clout Fairy than our esteemed Mayor. Anytime something blows up in the Mayor’s face it is always the Clout Fairy or his henchmen, “A Few Bad Apples™,” that are responsible. Anyone but the Mayor.
Only in Chicago can someone have a reputation for being a master of detail while also claiming to be completely oblivious to an unfortunate reality staring them in the face. Kudos to Mayor Daley for pulling it off.
Recently the Mayor stated in an interview “I don’t know where we get this, this idea that there’s a big Democratic machine going on. Chicago and the metropolitan area is very Democratic and the state is. There’s no, this machine. I thought it was laughable.”
Apparently the Mayor forgot that little matter that gained some notoriety in the press the last few years, the federal criminal trial and conviction of Robert Sorich.
Sorich, a former high ranking staffer in the Mayor’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, and three others were charged with and convicted for systematically rigging the City of Chicago’s hiring system to reward applicants who had done political work for the Mayor or his favored candidates. The Shakman Decree, civil service rules, criminal law and common sense were ignored by Sorich and his colleagues; the only factor that mattered for an applicant was whether he or she had done political work as ordered by the Mayor’s cronies. During the course of the trial it came out that the effort to illegally reward political work with City jobs was no mere isolated instance of corruption. The effort went back to at least 1994 and was highly systematized, it even included color coded binders and computer databases.
Webster defines a machine in part as “a combination of persons acting together for a common end along with the agencies they use.” Sounds suspiciously like the City Hall hiring scheme.
I guess the Mayor views irrefutable evidence of a thriving and expansive political machine in an office under his supervision as “laughable.” I wonder if Robert Sorich shares his good humor as he sits in prison serving his sentence.
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