Why Is My Mayor Cranky? Gee, I Don't Know

By: Mark Fitzgerald We Chicagoans have two anthems to choose from when we're whooping it up in weddings and wakes, or waltzing around the world's best jukebox at The Lodge tavern on Division Street: "Chicago" or, for my money, the far-better "My Kind of Town."

Our mayor, though, seems to take as his municipal theme a third song popularized by Frank Sinatra: "I've Got You Under My Skin."

Universally praised by people who don't live here -- including the increasing numbers of tourists attracted to Chicago, and out-of-town urban planners and architects wowed by such achievements as the recently opened Millennium Park -- Mayor Richard M. Daley nevertheless appears to be in a permanent hissy fit about how he is viewed inside the city.

That attitude is now on national display as Daley escalated a legitimate civic worry about fan safety following a couple of incidents of crumbling cement at Wrigley Field into a bizarre series of broadsides against the Chicago Cubs owners, the Tribune Co., and its flagship Chicago Tribune.

It reached a nadir of sorts this week when the mayor said of Cubs President Andy McPhail that somebody "should really put a clamp on his mouth." Without any sense of irony, the mayor appeared the next day to announce that this year's choice for the popular "One Book, One Chicago" would be Julia Alvarez's novel, "In the Time of the Butterflies" about three sisters murdered for opposing a dictatorship.

(Some Chicagoans also noted a further irony that the mayor -- who like any loyal South Sider cheers the White Sox and disdains the Cubbies and their North Side bandbox -- barked that McPhail should "get a team." At the time, the Cubs were tied for a wild card berth in National League, while the Sox were in a six-game losing streak that put them more than eight games behind their division leader.)

None of this is new to the locals. And even faithful readers of E&P will recall that way back on March 19, 2001, we chronicled Daley's bitter relations with the Trib and the Chicago Sun-Times ("City Hall Fights Back," p. 18).

But there's no doubt that Daley's mood has grown even darker since then. On top of the usual pummeling Daley gets from Mike Royko successor John Kass in the Tribune, the Sun-Times exposed a huge scandal in which buddies of Daley or other administration officials were being paid enormous sums to hire trucks that rarely did any real work besides park near job sites.

Earlier this year, Fran Spielman of the Sun-Times, perhaps the best of many excellent reporters covering City Hall, wrote a column that voiced what many others on the beat have noticed: Daley doesn't seem much to enjoy his job.

It's probably appropriate that it took a fight over Wrigley to bring this local phenomenon to national attention, because there is a kind of locker-room dimension to the contretemps between Daley and reporters. Like pro athletes after a game, Daley is remarkably accessible to reporters. He holds formal and informal press conferences several times every day.

Daley will talk about anything. Thursday, for instance, he opined on a city water meter inspector photographed sleeping in his car by the Sun-Times ("He's going to lose a good job") and the new rape allegation against William Kennedy Smith ("I know him personally, dealing with landmines and rehab").

Yet like a sullen ballplayer -- think famous Chicago jerk jocks like Jim McMahon of the Bears or Dave Kingman of the Cubs -- Daley often parries questions with sarcasm, evasion and juvenile "So's your old man" comebacks. He loved the Jayson Blair scandal, and for weeks seemed to answer all the questions with a variation on the theme that the newspaper business and journalism in general had no moral standing to challenge government on anything.

His favorite phrase these days is "Gee, I don't know about that." Daley is famous for dispatching crews whenever he happens to see a badly littered area or for directing flower planters to be installed on this or that street. When it comes to scandals by long-time associates, gee, he doesn't know anything about that.

Not surprisingly, that gets old pretty fast.

And the reverse of the mayor's daily accessibility is his administration's penchant for secrecy. The Trib finally took him to court a couple of years ago just to get City Hall to agree to follow state laws on freedom of information and public documents.

But Daley also resembles another kind of a sports pro, the star with a no-cut clause. He co-opted or run out of town all credible political opposition, and can be mayor for as long as he likes. Daley and the press corps will have each other to kick around for a long, long time.