There were further changes under way in Chicago. Obama had won his first campaign by using old-fashioned Chicago machine tactics at a time when the notion of machine politics was increasingly anachronistic. As the political consultant Don Rose and his colleague James Andrews explain in a chapter for a book about the current Mayor Daleys first victory, the machine literally provided voters with access to food, health care, and a job. In most American cities, that model vanished after the Second World War; by then, the blue-collar base was leaving for the suburbs and reform movements were challenging machine politics. In Chicago, Rose and Andrews say, the elder Daley updated and preserved the system by creating a modern machine that combined big labor and big capital, blue and white collars, and minoritiesa hybrid model that died with him.
Gradually, Chicago caught up with the rest of the country and media-driven politics eclipsed machine-driven politics. It became increasingly difficult to get into homes and apartments to talk about candidates, Rose said. High-rises were tough if not impossible to crack, and other parts of the city had become too dangerous to walk around in for hours at a time. And people didnt want to answer their doors. Thus the increasing dependence on TV, radio, direct mail, phone-banking, robocalls, et ceteraall things that cost a hell of a lot more money than patronage workers, who were themselves in decline, anyway, because of anti-patronage court rulings. Instead of a large army of ward heelers dragging people to the polls, candidates needed a small army of donors to pay for commercials. Money replaced bodies as the currency of Chicago politics. This new system became known as pinstripe patronage, because the key to winning was not rewarding voters with jobs but rewarding donors with government contracts.
E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, wrote about this transition in a 1999 column after Daley was reëlected. Dionne wrote about a young Barack Obama, who artfully explained how the new pinstripe patronage worked: a politician rewards the law firms, developers, and brokerage houses with contracts, and in return they pay for the new ad campaigns necessary for reëlection. They do well, and you get a $5 million to $10 million war chest, Obama told Dionne. It was a classic Obamaism: superficially critical of some unseemly aspect of the political process without necessarily forswearing the practice itself. Obama was learning that one of the greatest skills a politician can possess is candor about the dirty work it takes to get and stay elected.
At the time, Obama was growing closer to Tony Rezko, who eventually turned pinstripe patronage into an extremely lucrative way of life. Rezkos rise in Illinois was intertwined with Obamas. Like Abner Mikva and Judson Miner, he had tried to recruit Obama to work for him. Chicago had been at the forefront of an urban policy to lure developers into low-income neighborhoods with tax credits, and Rezko was an early beneficiary of the program. Miners law firm was eager to do the legal work on the tax-credit deals, which seemed consistent with the firms over-all civil-rights mission. A residual benefit was that the new developers became major donors to aldermen, state senators, and other South Side politicians who represented the poor neighborhoods in which Rezko and others operated. Our relationship deepened when I started my first political campaign for the State Senate, Obama said earlier this year, in an interview with Chicago reporters.
Rezko was one of the people Obama consulted when he considered running to replace Palmer, and Rezko eventually raised about ten per cent of Obamas funds for that first campaign. As a state senator, Obama became an advocate of the tax-credit program. Thats an example of a smart policy, he told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin in 1997. The developers were thinking in market terms and operating under the rules of the marketplace; but at the same time, we had government supporting and subsidizing those efforts. Obama and Rezkos friendship grew stronger. They dined together regularly and even, on at least one occasion, retreated to Rezkos vacation home, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
