Forrest Claypool’s ‘Stroger Dilemma’

“Of course it’s not true! But let’s make the bastard deny it!”

— Hunter S. Thompson quoting Lyndon Johnson during a 1948 U.S. Senate campaign in Thompson’s Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie.

Somewhere, the late Richard J. Daley is looking up—or down, depending on how things worked out for him—at Cook County Board President John Stroger and shaking his bald head in admiration. “There goes a real down and dirty SOB,” Daley is saying. “That man knows how to Get It On.”

Coming from Daley, the inventor of the Machine, that is high praise. If you’re not from Chicago, all you need to know about John Stroger is that he is the modern-day Daley, the boss of the Cook County Democratic Machine. Stroger commands an army of patronage workers amassed over the 12 years he has presided over the county board. His work history, according to his biography on the Cook County administration website, reads as follows: Cook County Commissioner, Attorney, Chicago Park District, Special Attorney to the General Attorney of the Chicago Park District.

As near as can be determined from that information, Stroger has ventured out of Cook County only once for an extended period in his 76 years on Earth: when he left town to earn a Bachelor’s degree at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He got his law degree from DePaul and since then has been a “public servant” in one form or another.

Stroger also happens to be black. Which would not be important except for two reasons: He is often cited as being a role model for young blacks and he has a tendency to remind people that he is black when it becomes politically necessary. Recently he has played the race card with abandon when one or another of the white county board members has challenged his bloated budgets, called attention to the astonishingly blatant nepotism and ineptitude he has brought to Cook County’s employment practices, or revealed yet another in the seemingly infinite layers of corruption poisoning the county’s public services.

It just so happens one of those white county commissioners, Forrest Claypool, is running against Stroger in the Democratic primary for county board president. Claypool has styled himself as a “reform candidate,” which these days just means he has not yet managed to use the County as his own personal employment agency and ATM—at least not to anyone’s knowledge.

Any Cook County resident (read: taxpayer) with half the average number of functioning brain cells would pull a Democratic ballot on Primary Day just to vote for Claypool. Stroger has run a down and dirty campaign, which is to be expected. In TV ads he has accused Claypool of everything except hating little old ladies, child molestation and kicking puppies. In one TV ad, Stroger claims Claypool has voted against funding breast cancer screenings, against a prescription drug program for seniors, against funding jail guards. Which is all true, technically, because Claypool voted against Stroger’s ridiculously oversized 2006 budget proposal. But in voting against it Claypool was taking a stand against waste and corruption. Stroger of course knows this but has no shame. In an editorial on March 14, the Chicago Tribune wrote that Stroger’s ad campaign is a series of lies. Not misinterpretations, not fudging – outright, bald-faced lies. He was playing Lyndon Johnson’s game—make Claypool deny he’d done those things. “If Claypool played this loopy game,” according to the Tribune, "he would say that Stroger, by supporting the 2006 budget, voted for continued abuse of children at the county’s Juvenile Detention Center.”

And maybe Claypool had an ad ready to go that said exactly that. Except that on the day the Tribune’s editorial ran, eight days before the primary, Stroger was taken to the hospital where doctors said he suffered a stroke.

The local TV media played the story for all the gravitas they could wring out of it, airing breathless live reports from serious-sounding reporters standing outside the hospital—not, by the way, the county’s brand new hospital with Stroger’s name on it, but a private hospital nearby. “His medical records are there,” as the news credulously quoted a county spokesperson. At any rate, there was much talk of Stroger’s condition, which no one really knew, and whether he would stay in the race. No one questioned the timing of Stroger’s trip to the hospital—a week before the primary—and no one mentioned the backdrop: Stroger’s flagging poll numbers in the face of Claypool’s persistent flogging.

If news watchers felt confused during the day by the conflicting reports on Stroger’s health coming from the county mouthpieces, and from Stroger’s own staff, Claypool’s campaign had to be suffering from whiplash. Early in the news cycle, Stroger had merely gone to see his doctor because he felt tired. Then it was fatigue. Then he had been taken to a hospital. It took until the end of the day, when Rush Presbyterian doctors finally spoke to the media, before anyone mentioned the word “stroke.”

By then Claypool’s campaign had scrambled to yank its own negative ads—such as they were—off the air. Stroger was doing enough race-baiting on his own, it would have been extremely bad form for a white challenger to have TV ads running that labeled an elderly black politician and recent stroke victim “sleazy” and a fraud. Accurate, but definitely in bad form.

Stroger is as corrupt as they come. A relative of his handles communications for the Cook County Forest Preserve District, perhaps the most inept and bumbling bureaucracy ever created since the dawn of time. To head the county’s troubled Provident Hospital, Stroger hired John Fairman, a man who has left a trail of mismanagement allegations and financial behavior bordering on, but apparently never crossing over into, criminal at nearly every executive position he’s ever held.

The list goes on and on. And we should be talking about it at length. Claypool could have run a head-turning campaign based simply on the premise that he’s Not Stroger. But he didn’t. And now it may be too late.

Stroger no doubt will stay in the hospital until at least the day of the election. Why not? He has effectively short-circuited Claypool’s campaign, which had been gaining momentum. Every major newspaper in Cook County had endorsed Claypool. Only old ward heelers and party hacks like Carol Moseley-Braun and Bill Clinton had thrown their support behind the tired old Stroger. Bill Clinton? Voters might rightly ask what the fuck Bill Clinton knows about Cook County politics. The answer is it doesn’t matter. He knows enough to know Stroger helped turn out the black vote for Bill in 1992 and 1996. It’s payback time.

As for Moseley-Braun, she too was probably reminded that Stroger had once backed her, even if he hadn’t (he backed her challenger in 1992). You see Stroger’s habit of bringing up race whenever he’s challenged on something extends to veiled exhortations for African-Americans to support their own at the polls. But, as with so many things Stroger says, his actions loudly contradict him. Aside from the Moseley-Braun snub, Stroger supported Richard M. Daley over the late Harold Washington in the 1983 mayoral primary (Washington won); in 1989 he backed Daley again over black candidate Tim Evans in a special mayoral election and in 1991 Stroger again snubbed the African-American candidate to back Daley. A more exhaustive list of Stroger’s “support” for fellow black candidates can be found on Tribune columnist Eric Zorn’s blog .

When the TVs showed the grainy footage of Stroger being taken out of the ambulance, wrapped in blankets from head to toe, some in Claypool’s campaign probably thought “This is it. Ding dong, the witch is dead.” They’d have been crazy not to. Their candidate’s deficit in the polls had shrunk to 10 points, and it may have been dead even including the margin of error. The machine was grinding to a halt just as the campaign was entering the stretch run.

But now … ah, now. Now it’s anyone’s guess what will happen. If Claypool doesn’t ease up he could face a backlash not only from the black community but from senior citizens, stroke victims and anyone who’s ever felt disrespected by younguns. If he eases up he could lose the momentum he’s gained in recent days and wind up handing Stroger the primary win on a plate. Or maybe a hospital food tray.

Stroger will probably live. The question is if he does, can Cook County live with him for another four years?